Our readings this morning are a heady mix of royal imagery and imperial authority, shot through with glimpses of humanity and humility. Two of them are exalted visions of Jesus entering into the glory of his Father in heaven. In the third, power is vested in Pilate, the Roman governor, yet it is Jesus, whose kingdom is not from this world, who speaks with the greater authority. What is it about Jesus’ kingdom that is so different from the kingdoms of this world?
As we read Daniel’s prophecy, we see in one like a human being the figure of Christ presented before the Ancient One, to be crowned with everlasting dominion and kingship and glory. This passage was already seen as a promise of the Messiah, the Saviour of Israel, when Jesus quoted it as he stood before Caiaphas (Matthew 26.64), deliberately provoking the charges of blasphemy and sedition that would lead to his own death. When we turn to our reading from the book of Revelation we find a similar picture of an Almighty and everlasting God enthroned in heaven. Once again, there is a second figure with him, this time explicitly named as Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the first born of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
And then there is Jesus himself, standing before Pilate in his simple homespun robe. The prisoner stands before the governor, and yet it is the governor who asks the prisoner whether he is a king. Jesus and Pilate seem to be at cross purposes in the conversation that follows. Jesus does not claim to be a king, but nor can he deny it. He evades Pilate’s direct question, but in doing so, he answers one which Pilate has not asked – his purpose in life is to bear witness to the truth. At which point Pilate loses patience, gives up the attempt to discover the truth about his prisoner, and goes back to wrestling with the practicalities of what he must now do to keep the peace.
We cannot walk away so easily if we want to know what kingship means to Jesus, and therefore what his kingship should mean to us. Why does Jesus answer questions about kingship by talking about the truth? What has truth got to do with kingship? When our children were little, we had a splendid book, mainly pictures, which on each page asked what was the IMPORTANT thing about hats or games or ice cream, or whatever. There would be lots of pictures to explore together on the hats page, for example there were green hats and pink hats, big hats and little hats, swimming hats and cycling hats and at the bottom of every page it said in big letters: BUT THE IMPORTANT THING ABOUT [HATS] for example IS THAT THEY COVER YOUR HEAD.
Well, in the same spirit, we might say that the important thing about kings, or indeed Presidents and Prime Ministers, is that they rule they exercise authority. As we are being reminded in the context of Iraq, the first thing we ask of any State, or any ruler, is that they should exercise sufficient authority, both internally and externally, so that citizens can get on with their lives in peace. You may call yourself a king, but in this world you are not truly a king if you do not exercise sufficient authority to keep the peace. In a democracy the authority of a government ebbs away as it loses support in the country and in Parliament. In more brutal societies, authority ebbs away as alternative leaders begin to emerge and impose their authority by force of arms. In either case it is the power to rule that is at stake. It is one of the difficulties associated with to-day’s celebration of Christ the King that we tend, however unconsciously, to picture his triumph in our terms, and even to be tempted to use inappropriate secular means to advance his kingdom. Yet the peace of Jerusalem, whether as a city or as a concept, will not be established by force of arms, whether those arms are carried by Jews or Muslims or Christians. You may or may not care for the anti-ecclesiastical bias of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, but he was surely right to see much evil in an authority which rested on the ruthless exercise of absolute power, and right to allow his shadowy figure of the Ancient of Days, rooted in an ancient lie as he and his power was, to dissolve into nothingness when finally confronted by the forces of Truth and Love in the shape of Will and Lyra.
Truth is the secret of Jesus’ authority, and Love is the secret of Jesus’ power. The basis of Jesus’ authority is revealed as he explains to Pilate why he has not ordered or even asked his followers to fight for him. On the contrary, when Peter drew his sword in an impulsive bid to stop the soldiers arresting Jesus, he was sharply ordered to put it away. Leaving aside Peter’s brave but futile gesture, Jesus could have called on overwhelming force to break free at any time, but he refused to do so. He knew that to behave like that would make him an earthly king even if the forces at his command, those legions of angels, were heavenly. And that would utterly betray the kingship, the authority to which it was his duty and his destiny to bear witness. For this I was born,’ he tells Pilate, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ (v37). Indeed, it is the truth to which Jesus bears witness that invests him with such an aura of calm authority as he stands there before Pilate.
A year ago we identified in the pages of our parish magazine four kinds of truth, all of them valid in their different ways. The truth to which Jesus bore witness in his life and death, is the truth about a righteous God, who is also our loving Father, one who does not compel our obedience by the exercise of overwhelming power, but seeks it as the response of love to love. Such truth about God is not the sort of material truth that we can touch and feel and demonstrate objectively, but it is the truth which lies at the very heart of the realm, the sphere of authority, where Christ is King. It is the essence of the narrative truth that we observe in the Biblical story of what God has done for us. It is the truth that was most perfectly expressed in Jesus’ own loving obedience to his Father’s will. It is the very essence of the performative truth that we ourselves experience in the Eucharist, where what we do together expresses God’s love for us and our love for Him. It is the truth which empowers the willing obedience of all those whose love responds to the love of God. It is the truth which we all experience in our different ways when we engage with it by putting our trust in Christ who is our Way and our Life as well as our Truth. My kingdom is not of this world, but everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. We too are called to bear witness to the truth about Christ the King- the King of Love.