The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

 Lectionary: 161

So Pilate said to him, "Then you are a king?" 
Jesus answered, "You say 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."

W hen the warlord David, son of Jesse, and his gang of debtors, adventurers, and embittered miscreants captured the fortress on Mount Zion, he called upon the twelve tribes of Israel to forget their ancestral rivalries, grudges, and feuds and come together as one nation with himself as their king. Weary of poverty and oppression and realizing that the superpowers in Egypt and

Mesopotamia might finally erase them from the earth, the Hebrews crowned David as their king and formed a single nation with its capital on Mount Zion; that is, Jerusalem.

The nation prospered for a while. David proved himself a reliable administrator and a just judge over disputes. He was also a vigorous husband to his eight wives, with little time for his twenty children. Their bickering eventually led to civil war; and, seventy years after it’s founding, David's Kingdom split into two nations, Israel and Judah, never to be reconciled. However, despite their poverty, the “royal psalms” celebrated David's heirs, the kings of Judah and Jerusalem. For instance, Psalm 2,

Why do the nations protest

and the peoples conspire in vain?

Kings on earth rise up

and princes plot together

against the LORD and against his anointed one:

“Let us break their shackles

and cast off their chains from us!”

The one enthroned in heaven laughs;

the Lord derides them,

Then he speaks to them in his anger,

in his wrath he terrifies them:

“I myself have installed my king

on Zion, my holy mountain.”

Given the size of Judah in comparison to Assyria, Egypt, Persia, or Babylon, these royal psalms are ludicrous. Judah could not field an army to match any of them; Jerusalem was not half so grand as other capital cities, nor was their economy very important. Judah was doomed to be swallowed up by first Assyria, then Babylon, Greece, Rome, Islam, and the British empire before they would again declare independence in 1948.

Given the normal route of history, the beliefs and rituals of Judah should have been lost and forgotten a long time ago, like thousands of other religions of thousands of other nations. Abraham’s singular belief in God had become the national religion of a small, backwater nation.

However, even after Jerusalem was destroyed and its leaders forcibly marched to Babylon; even after the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had apparently been humiliated by more powerful Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman gods, the Jews believed their God ruled over all the others. If the Holy City was desecrated by foreign gods it was not because their God could not save them; it was because God was punishing their infidelity.

Stop for a moment and consider that. Common sense said, “Our God has failed us; our God is not as powerful as we’d hoped; our God has been vanquished, killed, and buried by more powerful gods – in fact, as Nietzsche said, “God is dead!” 

But the Jewish prophets defied common sense and said, “We have sinned; we and our fathers have sinned.” They chose guilt, shame, remorse, and repentance before they would deny the goodness, mercy, justice, and supreme power of the God they loved. If anything, their suffering proved that the other gods – the gods of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome didn’t even exist!

As Isaiah the Prophet declared,

Thus says the LORD, Israel’s king,

its redeemer, the LORD of hosts:

I am the first, I am the last;

there is no God but me.

And he believed in the God who would save them:

I am the LORD, there is no other,

there is no God besides me.

It is I who arm you, though you do not know me,

so that all may know, from the rising of the sun

to its setting, that there is none besides me

I am the LORD, there is no other.

I form the light, and create the darkness,

I make weal and create woe;

I, the LORD, do all these things.

This was more than nationalism or patriotism; this was the Holy Spirit speaking to the Children of Abraham, and revealing a secret that no one else could imagine. Despite all the evidence, our God is the only God. He created the universe -- including matter, space, and time -- not out of stuff but out of nothing by the authority of his word. And without him nothing came to be. (John 1:3) 

Which brings us to the story of Jesus. As we read of his life and death, once again, we’re not hearing a story of power, domination, or conquest. We’re seeing helplessness in the face of cruelty, victimization, humiliation, and shameful death on a cross. Although Jesus clearly had power over the wind and the waves; although he healed illness and raised the dead; he had no love for power and preferred to offer himself as a sacrifice for many. 

If the world's powers were aware of him at all, they were amused. Pilate, who was a governor of Judea and never important enough for a personal interview with the Emperor, and his friend Herod Antipas – bureaucrats – were only amused at Jesus. Pilate sarcastically asked, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And Herod hoped Jesus might entertain him with a miracle.

The Romans condemned Jesus because many people hoped he might be the Messiah, the Royal Son of David, the once and future king. They were only taking care of business when they crucified him. They could not humor anyone's absurd notions of a kingdom, neither in this world nor the next. And the disappointed mob in Jerusalem, representing every nation on earth, agreed, “We have no king but Caesar!” 

So here we are, long after the Roman empire has faded away, and history has marched through many centuries of rising empires, war, and collapsing empires. Here we are worshiping Jesus, the Son of God, as our Lord and Savior. We just don’t quit. 

The United States has recently survived another scheduled anxiety attack as we elected our leaders; and we hope to do so again in two years and four years. Both election cycles will probably occur despite the warnings of some pessimists but, in any case, we will still celebrate this Solemnity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ the King. 

If by chance, we are invaded by Starwars aliens, we will tell them about Jesus, and wait for their gods to fall down and worship him. Their conquest of our planet will signal their defeat; and they will have come here by God’s guiding hand to meet the One who is also their Lord and Savior – because Jesus of Nazareth, Mary’s son who was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, is the King of the Universe.