Preached at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Kingsville, MD Christ the King Sunday, November 22, 2015
Scripture: John 18:33 – 37
33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ 34 Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ 35 Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ 36 Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ 37 Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
Sermon
Pilate might seem like the ultimate 21st Century Post-Modernist. “What is truth?” he says. What indeed is truth?
In Pilate’s time, of course, there were plenty of philosophies floating around the ancient world: Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Syrian, Egyptian and more, many more. And here’s Pilate, the Curator of Judea, confused by the whole mess, standing before a Galilean peasant who has the audacity to challenge him, challenge his authority but very covertly. If you have a Bible, you might like to follow along in this text. Now, I told Dan I don’t think I have ever preached on this particular text before, although when I was a pastor I did follow the lectionary cycle so there is a chance that back in the day I did.
But I was really struck this week in my work as I reflected and prepared for today. Here’s what’s really interesting from this particular text for us today. It’s not a question of what constitutes some sort of generic philosophical truth. And that’s how the tendency of preachers is to read this text. What is truth? Who can know the truth? How can you know the truth? How is truth even to be known? Is there such a thing as truth? And this is the dilemma the plagues the academy that I’ve been involved in for 30 years reading thousands of books by philosophers and theologians, and they all scramble really, really hard to try and figure out.. what is the truth? But in our Gospel, it’s already been said that the truth is not a concept. The truth is a person.
This changes everything because it takes the category of truth out of some sort of way to divide good and evil, right and wrong, true and false. It places it right into the category of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who he is and how he lived his existence. And in this text, right here before Pilate is going to come the key element of that which constitutes truth.
Truth is non-violent.
Jesus will say to Pilate in response to his question “Are you a king?” And Jesus says, “If I was a king of this world, my foot soldiers would have fought in the garden.” There’s an irony here, isn’t there? Because we know that Peter himself drew a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane to protect Jesus, slicing off the ear of a young man named Malchus, a servant of the Chief Priest. So, the fact is, Peter in the garden perceiving himself as a foot soldier of the truth, drew a sword and chopped off the ear of a man. And it’s a good thing he didn’t just run him threw. He just managed to miss this poor guy’s head. Peter was looking to behead the man. Think of this in terms of where we’re at politically today. Peter is no different than anyone in ISIS at that point in the garden. He thinks he’s going to protect Jesus by taking his sword and chopping the fellow’s head off. He misses, thankfully. The guy only loses an ear, which, according to the text, Jesus immediately replaces.
But when Jesus stands before Pilate, he’s very, very clear that his foot soldiers, that is, his true followers… do not bear arms. His followers will not take up weapons to protect him. Now there’s a double irony here. Not only does Peter take up the sword, but in this last week since the bombings in Paris, on Facebook, on Twitter, in the news, on blogs, and webcasts, Christian preacher after Christian preacher and lay people have said unequivocally that we have to take up arms against ISIS. And to that I want to say “Blasphemy!” The follower of Jesus does not take up arms, because the way he reigns, is not of this world.
Jesus is a substantively different leader than President Obama or Vladimir Putin or any other leader on the planet. Every single leader on the planet that runs a nation state or any government, with few exceptions, has a standing army and that standing army is there to protect the people. There is no way a civilized leader with a standing army or the power to push a red button and drop nuclear bombs or to command drones that kill innocent civilians can call themselves a follower of Jesus. They are just kings of this world just like Pilate, and they don’t get that truth has nothing to do with retaliation, nothing to do with violence.
When Christians come to the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of John, our tendency is to say “Oh. The people rejected Jesus because they wouldn’t accept his divinity, they wouldn’t accept his claim to be God.” That is not the case. What they specifically rejected was his claim to represent a non-violent God, a non-retaliatory God, a God who would have nothing to do with justice as “eye for eye’ and “tooth for tooth.” That god doesn’t exist. That god is an idol. That’s the god that was believed in by Second Temple Judaism. That’s the god that was believed on in Rome in its many forms. The only God to ever claim non-violence is the God and Father of Jesus, so much so, that this God alone of all the gods forgives.
The great critic of the New Testament, Rudolph Bultmann, was even able to say “Only the God of the Gospel forgives.” Forgiveness is not a category that’s used of figures like Zeus or Apollo. Only God forgives. Only the Maker of heaven and earth loves, forgives and chooses to lay down God’s own life and in the resurrection, not to come back as a retaliatory figure. And that’s what absolutely scared the disciples spitless on that Easter Sunday. They were waiting for vengeance. They had fled, they had betrayed, they had denied Jesus; it was their own people that crucified the Messiah. And surely sittin’ in the room that night when Jesus appears to them, all they can think of is the structure of their theology which requires justice, which requires vengeance, which requires god to satisfy god’s own honor. And so Jesus’ first word to them is the last word that will ever be spoken. “Shalom. Peace. Don’t be afraid. My Papa does not respond to violence with violence, and neither do I.”
