Jesus and the problem of authority
Proper 29B | John 18:33-37
When we last gathered on Sunday, we heard Jesus announce a terrifying future, what scholars call “The Little Apocalypse” of Mark. I had prepared a sermon for it, even recorded the audio, before that foul beast named COVID interfered. So I was not with you for that gathering, but I trust the community had to wrestle a bit with questions of fear and authority.
Jesus pushes back at the disciple’s awe toward human authority and the works of human hands in the building of the temple. That these are not as awesome as the works of God—and far more delicate.
What happens after that is the sequence we know as the Passion. When Jesus gathers his disciples close for one last supper together, he is betrayed, arrested, tried by Temple leaders, and handed over to Rome to be executed. And that is why he now stands before Pilate.
But this raises a lot of questions before we even dig into this moment itself, chief among them is this:
Why would Pilate accept this hand off from the Sanhedran?
Imagine we all made a citizen’s arrest of some evangelical spouting nonsense on the corner of our property, we take him down to the police station, and say to the chief of police “We want you to execute this man because he’s a heretic and we don’t kill people on Sundays.”
What part of all of that would make sense? None of it does!
Now, there is one way this starts to make sense, however. And that is if we were deputized to police ourselves. And that is the most damning part of this story. But even this doesn’t express the gall of the leaders to think they could expect Rome to execute this man for them. And, I think this is where we need to think really hard about what that relationship between the Temple leaders and Pilate actually represents.
And the main word for this is complicity. Wanting Jesus dead, put faith and empire on the same side to murder a troublemaker. That is what leads to this moment in which one king stands before another king who wonders How the heck did we get here?
A Misplaced Monarchy
Pilate displays his confusion at this whole arrangement. Which, as a matter of preserving the tradition in the face of empire, was a clever way of painting Rome in a bad light, but in such a way as Rome would confuse it for flattering. This was the way of the first two centuries. Trying to proclaim the anti-empire Good News under the oppression of empire. And it mostly left the empire confused.
This clevernous, however, was problematic once the church was absorbed by the empire in the fourth century and it mostly seemed to the Roman populace that it let the Romans off the hook and put the Jewish people on it.
But let us not get it twisted—Pilate hasn’t been played by the clever Hebrews. He’s willing to kill anybody. And his confusion is not so much at why the Jewish leaders would seek to kill their king. He’s got to be wondering why he’s alive now. And why those leaders are alive as well.
At the crux of this moment, of the confusion expressed between Pilate and Jesus, is not that this reasonable Roman gentleman is struggling to understand the backwoods ways of the Jewish people, but the incomprehension that this is what power looks like. That this man, Jesus, represents kingship. That these scheming fools represent the moral and political authority of the people. That any self-respecting king could ever be in shackles.
Why? Because it is kings who shackle. Just ask John the Baptizer.
A Monarchy of Faith
What is at stake in this room is Jesus’s human, physical life. And let us not think for one second that Pilate doesn’t welcome the opportunity to execute a dissident; to make a show of force or prove his potency to the public. He’s a big, strong man, after all. And this is a mighty empire that rules this occupied territory. For him, it is quaint that they think Pilate is saving them the work of executing the man who made such a ruckus at the Temple and is so very popular with the people. Downright adorable.
But there is something in our own eagerness to blame some and remove responsibility from another—to paint Pilate as a reasonable figure, perhaps, and the Temple leaders as bloodthirsty—the innocent Jesus is crucified and therefore we show our faith two thousand years later by coming to church and being faithful in our hearts. That we gild that crown of thorns upon Jesus’s head as we might gild our own thrones and place Jesus into the kingship he never claimed, and only ever rejected. That we would make ours into a monarchy of faith with Jesus at its head—a new holy (non)roman empire of Christian faith and conviction. Something only in our minds or hearts, perhaps, or legalized with posted commandments in classrooms, book bannings at the library, and an unhealthy obsession with the gender of people using bathrooms. That we do this while overlooking the people crushed under the boots and wheels and treads of empire.
