Reign of Christ
“The Light of the Morning”
Welcoming New Members
Rev. Brent Gundlah
Hey, so happy Reign of Christ Sunday everybody. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t get me anything because I didn’t get you anything either; it’s just not that kind of holiday. But it is an important occasion nonetheless. On the church’s calendar, the Reign of Christ represents the end of one liturgical year, while Advent, which starts next week, marks the beginning of another year. So, think of today as an early and slightly more sedate version of New Year’s Eve.
As Christian holidays go, this one is not as big of a deal as Easter or Christmas, and that makes sense; I mean, those celebrations are both described in the Gospels and so have existed for about two thousand years, while the Reign of Christ has only been a thing since 1925.
In the Roman Catholic Church that started it, the official name for this day is the “Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe” but that’s a lot to remember, so it’s generally called either “Christ the King Sunday” or, in our case, “Reign of Christ Sunday,” which sounds a bit less imperial and patriarchal.
This holiday was created by Pope Pius the Eleventh via an encyclical entitled Quas Primas, Latin for “In the First.” Pius’s main point in this letter was that the acknowledgement of Christ’s sole and sovereign rule over the world is the first premise and essential foundation for lasting peace in the world, and a holiday is a good way of getting people to stop and think about that.
No disrespect to the late pontiff intended, but I’m not sure I would have put it in quite those terms (I mean, it also sounds a little imperial, not to mention unappreciative of the various faith traditions besides Christianity that lift up peace as a virtue). But hey, it was a different place and a different time; and Pope Pius had a lot on his plate at that point.
You see, he became the head of the Roman Catholic Church in 1922 which, coincidentally, was the same year in which this guy named Mussolini seized control of the Italian government, stoking the flames of fascism that eventually engulfed Europe and led to World War Two. As autocratic regimes seem, once again, to be on the rise throughout our world today, this all sounds eerily familiar — as Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes” — and so maybe we ought to pay attention.
On the surface, Pope Pius’s assertion of the kingship of Christ in the middle of all that political upheaval might seem like it would have been a real thumb in Mussolini’s eye — after all, there’s nothing a dictator likes less than hearing that someone else (in this case, Jesus) is actually the one in charge. Good on Pius for letting him have it, I guess. And, until recently, this was the prevailing opinion among historians about what happened back then: a heroic Church standing up to evil fascists. But, as it turns out, the truth is more complicated than that.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the relationship between the Pope and Mussolini, David Kertzer looked at archives recently made available by the Vatican and concluded that Pius actually helped make Mussolini’s dictatorship possible. In exchange for Vatican support of his fascist regime, Mussolini not only restored many of the privileges the Church had lost over the years, but also deployed the police to enforce a strict version of Catholic morality. In The Tempest, Shakespeare observed that “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows;” apparently politics and religion do too.
Near the end of his life, Pius came to regret his part in the Church’s uncomfortable alliance with Mussolini’s government and threatened to renounce it publicly, but the Vatican elite put a lid on that, not wanting to destroy a long-standing and mutually-beneficial partnership. The moral of the story: When church and state seem to be inclined to do each other’s bidding, it’s time to be concerned. It was true then and, as we all know too well, it’s still true today.
As it turns out, it was also true back in Jesus’s time. Today’s reading from John’s Gospel makes that pretty clear. We enter the story midstream as Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, enters his headquarters, known as the Praetorium, in order to preside over Jesus’s “trial.”
Before this, there had been another such proceeding: Jesus was summoned before Annas, a high priest or official in the religious establishment of the Temple, to answer for the supposedly awful things he’s been out there doing — all of that preaching and teaching and healing. But Annas doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with Jesus and so sends him on to his son-in-law, Caiaphas, who also doesn’t seem to know what to do with Jesus, and so sends him on to Pilate.
In fairness, they know exactly what they want to do with Jesus — namely, execute him for undermining their authority — but they claim they can’t do this themselves because only Rome was permitted to levy the death penalty. So they decide to get Pilate, the enforcer of Roman law, to do their dirty work for them.
The result is kind of a wild scene: Pilate running back and forth between Jesus inside the Praetorium and the Jewish authorities outside — they couldn’t go in because to do so would ritually defile them before the impending celebration of Passover.
Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And Jesus, of course, does the most infuriating thing possible – he answers Pilate’s question with a question: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Now I’m no attorney but I’ve watched enough Law and Order to know that a judge would have admonished Jesus for being non-responsive here.
Following a little more back-and-forth, Jesus acknowledges his “kingship” to Pilate, but declares that his kingdom is not of this world and that he’s come into this world to testify to the truth. Pilate’s response — “What is truth?” (which is a more of a non-response) — indicates that he doesn’t really have any idea what Jesus is talking about here, though he probably doesn’t care either. It’s like they’re having two completely different conversations, because they kind of are.
After our story ends, Pilate will go out to the religious authorities and tell them that Jesus hasn’t committed any crime, but he also reminds them of the Passover custom of him releasing a prisoner of their choosing; the people select the thief Barabbas over Jesus and the rest, of course, is history.
But it seems like John lets Pilate off the hook a little too easily here (and the other Gospel writers kinda do this as well). In today’s story, Pilate ends up looking like something between fair, on the one hand, and weak, on the other: He declares that Jesus is innocent of any crime but puts the decision about whether to execute him back upon the Jews (even though he knows exactly what they’re going to do). Some scholars have wondered whether the Gospel writers gave Pilate a pass on all of this so as not to anger the Roman authorities who were actively persecuting both Jews and Christians at that time. Like I said, religion and politics can often make for strange bedfellows.
But history has been far less kind to Pilate. Two noted historians in that era, Josephus and Philo, tell of a Pilate who was corrupt and cruel, and who also had no great love or respect for the Jewish people. But in today’s story Pilate and the Jewish leaders seem to need one another, and so they unite to kill Jesus.
The Temple authorities’ quarrel with Jesus is straightforward enough: They want him gone because he is constantly calling their religious power and authority into question, and so they portray him as a blasphemer — a violator of God’s law — in order to justify making that happen.
Pilate has a related but slightly different problem. You see, his civil power and authority as governor depends completely upon his ability to maintain order and peace in that region. As our story takes place, Passover is imminent and thousands of Jewish pilgrims are about to descend upon Jerusalem for the festival.
The last thing Pilate needs is a public quarrel with the priests and their supporters that could very easily turn into a full-scale riot, and so he decides to give them what they want without appearing like he’s decided anything at all.
While this solves the Jesus problem for both of them in the short term, it doesn’t work out very well for either them in the long term: the Romans would eventually destroy the Temple and violently put down various Jewish attempts at revolt; Pilate would be summoned to Rome after a brutal massacre of the Samaritans and stripped of his power; the Roman Empire would fall, as all empires do eventually. But the resurrected Jesus, in contrast, would live on forever.
The conversation between Jesus and Pilate about kingship in this scene sounds really dissonant, and there’s a good for that. Pilate is thinking about kingship in an earthly sense — one in which things like power and influence and wealth are what matters. Jesus, however, is thinking about kingship in a cosmic sense — one in which ideals like love and justice for all prevail and earthly concerns don’t matter.
Would it be great if we could live in the kind of world that Jesus envisions? Sure, it would; and, according to him, we will some day. But, at least for right now, we live with one foot in Jesus’s realm and one foot in the realm of Pilate and the Temple Priests, of Pius the Eleventh and Mussolini, of religion and empire, of faith and politics. And this is often not a fun place to be.
And so maybe the best thing we can do right now is to do what Jesus did — to do what prophets throughout the ages have done whenever the priorities of the world are out-of-whack:
Be critical when the relationship between church and state seems to be a little too cozy;
speak truth to power when religion and empire align in ways that are not in-line with the values God has called upon us to embody;
raise a ruckus when wealth and influence and control seem to be more important than loving God and neighbor, and caring for those in need.
The stakes are just too high – we simply can’t remain silent and idle.
In the words of the political philosopher, Ice Cube, “You better check yo’self before you wreck yo’self.”
Is this a risky and potentially dangerous strategy? Of course it is — look how it turned out for Jesus and the Apostles. But, as history tells us, the consequences of doing nothing wouldn’t be any picnic either.