For Sunday
Proper Last B
Collect
Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. **
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Jesus’s critics have started looking for ways to kill him ten chapters ago. And now, here he is. They paid off an inside man to deliver Jesus in the Garden where he was arrested, bound, and sent off to the chief priest, then Pilate, Rome’s representative, the one man who can take care of him.
Jesus’s exchange with Pilate is famously about authority and power. It is written to make Pilate seem curious about the ways of the Jewish people; it seems odd that they would arrest their king and send him off for execution. In his experience, king’s demand the execution, not receive it.
His lack of familiarity with the role Jesus embodies is not simply the problem of a mistranslation of a foreign people, but with the very notion of what it means to have power and authority. Or as we might put it today, what it means to lead.
This exchange must also give us pause, too. With how we seek to see Jesus as king ourselves. Not just because this new church holiday of Christ the King is centered on Jesus’s spiritual kingship, but in word and deed, as well.
The terms Jesus seems far more comfortable with are Messiah and Liberator. His commitment to being a king is less than zero. Pilate has no hope of understanding this any more than a person raised on the American Dream could imagine choosing not to get ahead. This is our challenge, too. In seeing Pilate’s confusion as not all that different from our own. And that our attempts to comprehend Jesus’s authority without the power to control and destroy, to kill, to choose the very living of every person under his control but to, instead, suffer crucifixion, die, and trust in God’s intention to raise him on the third day. That we are to trust in the one who trusts, love the one who loves, and share with others what was shared with us. A life of service and grace.