Last Pentecost.B.24
John 18:33-37
The Rev. Melanie McCarley
Today we hover on the edge of a season of expectation with the arrival of the season of Advent next Sunday. Who is it we await? What are we preparing for? It is the answer to these questions which form the purpose of this Sunday’s lessons. From the prophet Daniel to John of Patmos, who write in their respective books of a King coming with the clouds of heaven, to Jesus’s encounter with Pontius Pilate; on this day we come full circle from the promise of the coming of the Messiah in Advent, to the realization of his full authority and kingship on this, the Last Sunday of Pentecost, Christ the King Sunday.
In the Gospel lesson for today we find ourselves in the praetorium, where Jesus is confronted by Pontius Pilate with the question regarding his reign. Pilate asks him: “Are you the King of the Jews?” In the Jewish mindset of the day, the title of “king” references a liberator—someone like King David of yore, who has arrived to set the Jews free from oppressive rule. This is the question to which Pilate wants an answer. Now, Pilate is a political person—and this is how he understands the question. But Jesus refuses to answer on the same level that Pilate is asking. Jesus says: “My kingdom is not from this world.” Jesus isn’t talking on the same plane as Pilate—he’s answering on his own terms, not the terms that Pilate is asking—and Pilate, a political creature, dealing with a good deal of anxiety, after all, he has an excitable mob on his hands, and perhaps a lack of imagination as well, doesn’t know how to respond. His task is to determine if Jesus is a threat to Roman rule. Is he?
I believe he was. Some theologians suggest that the kingdom of God that Jesus announced and embodied is what life would be like on earth, here and now, if God were king and the rulers of this world were not (Borg & Crossan). Would a commitment to a kingdom such as this place people in conflict with their political rulers? At times, almost certainly. God’s kingdom would be primarily concerned with establishing a lasting peace, not jockeying for power. This kingdom would be a place of liberation, not exploitation, of sacrifice rather than subjugation, mercy, not vengeance, care for the vulnerable instead of privileges for the powerful, generosity instead of greed, humility rather than pride, embracing others rather than finding reasons for exclusion. Before you consign all of this to an impossible fancy, consider the following…
Joshua Levine, a writer for Smithsonian magazine in 2018, wrote an article not about a person—but about an entire community of people, who have, over the course of hundreds of years, chosen how to respond to persecution in a remarkable way. He writes:
“In Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a town of just 2,700 people on a high plateau in south-central France, kids play. They are from Congo and Kosovo, Chechnya and Libya, Rwanda and South Sudan. “As soon as there’s a war anyplace, we find here some of the ones who got away,” says Perrine Barriol, an effusive, bespectacled French woman who volunteers with a refugee aid organization. She says, “For us in Chambon, there’s a richness in that.”
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon first became a refuge in the 16th century, when residents who converted to Protestantism had to escape Catholic persecution. In 1902, a railroad connected the isolated area to industrial cities on the plan. Soon Protestants from Lyon journeyed there to drink in the word of the Lord and families afflicted by the coal mines of Saint-Etienne went to breathe the clean mountain air. First came refugees from the Spanish Civil War, then the Jews, especially children, in WWII. When the Nazis took over in 1942, the practice of taking in refugees—legal before then—went underground. Residents also helped refugees escape to (neutral) Switzerland. In all, people in and around Chambon saved the lives of some 3,200 Jews. Local archives have not yielded one instance of neighbor denouncing neighbor—a solidarity known as le miracle de silence. In 1990, the State of Israel designated the plateau communities as “Righteous Among the Nations” for their role during the Holocaust.
The tradition of opening their homes to displaced people continues today.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to explain how easily ordinary people can slip into monstrosity. The Bulgarian-French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov advanced its lesser-known opposite: the banality of goodness, which is what you run into a lot around Chambon.
Gerard Bollon, a historian and resident of Chambon, takes pride in the view from the museum’s second floor, which looks out on the schoolyard. “You see our little kids rushing toward the kids who have arrived from elsewhere, kids who don’t speak a word of French, and take them by the hand. There it is! We’ve succeeded. (he says) That’s our lineage.”
But, back to the Gospel lesson for today where Pilate is trying to ascertain the threat of the man standing before him, dressed in purple and wearing a crown of thorns. Is this beaten and tattered messiah a threat to Roman rule? It just might be that praying the Lord’s prayer is the most subversive of all political acts in which we can engage. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” People who pray this way—and live this way—well, they have a very different agenda than Caesar’s—no matter who the ruling party might be or to which political party they might belong. Why? Because if Christ is your King, he is the ultimate being to whom you owe your allegiance—and it is for his kingdom that you work and pray.
Jesus is many things. People remember him as a carpenter, a healer, as well as a miracle worker, a teacher, and a renegade rabbi who broke purity laws with impunity. He was a prophet who defended the weak and vulnerable as well as outcasts. He claimed to be both a Good Shepherd as well as a King.
The historian Garry Wills says that Jesus threatened the political powers, not because he sought to control what they controlled, but because “he undercut its pretensions and claims to supremacy” with his alternate kingdom.
Today, on Christ the King Sunday, we are being asked the question—who is your King? And with our response comes the answer as to how we then will live our lives. In Jesus’ name. Amen.