Jesus is in the final week of his life. He s had three years of popularity. He s taught with a wisdom that amazed the crowds.

Transcription

1 George A. Mason Christ the King Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 25 November 2018 Dallas, Texas Not From Here John 18:33-37 This is the last Sunday of the worship year. Next week we begin again with the season of Advent, which culminates with Christmas. In 1925 Pope Pius XI decided to designate this last Sunday by the name Christ the King. He was worried that Christians were getting too cozy with the secular kingdoms of this world and losing their loyalty to the true king of glory. If that was true nearly a century ago, how much more so today? We have a hard time these days getting free from our political allegiances to understand how Christ is our true king. But that isn t just a modern problem; it was also precisely what was going on in Jesus own time on earth. Our text today zeroes in on a moment when Jesus tried to make it clear how he isn t a king like any king we ve ever known, let alone any president or prime minister. The difference is everything always has been, always will be. Jesus is in the final week of his life. He s had three years of popularity. He s taught with a wisdom that amazed the crowds. He has healed the sick and cast out demons. He has made ordinary Jews excited at the prospect that he was the messiah who would free them from the oppression of the Romans and restore the kingdom of Israel. That hope made two other groups of Jews nervous: the Pharisees, who held sway over the everyday life of the people; and Temple priests, who had negotiated an accommodation with Roman authorities to leave them in control of Jewish worship. In theory they wanted a messiah to restore their sovereignty, but their fear of being wrong was also legitimate. If they set their hopes on Jesus and they were wrong, Rome would punish them ruthlessly. They were right about that, too. From the years CE (Christian Era), a group of Jews revolted against Rome and were crushed by the massive forces of the empire. The Temple was destroyed, and the Jews had to flee Jerusalem. The last stand of the rebels was at Masada, the glorious mountain fortress of

2 King Herod overlooking the Dead Sea, where the Jewish revolutionaries decided to take each other s lives, killing their wives and children by their own hands rather than letting Roman soldiers take their lives. Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. Jewish leaders had turned him over to Pilate as a criminal. They were looking out for themselves, but their own law wouldn t allow them to kill Jesus. So, they let Pilate do the dirty work, technically letting themselves off the hook. Pilate wasn t interested in whether Jesus was the Jewish Messiah; he wanted to know whether he was the King of the Jews. Kingship was all that Pilate understood, and if he was to protect the interests of Rome, he would have to put down any possible insurrection. Are you the king of the Jews? he asked Jesus. Jesus asked him whether he wanted to know or whether someone had put him up to it. I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. This is where we have to pause to say something important. Some of us were just in Israel. A Jewish man in our group was pretty anxious about being with a group of Christians, even though he is married to one. He grew up in upstate New York hearing his Italian Catholic childhood peers, no doubt parroting their parents and priests, calling him Morta Christo, which means Christ Killer. For centuries Christians have indicted the Jews for killing Christ. So-called Christian kings justified Jewish genocide by saying that Jews killed their Savior. Of course, the weird thing about it is that it s only by his death that he saved us. Our friend wanted to know whether we thought that, as a Jew, he was a Christ-killer. The answer is emphatically no. Jews, as Jews, did not kill Jesus. Only the Romans could have and did carry out his execution. But having said that, we should just as quickly say that a particular group of Jews did conspire to have Jesus killed, while the rulers of Rome carried out his execution. It wasn t Jews as Jews, though, or Romans as Romans who killed Jesus; it was Jews and Romans as human beings who killed him, because they were more aligned with the ways of the kingdoms of this world than the ways of the kingdom of 2

3 heaven. Which is to say that any of us who prefers the ways of worldly kingdoms to the way of Christ s kingdom are guilty of his death in other words, all of us, to one degree or another. My kingdom is not from this world, Jesus said. So he s not from here. What does that mean? Where are you from? is a common question. It s one of the first things people ask when getting to know each other. And it s usually not a compliment when someone says, You must not be from here. My son always likes to correct me when he hears me answer the question of where I m from. I tend to say New York, going back to my origins. He reminds me that I ve lived in Texas for 35 of the last 39 years more than half my life. I don t quite feel like Browning Ware did he, the longtime pastor of the First Baptist Church in Austin. He had a cabin in Colorado. He liked to say he went to bed in Texas, but he fell asleep in Colorado. I like to say that I m at home in Dallas, but I m never visiting when I go back to New York. I confess to maintaining a New York state of mind, don t you know?! Still, where you say you are from says something about where your values come from, something about how you view the world. There s a t-shirt company called Home T that markets shirts with your state of origin on the front, and inside the outline of the state is simply the word Home. If Jesus had one of those t-shirts on as he stood in front of Pilate, what shape would his home state have taken? If you imagine it with the shape of Palestine, you would miss Jesus point altogether. Jesus kingdom, his kingship, is not of this world. Now here s the big HOWEVER. When most of us hear that, we immediately misunderstand him. We think he means he is uninterested in politics, in the way human rulers operate. Jesus cares only about our hearts. We think he is telling us that true religion is a spiritual matter of getting right with God so that when we die, we will go and live eternally in his heavenly kingdom. By that logic, the Jews and the Romans made a terrible mistake, because Jesus was really no threat at all to the powers of this world, and he still isn t. He was a mystic who cared only about the life to come. 3

