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PERICOPE STUDY
CENTER FOR THEOLOGY, LRC
Christ the King - November
23, 2003
The Old Testament Lesson: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
As I looked, thrones were placed and one that was ancient of days took his seat; his raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was of fiery flames, its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came forth from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. … I saw in the night visions, and behold, with cloud of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
1 The seventh chapter begins the visions. Daniel 7:2-14 is a "night vision," a dream. The "great sea" is the Mediterranean (vs. 20) and the four beasts (vs. 3ff) are "four empires," perhaps Babylonian, Mede(ian), Persian, and Greek. It is not unusual today to represent nations by animals (e.g., eagle, bear … Ben Franklin would have preferred the wild turkey as symbolic of the nascent U.S., or did he have his tongue in his cheek when he wrote it?), whether or not a prophet is doing dreams or apocalyptic.
2 The ten horns (vs. 7) represent kings or dynasties of that empire symbolized by the beast whose horns they were, the "fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong … (which) had great iron teeth." From the Seleucid kings of Palestine came the little horn (vs. 8) from the north Antiochus Epiphanes, who usurped the throne from his brother Philopater.
3 The "Ancient of days" (vs. 9) on the throne may well represent God, in the function of divine judgment.(1) Indeed, the beast is killed and its body destroyed. The dominion of the remainder of the beasts is taken away, but their lives are prolonged for "a season and a time."(vs. 12)
4 At vs. 13-14, the dream changes. The judgment is followed by an eternal kingdom, ruled over by "one like a son of man" who came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. "And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed."
5 In apocalyptic literature, celestial beings are often symbolized in human form. The figure of "one like a son of man" represents a king and a kingdom; he may well represent for Daniel the messianic king." (2) In the midst of oppression, in a culture of apocalyptic ambiance and unabashed expectation, the author of Daniel interprets the meaning of history in a fashion that includes the messianic king, to whom is given dominion and glory, as cited. The author is familiar with the fate of kings and empires, but he knows - and claims - that the messianic kingdom will be "everlasting," because, if it is not everlasting, it will not be messianic. "Everlasting" is a mark of messianic kingdom.
6 In every congregation there seem to be Christians whose apocalyptic appetites are fueled by current events, global catastrophes, especially since 9/11 and the arrival of the new millennium. Daniel 7-12, along with the 4th Evangelist's Revelation, furnish ample imagery and substance for this passion
7 In a secular - indeed, neo-pagan - society, opportunities abound for documenting the decline of the age. In a secular society now challenged by a militant and malignant distortion of the Religion of Peace, apocalyptic scenarios emerge from self-immolation. On the other side of yearning, seeking a "better time" within history and better actualization of human potential can generate utopian or near-utopian notions.
8 But neither apocalypticism nor utopianism is, it seems to me, proper response to Christ as Lord of history and Lord of the universe. Proper response is rather proclamation of the resurrection as prolepsis of God's ultimate rule. This does not mean that we should attempt to spiritualize the lordship, as if it is Christ rule over our hearts alone that is important, important as it indeed is. Rather, Christ's rule is cosmic, eternal and personal. The question is put to us by invitation and by grace to live under that rule and to recognize that lordship.
9 At the end of the church year, and in anticipation of the coming celebration of Incarnation, it is instructive to proclaim the antecedent transcendence of God the Son, the Logos as only-begotten Son. And to proclaim as well the eschatological transcendence of the Risen Lord. Whatever the catastrophes and wickedness of the present age, whatever the impoverishments of body or spirit in the transitoriness of life, there is the One who is before all, above all, and in all, who is reigning and will reign forever and ever.
10 Understanding the magnitude of "Christ the King" makes all the more poignant and powerful the anticipated baby in the manger. Elizabeth Bettenhausen's remarkable insight (in a piece entitled "God Is My Size") was to frame the Incarnation from the point of view of a child: "God is my size" in the cradle. But the "God is my size" is made all the more remarkable when one considers that the one who was in the cradle, "my size," was first of all and last of all King of Heaven and Earth and all that is therein. Light years and galaxies, intricacies and majesties, kingdoms that rise and wane - all have their existence and coherence under His sovereignty.
Efforts to understand discipleship as freedom, particularly as freedom from oppression, need to be as wary of human capacity to distort His message as they are contemptuous of the tyranny of oppressors. "In this world," said Camus, "there are only oppressors and victims. It is up to us to be on the side of the victims." Well, surely. But the line between "oppressors and victims" is not a simple division between those of power and those powerless, or between races, or sexes. It is a line within the human heart. The invitation to apply the Gospel to freedom is one provided by Jesus himself: I have come to set the captive free. But the passion to politicize the Gospel is as radically off base as the impulse to spiritualize it. Or to make it apocalyptic. Utopian schemes of the political meaning of the gospel are as off the mark as pious schemes of spiritualizing it. Or eschatological themes of imminent apocalyptic.
