John 18:33-37
November 22, 2009
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Before construction sites were fenced off like they are now to prevent liability, I can remember as a kid playing on top of mounds of dirt. We played “king of the hill” where you try to stay on top by toppling those trying to climb up the hill to dethrone you. It was rough and fun to stand up with arms raised proclaiming to be “king of the hill” even if it was on top of a mound of construction dirt.
Today, we see elected leaders from the moment they take office, they are trying to fend off potential opponents and consolidate power. While we may want them to represent our concerns but often than not, they are getting ready for the next election. Being on top and staying on top seem to be the object, and almost everyone knows it.
Israel’s King
Israel always wanted a king, so that it could be more like other nations. It is hard to be a great nation without a great king. A king is the very embodiment of power and sovereignty. Is that the reason why we have the Sacramento Kings?
Israel had some impressive and powerful kings like David and his son, Solomon. But most of Israel’s monarchy was a sorry lot. Joakim, Ahab, and Zedikiah are names that nobody remembers. It wasn’t long before another nation with a really powerful king, Nebuchadnezzar—swooped down from the north, devastated Israel, destroyed everything, and took the people off into cruel exile.
But Israel never lost the memory, the dream, of a great monarchy. King David, one strong, able king that Israel did have, remained in Israel’s consciousness. Israel said, one day there will be a king who will reestablish the monarchy. This king will bring the nation together, and will lead so well that Israel will once again be a strong nation. All of the nations of the world will at last sit up and take notice.
Some of the prophets, like Isaiah, who had been critics of the monarchy, said that one day Israel would get a king from God who would be worthy of the name. This king would be known as the Messiah, the anointed one. One sent to Israel, not through savvy politics, but as a gift of God.
When a baby named Jesus was born out in the backcountry, some saw grand possibilities for the future. Herod, the latest king who had been put in place by the Romans, was terribly troubled by news of Jesus’ birth. Herod didn’t want any other kings troubling the arrangement that he had worked out with the Romans. Herod was king of the hill at that moment. But Luke says that when Jesus was born, angels filled the heavens, singing, “Glory to God in the highest! And on earth, peace and goodwill…” This is a royal announcement. These angels are messengers sent to make a royal proclamation. At last, suffering Israel has a new king! Now the tables will be turned on the Romans, now Israel shall be reestablished as a great nation.
Jesus before Pilate
Today in the church calendar is “Christ the King Sunday.” In our lesson from John 18, Jesus, betrayed, arrested, questioned by the high priest, denied again and again by Peter, appears in front of the Roman prefect, Pilate.
Pontius Pilate, the fifth governor of the Roman province of Judea, held office from 26 to 37 AD. As prefect, it was Pilate’s responsibility to maintain law and order in the province, and he could count on significant military forces to enforce compliance to that end. Pilate was king of the hill from Rome’s standpoint.
The prefect was also the highest judicial authority in the province, although the exercise of that authority was a matter of careful balance between his own jurisdiction and that of the local authorities such as the high priest and Pharisees that operated under the local law. Jesus finds himself at the crossroads of these two intersecting dimensions of Pilate’s duties as the Roman presence and the local authorities.
Pilate knows that the local religious authorities had taken Jesus into their custody and were handling their prisoner over to him, on unspecified charges. Pilate asks, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” (John 18:29) and they answer evasively, “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you,” In his first words to Jesus, the Roman prefect cuts to the chase: “Are you the King of the Jews?” Whatever the accusations that might have been brought against Jesus by the local authorities, Pilate has one issue in mind as he faces his prisoner: is this man a threat to public order? For Pilate, pretending to be “King of the Jews” has less to do with matters of religious observance than it does with the political subversive implications of such a claim.
It mattered little to Pilate what the Jews believed. All that mattered to him was their submission—willing or otherwise—to Roman rule, and Pilate’s sole concern in dealing with this prisoner was whether or not he posed a real threat to the status quo. Jesus does not help matters—on his own case—very much by asking in turn: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate’s response gives us a glimpse of how little he thought of Jesus and his fellow Judeans, “I am no Jew, am I?”
King in Our Lives
How is Jesus King in our lives? Certainly in today’s lesson, Jesus looks anything but a king. Much of the royal language that Pilate uses here is more taunting than revering a title of honor. Jesus’ answers are evasive, talking about other worldly kingdoms and fending off any notion that he is king today. When Pilate asks, “What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world.” So the prefect, widely known to be ruthless, sends him to be king of another hill, Golgotha. Even his own people reject him. They do not see him as the anointed one who will be king.
Let us not be too high and mighty at this point because it’s necessary to point out that in our day, we do not treat Jesus much better. Many people have rejected Jesus’ claim upon the world and upon our lives because we are engaged in our own personal and private game of being king of the hill. So we assign Jesus the place of “moral teacher” or as our life’s companion and guide, but not king. We won’t have Jesus as king because we are busy trying to make our own way as king or queen, if not of the universe, then at least in our little corners of it.
