November 25, 2012 | 8:00 a.m. | Christ the King Sunday

God’s Once and Future Kingdom

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 93
John 18:33–38

“My kingdom doesn’t originate from this world.”

John 18:36 (CEB)

Well, Jesus will be here,
be here soon.
He’s gonna cover us up with leaves,
with a blanket from the moon,
with a promise and a vow,
and a lullaby for my brow.
Jesus gonna be here,
be here soon.

Tom Waits
“Jesus Gonna Be Here”

Last week, after the dedication of the Gratz Center, my family and a friend went out for a late lunch. At some point the conversation turned toward Christmas. We began to ask my almost-four-year-old son what Christmas is all about. Whatever feelings of pastoral accomplishment I might have felt during the dedication of the Gratz Center were quickly dispelled by this conversation. I suppose it was God’s way of keeping my pride in check.

It quickly became apparent that my son had completely forgotten the things I tried to teach him last year about the birth of Jesus and the real Saint Nicholas. The only thing he knew was coming with Christmas was Santa Claus. The only meaning of Christmas in his mind was the receiving of gifts. It was a pastoral and parenting fail.

Of course, those of us trying to raise our children to appreciate the religious and spiritual meaning of Christmas are fighting an uphill battle. The commercialized secular Christmas of our culture is absolutely ubiquitous and pervasive. Even before Santa Claus made his grand entrance at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Santas were popping up in commercials and in storefronts. In fact, well before his appearance in the famous New York parade, Santa rode triumphantly down Michigan Avenue, right here in front of our church, during the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival. How can we compete with this?

Interestingly, this is not so far removed from the concerns that gave rise to the special liturgical day we celebrate today, the Feast of Christ the King. I was somewhat surprised to discover this year that Christ the King Sunday is less than a hundred years old. Instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 and only moved to the last Sunday of the church year before the beginning of Advent in 1969, it was intended as a countermeasure against the rise of secularism Pius was already aware of in the first quarter of the twentieth century, not to mention the rise of secular dictators that directly challenged the reign of Christ through the Catholic church. While I doubt that Pius could have envisioned a South Park-style confrontation between Santa and Jesus, there is nonetheless something compelling about pausing to reflect on Christ the King in this liminal space between Thanksgiving and Advent, a space mostly filled in our culture with Black Friday sales and that jolly old elf from the North Pole.

Yet in our postmodern, postcolonial, and post-Christendom context, I’m not sure what it means to fixate on Christ as triumphant king. A cynical or deconstructionist reading of the efforts of Pius and other popes to inject Christ the King into the liturgical calendar could be interpreted as a twentieth-century effort to reclaim the symbols of the church’s former imperial and colonial glory, frantic efforts to hold on to the last vestiges of Christendom. Today, as many of us are happy that the church has been liberated from the bonds of its own power and triumphalism, perhaps an imperial Christ the King is not what we really need.

Thinking about how Christ the King was eventually co-opted by the Roman Empire, the medieval Catholic church, and numerous European colonial empires, we might rightly be suspicious of these symbolic representations of Christ. We might especially recognize the dangers of venerating a militaristic Christ the King, given our own culture’s imperialistic tendencies and the symbolic or ideological confrontations with Islam we seem incapable of escaping. Rather than Christ the King who vanquishes his enemies in apocalyptic or eschatological battle, we might instead long for the Prince of Peace.

I wonder if a post-Christendom approach to Christ the King Sunday might focus less on Christ as triumphant king and more on the enigmatic and mysterious way that Jesus understood God’s emerging kingdom. It is clear from the way he lived his life, the message he preached, and the way he submitted to death that the kingdom he envisioned was not at all what the oppressed Jews of the first century were anticipating or praying for. His way was explicitly not militaristic. Though it seems clear that he was intentionally suggesting an alternative way of life to that of the Roman Empire, he was not raising up an army to lead into battle as a revolutionary warrior king. In the famous exchange with Pontius Pilate we heard today, he makes this explicitly clear.

“My kingdom doesn’t originate from this world,” says Jesus. “If it did, my guards would fight so that I wouldn’t have been arrested by the Jewish leaders. My kingdom isn’t from here.”

What Jesus has in mind is radically different from what was expected in first-century Judea. What Jesus envisioned, what Jesus lived and died for, is something else entirely. It was not a militaristic power play. It was not a triumphant reign. It was not the exchange of one imperial lord for another. It was something altogether different. The kingdom Jesus ushers in is not of the world as we know it. Rather, it is the emergence of the world as God wants it to be, the transformation of the world into something radically different, the recreation of the world into a new heaven and a new earth.

When pressed by Pilate to admit that he is the in fact king of the Jews, Jesus answers, “You say that I am a king. I was born and came into the world for this reason: to testify to the truth. Whoever accepts the truth listens to my voice.”

As Pilate famously asks, what is truth? What is the truth to which Jesus testifies? What is the truth he preached? What is the truth he lived for? What is the truth he died for?