The Lordship of the Risen Lord radically relativizes all human claims to authority. And radically discounts claims of power as the operative rubric in His name. Under his lordship there are no legitimate lieutenants. Only disciples. His church is the eschatological community-in-the-making, a provisional manifestation inaugurated by His call and deriving its authority from Him. The authority of the church is not political but apostolic.
The ones who are of the truth hear His voice - and submit to His lordship.
JLY - 11.17.03
The Gospel: St. John 18:33-37
Pilate entered the praetorium again and called Jesus, and said to him "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered, "Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?" Pilate answered, "Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me; what have you done?" Jesus answered, "My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world." Pilate said to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?"
1. Ecce homo! St. John's account of the trial as Gospel lesson for Christus Rex is a stark and brilliantly chosen reminder that rule of this king is not reducible to this present age (aiwn), even as St. Paul's poetry (Col. 1:15-20) declares that He is Lord of the universe, arce of the kosmos. The immediate Jewish objection of a category exclusion to the notion of a "crucified messiah" fuels the irony vested in the image from Calvary. Pilate's sarcasm, Sanhedrin objection not withstanding, unwittingly mirrors the reality of God-become-human, Divine regency as Suffering Servant. The mockery of the soldiers, typical in their myopic view of power, mimes and presages scorners of every succeeding generation: "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself." The hypothetical syllogism is not lost in the irony of God; in the now-immortal words of Bonhoeffer, "For Christians and pagans alike he hangeth dead, and both alike forgiving."(3)
2. Pilate himself had pressed the issue, in the conversation as recorded by the Fourth Evangelist and as above. The clincher is Jesus' invocation of "truth," to which Pilate responds, "What is truth?" After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, "I find no case against him." (18:38b) [I find it inexplicable that the pericope should exclude vs. 38a! It was in fact Jesus' invocation of "truth" that convinced the skeptic Roman that Jesus was harmless to the empire. Roman imperial hegemony appropriated all power that was worth anything to the state, thus reducing both religion and philosophy to "personal opinions," unworthy of censure because not commanding of allegiance. Roman pagan polytheism was nothing if not tolerant, made so by its certitude concerning the nature of truth as a function of power, truth as pragmatic and political rather than ideological. Many gods could be invoked and many philosophies dabbled in because none had power in the face of the state. Moses and Socrates alike were incomprehensible to their arch, the political as eros, will to power. Gibbon, among others, notes that the later Roman problem with the Christians was the church's insistence that allegiance to God trumps the authority of the state. Such a view, voiced directly in his face, escaped Pilate as to its significance, coming as it did, calmly, from one man, himself bound and beaten, seemingly powerless.]
3. The decline of the Empire allowed Leo I the Great (AD 440-461) to claim philosophically what Innocent III (AD 1198-1216) was able to enforce politically, 750 years later in pre-Renaissance Europe: that God had made two great lights to rule the day and night, with the sun as the greater and the moon the lesser. The sun represents the rule of God of the soul, exercised by the church; the moon is the rule of the king over the body politic, exercised by the state. The prince of the Church, bishop and patriarch, rules as vicarius christi mundi. A curious inversion of the assertion of the Gallilean--hegemony of power is no more attractive in the hands of the princes of the church than in the arrogance of the empire.
But Medieval man understood, though through superstition and a veil of almost universal ignorance, that the spiritual is what counts--the reign of Christ is eternal. What is not of this world, this present age, is of far greater importance than the rewards and punishments of temporal existence. In the face of plague and brigands, tyrants and feudalism, both serf and lord alike knew who was Lord of the universe. His christology skewed by intimidation, his allegiance benighted, his religion distorted by the very power the church had appropriated, Medieval man nonetheless knew that his ultimate destiny was what finally counted - Pilate and Marx notwithstanding, afore and aft.
It was less than 100 years from the death of Innocent III to the reassertion of the power of the state over the church, by Phillip IV of France in his kidnapping of Boniface VIII (1294-1303) - despite the pope's famous Unam Sanctam, asserting the supremacy of spiritual over temporal power - beginning seventy years of Babylonian captivity in Avignon. The captivity of the church was the beginning of its reform, first by council, Wyclif and Hus; later and more completely, if more schismatically, by Luther, Calvin, and then Trent. It was also the beginning of the Renaissance, a fundamental shift in attention, if not yet allegiance, from the spiritual to the temporal: Renaissance man viewed this world as the significant field of endeavor. The distance between Dante (+1221) at the end of the Medieval, and Machiavelli (d. 1527) in the middle of the Renaissance is two centuries and several light years, the former measured in time and the latter in philosophical difference.
