Elsewhere King
John 18:33-38

November 23, 2003

I had just moved out of college housing, and was being graciously hosted by the Church Secretary or lay leader of the Summertown United Reformed Church. She was out of town for a couple of days, so I moved into an empty house on Saturday afternoon. I couldn’t figure out how to turn on her fancy TV, so I just read myself to sleep. Sunday morning meant church, but I got up late and walked the eight blocks down to the church. I was so late I knew I didn’t have time to cross the road past the church to buy the Sunday paper as I usually did.

The service was beginning and the beadle gave the announcements, including a cryptic remark about “the great shock.” The preacher at one point asked us to pray for the royal family.

I was mightily tempted to lean over to someone in the next pew and whisper, “Psst, what’s happened?” But I was dignified, but after the final amen, I collared the person, and found out that Princess Diana had been killed overnight in an Paris automobile crash. Did the idea of royalty die that night?

I had to wonder what all this frenzy was about in the week that followed. A personal tragedy, but after all, she wasn’t a real princess, neither by birth nor by marriage anymore. The one person whose lack of words said too much was Queen Elizabeth. The population knew there had been tension between the two women, but she was after all the one who reigned. Friday afternoon at 5:00 p.m. she addressed the nation. My hostess, a professor’s widow, native of Belfast, social action oriented Christian, was returning from tending to some chores at her cottage on the outskirts of town. Just before 5:00 p.m. she pulled over to the side of the road “to listen to my Queen.” What is royalty that she can do that to one of her subjects?

Australia has wondered publicly about whether it still wants “royal” to be one of its adjectives. We have no problem, however, standing outside our church watching Prince Edward walk about, while our tower bells tolled royal music. This is after all the metropolis of Regina Victoria.

The Bible was full of ambivalence about kings and queens. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob kept bumping into these foreign kings in their travels and warfare; there is no hint that they were jealous of their power. The Pharaoh in Egypt (a title that literally means “the king”) was never a model of divine right leadership, that is, the way God rules the world through human beings.

Oh yes, the Israelites would have kings of their own, but in the eyes of the writers of the Old Testament that was not necessarily an improvement. All the elders approached the aging Samuel and begged for “a king to govern us, like other nations.” That’s a cardinal sin right there, wanting to be part of the crowd, to be just like the other boys and girls. The kings of the other nations were a rough crowd to run around with. Samuel did not like the idea at all.

Samuel referred the matter to God in prayer and God’s answer was clear. Give Ôem what they want, for “they have rejected me from being king over them.” The only king for a nation worshiping the only God is the God, the King of the Universe, as the Jews still proclaim in their synagogue worship. Before long the Israelite king will start worshiping gods of other nations, and that is precisely what happened. Not every king, mind you, but the good ones got pretty sparse. The long historical books of 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings are the chronicle of how these kings went from good to bad to worse, and helped bring down the nations of Israel and Judah with them.

And yet, here we are with Christ the King on the last day of the year. How can Jesus be a King with all the bad track records of royalty and bad theology as well? You can’t avoid asking, “Is Jesus a real king?”

Pontius Pilate was real, however. Roman records list him as governor of Judea from 26-36 A.D., and all the early creeds of the Church recite his name and role in Jesus’ passion. What happened the creeds make clear was real and historical.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” and Jesus’ response is a laconic, “You say so.” In John, Pilate and Jesus get into a conversation and discussion. “Are you interested in the matter or did they put you up to this?” Jesus retorts. “I’m not a Jew. Don’t you know what a mess you're in?” Pilate comes back. “My kingdom is not from this world....My kingdom is not from here.”

So Jesus allows that he is some sort of king, but a king from elsewhere. He has no territory to covet; people anywhere can be part of his kingdom. Jesus’ principle task is not the exercise of political or religious power, but to testify to the truth. That’s the territory over which Jesus reigns, the domain of truth. By this time, Pilate’s brain is spinning. His mandate is to maintain the power of the Roman Empire in this God-obsessed land, and to preserve peace at almost any cost. “What is truth?” he mumbles after Jesus, having difficulty judging on his own between all the conflicting versions - the dilemma of most politicians to this day.

The kingdom from elsewhere operates by a entirely different spirit. Not power, but truth is what matters. Things are accomplished not by strength and military might, but by weakness that no worldly power can defeat. The poor are affirmed and the rich lose out. The people despised and discriminated against - foreigners and minorities, women and the lame and the handicapped - are seen as very important people, not people to be ignored or forgotten. However, lots of the powerful people in our kingdom don’t like that upside down elsewhere kingdom. If you pay too much attention to the poor and afflicted, if you reward weakness and hold fast first to truth and love, then you undermine the kingdoms of here and now. Kings of elsewhere kingdoms usually are killed.

Is Jesus a real king? I suppose it all depends on what you think reality is, and I suppose some more whether or not you believe God is real.

A few weeks back a Roughrider player was arrested smoking marijuana in Saskatoon. He was not convicted, but he was unhappy with the media coverage and the attitudes of many Saskatchewan residents. This happens all the time back in the inner cities he came from and no one cares. I have heard more or less the same refrain more frequently of late. The violence and crime and difficult life in the ghettos of the big cities are being portrayed as the reality of today’s world. Peaceful life is an illusion, unreal.

Get off of it! The violence we experience and hear about in our own city and in Iraq is physically real and tragic, but it is not reality. It is not the truth for which you and I were born and came into this world. Are you saying that injustice is more real than justice? Are you saying that war and violence are more real than peace, that war is therefore better than peace? Are you saying that the power of this world is more real than God’s Kingdom of Heaven? Remember George Orwell’s novel 1984: this is the Big Lie.

I know a real king, and that’s how we end the Christian year, by proclaiming a real king whose domain is truth and love and justice. I know he doesn’t wield the kind of power the world prefers as its currency, yet his weakness really changes the way we live and see the world and our neighbours living next to us. I know he gives the first place to the powerless and the poor, to the sick and the lame, because the healthy ones need no physician. That is reality.

And what is most real is that our King’s kingdom has outlasted any other and all kingdoms of this world. Today is not the end of this year’s kingdom; it is the beginning again of how a real king serves and gives real life to those living in the kingdom.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan