A Different Kind of King

Sunday, November 24, 2024 – Mark 12:38-44, also 1 Kings 17:8-16, Psalm 34:1-8, Hebrews 9:24-28.

Today is Christ the King Sunday. This feast day was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 in response to the movement toward secularism and atheism. It’s the last Sunday in the Christian liturgical calendar, and our new year begins with the first Sunday in Advent, which we celebrate in one week.

Just this past Friday, a group of us went to see a new movie about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor in Germany who was part of the resistance against Hitler’s Third Reich. Bonhoeffer watched in horror as the national church of Germany become aligned with Hitler and his genocidal policies. That led him to become part of a movement called The Confessing Church, which defiantly opposed the German government’s efforts to unify Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church.

While the movie took some liberties with the truth, (and here), it moved me deeply. It took a clear stand against the kinds of nationalism that would seek to align the church with the state, any state. And so, on the heels of that film, I feel a little wary of a term like “Christ the King” because what we generally associate with kings has almost nothing to do with Christ.

Even though Jesus adamantly insisted that his kingdom was “not of this world,” many in our world want nothing more than to enlist him in their violent power projects – picturing a muscular Jesus holding automatic weapons.

It’s not just governments like Hitler’s Nazi Party that want to abuse Jesus’ memory in this way. The Church itself did the same thing in its historic violent Crusades against the Muslims and in its more recent colonization of Native American populations in the United States and Canada, where Christian missionaries intentionally erased Native culture and language and tore Native children from their families to put them in abusive boarding schools.

But our gospel reading makes it very clear that Jesus was not interested in violent power or in overthrowing the Roman government. In fact, when Pilate asks “So you are a king?”, Jesus answers, “You say that I am a king.” It’s almost like he doesn’t even want the label.

Jesus knew that Pilate’s assumptions about kings and kingdoms had no resemblance to his mission or his understanding of real power.

What kind of power, what kind of rulership, is Jesus about?

My favorite philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, once wrote that Christianity has mistakenly assigned to God the force-based power of the Roman Caesar rather than the gentle love-based power of the Galilean Jesus.

To express the true power of Jesus, I want to share a song by Sherri Youngward, it’s called “That’s My King.”

Jesus’ power was not his might, but his willingness to be vulnerable, to embody human frailty in the form of a child, the child we welcome in a matter of weeks.

Last Sunday, I spoke about sin as the “illusion of separation” and about how we are always actually inseparable from the Wholeness that is God. And to believe otherwise is to believe a lie.

When we say that Jesus saved us from sin, we don’t have to create a false story of an angry God that is so offended by our sin that he demands a blood sacrifice through the death of his son to keep God from throwing all of humanity into the eternal fires of hell. That is the falsehood.

Jesus tells us exactly why he was born. He says, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” He came to shatter our illusions about separation and to show us – to testify to – the reality of our irrevocable and unbreakable relationship to God.

He came to testify to the truth of Love.

We’ve always been loved. We’ve always been forgiven.

As I’ve heard Richard Rohr say,

God doesn’t choose to forgive every now and then. Forgiveness is God’s permanent state toward Reality.”

It’s always just been about Love. And now we’ll sing together a hymn that beautifully captures the different kind of king that Christ is.