Evangelical New Testament scholar Scot McKnight has written a compelling critique of evangelicalism in which he suggests that evangelicals have become more focused on salvation than the gospel (Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited). In other words, McKnight argues that evangelicals care more about convincing others to make a decision about Christ that will get them into heaven than about discipleship and transformation through the way of Christ. One of McKnight’s most potent arguments is that a simplified (and frankly simplistic) “Plan of Salvation” has been disengaged from the full story of God and God’s people as we discover it in the Bible. This understanding of salvation through belief in Christ is disconnected from the bigger picture that provides the story of Jesus with its context and meaning. Evangelicals therefore obsess about bringing people to salvation and preparing them for a far-off heaven rather than encouraging them to live into God’s emerging kingdom right here and now.

A similar criticism could be leveled against progressive mainline Protestants like ourselves. We tend to focus on a social justice reading of Jesus that is just as disconnected from the full biblical story of God’s activity in the world. We talk about Jesus as a great motivator who compels us to work for peace and justice, fight oppression and marginalization, treat others with fairness and equality, help the helpless and needy, and make the world a better place by being nice to each other. But this really has very little to do with the unfolding of God’s kingdom in the world. What’s missing is how this vision of peace and justice fits into the bigger picture of the biblical story.

Of course, as a child of postmodernity, I’m suspicious of meta-narratives that oversimplify our complex lives or get used for oppressive purposes. But I’m also aware that narratives—the stories we tell—are vital to our understanding of the world and our place in it. Every person and every culture has a story (or stories) that shapes our worldviews and gives meaning to our experience of life. I also recognize that our cultural context is engaged in a variety of competing stories. It’s simplistic, to be sure, but consider the competing narratives of Christmas with which I began: the consumer Christmas of Santa Claus and the radical story of Christ’s birth and promise for the world. Indeed, there is something compelling, something life giving and transformative, something inexplicably true about the story we discover in the Bible.

In the beginning God created the world and called it good. God created humanity in God’s own image and entrusted us with the care of this sacred world. Our ancestors chose their own desires and ways instead of God’s ways and sin entered the world, corrupting what God had called good. Violence escalated to the point that God decided to start over, preserving Noah and his family and making a covenant with humanity to never again cause such devastation.

In time, God chose Abraham and his wife, Sarah, to give birth to a new nation that would serve as witnesses to the world of God’s ways. Through Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s children, Israel was born. Fleeing famine, they settled in Egypt and were enslaved after their numbers grew to threatening proportions. After centuries of their subjugation, God answered their cries for deliverance and liberated the people through Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.

Still stubborn and disobedient despite their covenant of instruction with God, the generation of the exodus wandered in the desert until at last the people returned to the promised land of Canaan. After a long period of conquest and war, the tribes of Israel were settled. Growing impatient with their ad hoc leadership, the people eventually demanded a king, which God reluctantly allowed. The first king, Saul, was a disaster, but Israel’s second king, David, united the tribes and established a kingdom. He was certainly flawed, but he was remembered as a great king, the ideal leader of God’s people. He did his best to guide the people in God’s ways of justice and righteousness.

David’s son Solomon expanded the kingdom, but his sons tore Israel apart in civil war. For the next several centuries the people and their leaders wandered from God’s ways and were disciplined by prophets inspired by God to guide the people in God’s ways. In the end, both of the divided kingdoms were overcome by imperial conquests.

In exile, the people of Judah wondered what had happened to their God. They wondered if God had been defeated. They wondered if they could worship God in a strange land.

At the right time, in a movement reminiscent of the exodus from Egypt, God orchestrated history such that the people were freed from exile and allowed to go home. Yet only for a short period of time were they ever again independent and free. A series of imperial lords culminated in the Roman Empire, during which time God sent God’s special Son into the world to announce the emergence of a new reality, what Jesus called God’s kingdom. This new reality, God’s kingdom, was good news for the poor, release for prisoners, sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed, a new year of God’s favor.

Jesus’ vision of a recreated world, a world reshaped according to God’s good intentions, brought him into conflict with the religious and political leaders of his day. He was called a blasphemer and an insurrectionist. In an ironic and tragic twist, his coronation as king of his people occurred as he was executed on a cross. Yet not even this tragedy was beyond the redemptive power of God’s love. Jesus returned from the dead and lives to lead us into God’s still emerging kingdom. God’s work of radical transformation in the world is not complete. It continues in us.

“My kingdom isn’t from here,” says Jesus.

It’s a powerful, transformative story. And fortunately for us, especially in this service, each week we are immersed in it anew when we gather around the table to share in the sacred liturgy of the Lord’s Supper. I love the mystery and the tangible reality of communion, God’s grace that we can see, touch, smell, and taste. But I also love the words we pray. Our great prayer of thanksgiving recounts our sacred story and reminds us of how it is that we fit into it.

Through Christ, God’s once and future kingdom continues to emerge—around us, within us, and through us.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.