What could it mean to be the King of the Jews if kings only ever turn to violence, oppression, domination, exploitation? What would it mean to turn Jesus into such a manifestation of malevolence? Then or now?
The Reins of Christ
Some have taken to repurposing this new holy day, named Christ the King just a century ago by a pope, calling it now “The Reign of Christ” in an attempt to keep the kingly without the king. As if the trappings of power are less problematic than the title. It is a desire, I suspect, to soften the arrangement while keeping the kingship itself unquestioned.
This, however, seems convenient for those who have the reins of power, to name the relation of Christ to the church as one of pseudo-dominance, as a king with no control. Like a monarch with no tangible authority. Like the King of England with a parliament there to run the state. Such an easy thing to turn Jesus into a figurehead, then. Something like a holy cheerleader or worse, a mascot. Someone there to claim we’re on the right path, this country, so blessed, ordained to greatness, empowered by faith, to be perfect, divine, protected. To rein in the power of Christ and contain it, control it, deploy it, and destroy our enemies.
Why don’t we ever consider that the whole thing—this whole endeavor to crown someone with authority, to declare them the vessel of divine greatness—that it is wrong? That none of it matches the vision God has for creation? Didn’t God warn the Hebrews for literal centuries (centuries!) that kings are bad news? And hasn’t it proven over and over again to be the case? (The answer is yes).
The problem isn’t the person, or the idea in its conceptual form, or even in the execution of how kings do their kinging. It is in the human obsession with authority. In our demands for authority. In our seeking to win and never lose, to dominate and never be dominated, to command and never be commanded, to kill and never be killed. It is in our lack of trust, our lack of conviction, our lack of dedication, our lack of concern for the welfare of our neighbors, our lack of thoughtfulness in how we order our society, in our obsession with our own rights and not the health of our neighbors, and in our refusal to be responsible for the welfare of the people next to us.
The We of Christ
We think someone has to be in charge. And then we look around. And we miss the uncanny truth surrounding us. That we are responsible. There is no “in charge.” It is us. A people who look out the window and see a world in need of more love and trust and hope and joy, not less. Not ordered by a king or directed by a president or governor or mayor or priest. But because our eyes see it and God has asked us to look at our neighborhood this way. As Jesus has told us, not that we ought to or have to do this. But that when we have died, the question will be “did you do this when you had the chance?” Did you feed people when you saw them hungry? This will be a question for us: did we feed people? So it becomes a question for us now: do we?
And we answer: Yes. Could we feed more, of course. Could we feed better, yes, no question. But these aren’t the questions, so we must stop worrying so much about them! The question is Do we? Yes, we do. Every Sunday from the altar, and then again in the Great Hall. Every week through Manna and in our apportionment to the diocese and its apportionment to The Episcopal Church. We feed and give and serve.
The image of the king undermines Jesus’s authority because his work is not to be a king any more than our work is to be the serfs of a holy monarchy. We are children of God in a Kin-dom that turns all of our earthly ordered impulses upside down and reverses their polarities. The Kin-dom makes the powerful into little weeklings and the meekest into loudmouths and this doesn’t come from a king telling us to flip things around, telling us up is down and that the naked man before us is dressed in the most beautiful clothes we can imagine.
It comes because we act like it. We live in the Kin-dom of God when we love each other. That’s the work. Love each other. Get off your neighbor’s case. Compliment them rather than critique them. Feed them something tasty. Buy them something they can use, like laundry detergent, or something fun, like movie tickets or a book you read and can’t stop raving about.
We are called to feed and visit and heal and love. To find the joy in serving God in serving one another. This, my friends is our communal, decentralized work entrusted to us by a God who has faith in us, ordered by a Christ who has faith in us, empowered by a Holy Spirit who brings the faith out of us and into this blessed, grace-filled neighborhood with the joy that we are on the verge of something beautiful, something true, something entirely and fully involving every last one of us. Including you.