For Dante, what counts is the reign of Christ eternally. The pilgrimage of life is informed negatively by agonies of the inferno, positively by beatific vision - the former to be avoided in terror, the latter passionately sought. For Machiavelli, the political is the proper arena for allegiance, with the eternal deferred, the reign of Christ put aside in pursuit of power according to an accurate-if-cynical understanding of human nature. If the prince is cunning, even cruel, it is in the proper service of power. The kingdom of this world is the kingdom that counts. Leave to God the affairs of God.
4. The allegiance of post-modern man is neither to God nor to the state, but to himself. Some trace this to Luther, with his stand at Worms, unwilling and unable to concede to church or empire any recanting of his views, God help him.(4) It is the individual who decides whether to submit to the authority of the state and the church in matters of conscience and faith. The political and the ecclesial alike come under the scrutiny and judgment of the reflecting and asserting individual. If Luther is responsible for this framing of individual autonomy, it is a charge more serious than that of his later anti-Semitism giving aid and comfort to Hitler. But Luther's conscience is captive to the Word of God; his freedom is remarkable and subject to no man, but at the same time responsible servant to all. Luther's liberation is not from Christus Rex but for and by Christ the King. Luther's respect for the state is as the left hand of God, ordained for civil order. Luther was a theological revolutionary but a political conservative. He consistently rejected, even railed against, political appropriation of his newly asserted freedom, rediscovered in the writing of Paul.
5. Others trace the problem to Jefferson and his co-signatories, denying both divine right and inherited privilege to kings and emperors. Government, they insisted, in their innovation of the grand American experiment, "derives its just authority from the consent of the governed." Governments are both the creation and concession of the people, rather than the institution by divine mandate to the legacy of kings. Russell Hittinger observes that it was only a small move to shift the conferral of "just authority to govern" us from the political to the theological: we will concede to God only what we deem appropriate. We will determine the content of right and wrong, rather than be governed by the intrinsic divine authority of God.
It may have been a small move, but it was some time coming, after Jefferson. For him, the endowment of the people with "unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is by nature and nature's God." Deist Jefferson knew only a humanity endowed by "their creator," not a humanity emergent from primal slime by material cause and evolution only. Jefferson did not acknowledge Christ the King, but neither did he assert homo autonomous.
The distance between Luther and Nietzsche, between Jefferson and Derrida, is the disjuncture between freedom and truth, as John Paul II has observed.(5) What has moved all this from the theoretical and intellectual to the practical and physical in the popular culture is the influence of the mass media and the various accompanying cultural revolutions. If the invention of the printing press facilitated Luther's reformation, the age of instant information has augmented instant gratification and the emancipation of the individual from responsibility either to God or to the state, much less the neighbor. Even parents must now resist - or not - the temptation to pursue life according to their own interests at the expense of their children. They can choose not to have children, even after those children are conceived and gestating.
6. In such a climate of fundamental and radical autonomy - and where truth is "only perspectival," or primarily a "function of power" - the assertion that Christ is King must sound almost as strange as it did to Pilate, almost as quaint as the sign above the cross. To the faithful it must be proclaimed that we need radically to examine our allegiance. The tyranny of totalitarianism, defeated in the preceding century several times at enormous human cost, is no more a threat than the tyranny of radical autonomy. Both deny the lordship of Jesus Christ. The signers of the Barmen Declaration knew it. The people in our congregations need to hear it, too. If Christ is King, then I am not. It is as simple as that. The Roman Empire could not understand it and thought it, at first, irrelevant - then dangerous. The danger to my personal control of my allegiances is both radical and destructive. But also salvatory. As St. Paul so poignantly writes, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:19b-20)
7. If Christ is King, then I am not. Neither are you. Neither are they. O worship the King.
JLY - 11.17.98 (rev. 11.21.00 & 11.17.03)
1 "that Yahweh himself might be seen sitting in the form of a man on his throne was an ideal familiar to a Jewish audience (Eze. 1:26; 43:6-7; Isa. 6:1)." Interpreter's Bible, vol. 6, p., 457.
2 Ibid., pp. 460-1.
3. From, Letters and Papers from Prison, 18 July, 1944, p. 192.
4 A priest in Italy, in November of 2000, condemned the MacDonald's hamburger as food of the protestant motif and philosophy: individually consumed, and quickly, apart from family … and church!
5.Veritatis Splendor, 1993.
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