We know that there are some Christians who are convinced that Jesus will eventually be king. These folks teach that Jesus is just waiting for that time when he returns with an army, to destroy the world and all those in it. It’s interesting to note that those who believe in Jesus will take the world by force from the evil that inhabits it forgets that in John 3:17, we find that God sends his Son into the world not to condemn it, but to make it whole again.
What is wrong with either one of these two understandings of making Jesus only a friend and a moral teacher in our lives and that of Jesus returning to cause havoc to evil is that it assumes that the world’s way of being a king, the world’s way of exercising authority, is the way Jesus will be king. It’s the belief that those on top enforce their will by pushing down and crushing those who challenge it until all are defeated. This is not the way Jesus is King of the hill.
The irony of our lesson today, and of the story of Jesus at all, is that Jesus IS king, precisely when he least looks like it. Jesus is king above all others because he defeated the greatest enemy of humanity, death. God is, in Jesus on the cross, both playing the game of “king of the hill” and ending it. He plays the game by toppling not only the powers of this world, but also that way of being in power. No longer will force serve to keep someone on top while others are below. The game itself, with the cross and resurrection, is ended. It is defeated not by force, but by love, a love so great that Jesus would lay down even his own life.
Lion King
We say that the lion is the king of the jungle. There’s a story of a young lion that wandered from his father to test whether or not he would get the same respect from the other animals as his father did. As the young lion approached some monkeys, he roared and asked, “Who is the king of the jungle?”
The monkeys, being afraid, responded, “You are!”
The lion replied, “And don’t you forget it!”
The lion repeated this to each animal in the jungle and got the same response until he came across a herd of elephants. The little lion roared and asked, “Who is the king of the jungle?” The big bull elephant walked closer to the lion, swooped him up in his trunk, swung him around and around and threw him in the river.
Battered and wet, the little lion replied, “Just because you didn’t know the answer to the question doesn’t mean you had to get nasty about it!”
Unlike this little lion, Jesus as King never demanded respect but received honor and praise by serving as Lord with humility and love. We may know Jesus Christ is the King of the world but we don’t live or act that he is king in our lives. We are too busy trying to make our own way as king and queen in our little worlds toppling others down to stay as king of the hill.
In his children’s book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes about Aslan, the Lion, a stand-in for Jesus. He willingly gives himself up to the villainous White Witch in exchange for the life of young Edmund. The Witch gloats as she is about to kill Aslan according to the “deep magic from the dawn of time,” which requires a death for certain crimes. She says to him, “You fool! Once you are dead, who is to stop me from killing the boy, too, and all of this will be for nothing.”
Aslan dies in the witch’s game of king of the hill. But a “deeper magic from before the dawn of time” gives Aslan the victory over death and over the power of the witch. He breathes life into creatures she had previously turned to stone. He wakes a sleeping land of Narnia from its long winter. Aslan, the Lion, a metaphor of Jesus triumphs at the end not because he went around asking and boasting if he was the king of the jungle. He triumphs by playing the game of “king of the hill” and ending it.
Jesus is Lord
One of the most widespread early Christian affirmation is “Jesus is Lord.” It also has political implications. “Lord” was one of the titles of the Roman emperor. Caesar was called “lord.” To say “Jesus is Lord” is to say, “Caesar is not lord.” To affirm the Lordship of Christ is to deny the lordship of Caesar.
Several of the “titles” of Jesus in the New Testament were also titles of Caesar. On coins and inscriptions, Caesar was referred to not only as “lord,” but also as “son of God,” “savior,” “king of kings,” and “lord of lords.” Caesar was also spoken of as the one who had brought peace on earth.
But Christians used all of this language to refer to Jesus. Even the Christmas story contains the challenge to Caesar. In Luke, the angel says to the shepherds, “To you is born this day…a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord,” who will bring peace on earth. The titles of Caesar properly belong to Jesus.
We have made this politically charged affirmation, “Jesus is Lord,” almost a Christian cliché without any responsibility or consequence. What was originally a challenge to the Roman Empire has little if any implications. Can it still do that today?
If we truly believe that Jesus Christ is the king of the hill then it is like Christians in Nazi Germany saying, “Jesus is mein Furher” and thus Hitler is not. Or in the United States, it would mean saying, “Jesus is my commander-in-chief”—and thus the president is not. When Jesus is Lord in our lives, nobody else can be lord.
We, who follow Jesus, follow a king like no other. We do not have to wait for a conquering army at the end of time. The powers of this world are undone by the cross itself. From the cross and empty tomb our king has led the way through death into new life.
Jesus breathes that life into each of us day by day. He feeds us at his table, and equips us for a world not fully rid of the “games” that people play. He sends us out, not to join the game, but knowing that the game is doomed to come crashing down under it own self-interest weight, for we know who is the true King of the hill.
Christ the King has battled against evil and death and won through dying and rising. Jesus Christ IS King. It is now up to us to make his reign present in this world.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, from the viewpoint of eternity your reign has already begun, is complete and fulfilled, and our choice is to live both the blessings and responsibilities of your kingdom right now. The temptation is to live by the laws of money and power. Strengthen us according to your promise that we may reject the world and follow you. These things we pray as servants and creatures in your image. Amen.