And that is the truth that Pilate had in front of him, and that is the truth that confused him. How could this person claim to be a king and yet not take up arms? How is that truth? How is it? How is it that Christianity for almost two thousand years… and one could in fact argue this could be traced to the Jerusalem Church, but I won’t do that. I’ll just go seventeen hundred years with Constantine, not worry about the first three hundred. How is it that for seventeen hundred years we have managed to merge and mingle that which the Gospel has kept apart: God and violence? How is it that we as Christian theologians, as Church, as Christianity have married the two things that God has rent asunder: life and retaliation?
The Gospel text for today is so loaded with irony that if we look at our own historical situation right now as Church, all we can do is repent, because it is in the Name of Jesus that George Bush took this country into Iraq. It is in the Name of Jesus that Christian preachers on the radio and TV would have us sacrifice our young men and young women in Syria. It is in the Name of Jesus that the Airforce Academy in Colorado with its chapel shaped as F-16 jets sits and plays its video games and drones and kills innocent civilians right and left. We as Americans, we’re not just killing foreign terrorists, my friends.
Two days ago, we bombed a house that killed a two year old girl. A two year old girl. We did. That was done in our name. We, a Christian nation, killed this little girl. We don’t know the truth. We are so far from the truth in American Christianity, we’re no different than Pilate, or Peter in the garden, or James and John who would call down violence on a Samaritan village. And like them, we, too, are confronted with the Risen Christ who does not come back with revenge. Jesus did not come back with revenge and retaliation on Easter Sunday, and he’s not coming back in the future with revenge and retaliation.
Some years back, where I live in Lancaster, I drove by a church sign out front – you know all those church signs you read when you’re driving past churches – it said “Jesus is coming back and boy is he pissed.” I don’t worship that Jesus. The Jesus I worship is the Son of the Father. The Jesus I worship is homoousius, of the same substance, of the same reality as the Father. The Jesus I worship is non-violent. The Jesus I worship is forgiving. The Jesus I worship is loving, and nurturing, and compassionate, and merciful, and generous. And so is Papa.
The God who now looks down upon you does not look down upon you with hatred. The God who looks down upon you now doesn’t look at your life and demand or require some atonement from you. The God that makes heaven and earth looks down upon you as His precious children. And He looks down upon the ISIS terrorists as His precious children. And looks down upon that two year old that we killed in His Name as His precious child.
We are all on trial today in American Christianity. We are all on trial. It’s not for us to sit and equivocate about the nature of the truth – Well, Jesus got angry in the temple. Well, Jesus said why don’t you buy a sword – and to try and find a way out, a way back to the kingdom of this world. It is our place to listen only to his voice and recognize that he alone, he alone reveals the character of God. And he alone is the one who comes in that revelation and reconciles us by being crucified on a Roman cross.
How many crosses do you suppose there are in this sanctuary, pictures and icons? And from that cross he prays, “Father. Don’t forgive them! Get them back! Send some bombs on them! Kill them!” Does he do that? Does Jesus say that?….. He says “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.” And that is our problem. We don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to the issues of violence and justice, retaliation and revenge.
If we are going to follow Jesus, there is only one way, only one way. And that way is the same way he went. “If you would be my disciple, take up your cross.” To take up your cross doesn’t mean to suffer. It means to learn to live with the same measure of forgiveness that Jesus himself preached and taught his whole ministry. As he died, over and over again from that cross he was saying “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
René Girard, the great thinker that just passed recently, said “There are only two things that can reconcile: violence and love.” Violence does reconcile, my friends. When we take our anger and hostility out together against someone, when we as a group blame someone for our woes, when someone in our family systems we perceive is the trouble, we blame them for all the woes in the family, when we scapegoat others,.. we can be reconciled. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Violence does reconcile.
But that’s not God’s way. Love is God’s way. Love reconciles. Love absorbs the pain. Love absorbs the violence. Love say “You can kill me, but I believe in a God of love. I believe in a God that raises the dead. I believe in a Kingdom to come. Your liturgy is suffused with this language, the language of truth, the language of the reign of God. Listen to what you just said in the prayers. Listen to what you’re going to say next.
God is good. And this is the Gospel of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
(Register for the class with Michael Hardin: René Girard and Nonviolent Atonement here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings). The course will run from the week of October 7th to December 6th.)