4 But there s no indication that this is what he meant. Notice what he said: 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. Jesus kingship does not operate by fighting with the weapons of the world. It doesn t use the means of the kingdoms of this world. Every empire employs violence to protect itself against others and keep itself in a position of power and privilege. It is willing to kill people if it sees them as threats. It is willing to scapegoat others to retain power. We ve seen an example of that recently with the killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khoshoggi. Khoshoggi was a critic of Prince Mohammed bin Salman. All the evidence points to the crown prince s ordering of the assassination of Khoshoggi. And since his murder, the Saudis have come up with one story after another about what happened and who is responsible. In order to appease world opinion, the prince has arrested and ordered the execution of five operatives as scapegoats, denying the truth of his own treachery. And because of our country s alliance with him, the billions of dollars of weapons sales we have to Saudi and our access to low-priced oil, we are going to let him off the hook. The kingdoms of this. world. But this isn t a partisan matter. Compare this to the frontpage article in The Dallas Morning News today that reminds us of the decision of George W. Bush to provide aid to Africa in addressing its HIV/AIDS crisis. Bush believed that rich countries have a moral obligation to help developing countries, especially when they would otherwise be denied access to drugs that would save lives. And there s no telling how much his leadership changed the course of a continent. Or consider what happened in Denmark during World War II. Hitler had been scapegoating the Jews all over Europe. He had installed a puppet government in Denmark. A Swedish newspaper cartoon depicted the king, Christian X, talking with the former Danish prime minster, who asked him, What are we going to do, Your Majesty, if [they make] all the Jews wear yellow stars [of David]? The 4

5 king responded: We ll all have to wear yellow stars. When we visited the Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem, a few weeks ago, we walked through the room that honored the righteous Gentiles who saved Jews during the war. Of the estimated 7,000 Jews in Denmark, almost all of them were rescued by the Danes and secretly shipped off to Sweden in a deal the king made to protect his citizens. Jesus kingdom operates just that way, and Jesus wants the kingdoms of this world to operate just that way. The kingdom of Christ is a kingdom of love and mercy, a kingdom where every person is treated with respect and dignity, no matter who they are or where they are from. His kingdom is not from here; in other words, it does not conform to the ways of earthly kingdoms, but it holds accountable every earthly kingdom. Jesus says he came to testify to the truth, and those who belong to the truth listen to his voice. Jesus is saying to Pilate what he has said to his disciples, namely that he himself is the truth. He is the shepherd king, and his sheep know his voice and follow him. He is the Good Shepherd who doesn t sacrifice his sheep to save his own skin. He lays down his own life for his sheep. He goes to find every lost sheep and bring them safely home. The contrast is between selfish, self-seeking ways of living and selfless, other-seeking ways of living. When we look after our own interests first and see other people as different from us and unworthy of our love and care, we have done exactly what Pope Pius XI feared: we have given over our loyalty to secular kingdoms and lost our moral compass. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way: Every person must decide whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others? Jesus doesn t privilege any version of truth that sidesteps humility, surrender, and sacrificial love. He doesn t secure his own prosperity at the expense of other people s suffering. He doesn t allow holy ends to justify debased 5

6 means. He doesn t make honesty optional when the truth strikes him as inconvenient. And he never aligns himself with brute, dishonest power to guarantee his own success. This is our King. 1 If we are subjects of King Jesus, this is how we must live, too. We have to be committed to the truth of his way of life. When the kingdoms of this world try to seduce us into following their way, we must resist and follow the voice of the one who is the way, the truth and the life. Not being from here is the only way of truly being here with King Jesus. 1 Debie Thomas, The King of Truth, -essays/current-essay?id=2014 6