John
18:33-37
If
you ever use Wikipedia for research, you need to be prepared to go down the
occasional rabbit hole. Say, for
instance, you are looking up the origin of the Feast of Christ the King. You might discover this little tidbit:
“Stir-up
Sunday is an informal term in Anglican churches
for the last Sunday before the season of Advent.
It gets its name from the beginning of the collect for
the day in the Book of Common Prayer, which
begins with the words, ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy
faithful people’. But it has become associated with the custom of making
the Christmas
puddings on that day. The Christmas pudding is one of the essential
British Christmas traditions and is said to have
been introduced to Britain by Prince Albert, husband
of Queen Victoria (the reality
is that the meat-less version was introduced from Germany by George I in 1714). Most
recipes for Christmas pudding require it to be cooked well in advance of
Christmas and then reheated on Christmas Day, so the collect of the day served
as a useful reminder.”[1]
Only the British would make that kind of
connection on a nation-wide scale.
Anyone from anywhere in the world, however, would recognize that there
are times that the sacred and the secular can intertwine in close ways.
Stephen
Prothero, who teaches in the Religion Department at Boston University, wrote a
book called Religious Literacy to
make the point that ignorance of religion is not only unfortunate but downright
dangerous for anybody who wants to know how the world works. Some of it is as simple as knowing to say,
“God bless you!” when someone sneezes, or that a gentleman takes his hat off in
a church but covers his head in a synagogue.
Some of it is far more complex.
He says,
“Religion has always been a major factor in US politics and
international affairs. Neither the
American Revolution nor the Civil War is comprehensible in a religious
vacuum. The same goes for social reform
movements such as abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights, civil rights, and
environmentalism – and, of course, for contemporary debates about abortion,
stem cell research, capital punishment, animal rights, global warming,
intelligent design, state lotteries, birth control, euthanasia, gay marriage,
welfare policy, military policy, and foreign policy.”[2]
When Jesus says, “My kingdom is not from this world,” he does not mean that he has
nothing to do with this world, because he does.
What he means is that his kingdom is not rooted in anything here, but in
God.
Clearly,
unless he was just plain naïve (which he was not) the choices Jesus made that
landed him in front of Pontius Pilate were choices that had to do with obeying God,
not following any kind of earthly expedience.
If you or I were looking to appoint someone to catch the hearts and
minds of humankind and to speak words that would stir up their hearts within
them, we would look for a celebrity, a hero of some sort, or maybe a songwriter
or poet, somebody who would get the world’s attention. God sent Jesus instead, who was born long
before mass communication of any form, born in a scandalous way in an obscure
corner of a contested part of the Roman Empire where they spoke a strange
Syrian dialect.
There was something about Jesus that just never
evens up with what we are used to or expect.
When his own followers later would look back on the scriptures they
would read these words of Isaiah:
“He had no form or majesty that we should look
and him,
nothing
in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
a
man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he
was despised and we held him of no account.”
[Isaiah 53:2-3]
They would say, “That was him! That describes him just right!” It wasn’t just his appearance, about which we
don’t know anything. The whole way that
Jesus lived brought him into conflict with the way things are done. He taught,
“When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not
invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in
case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you
give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the
blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you
will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” [Luke 14:12-14]
That is, of course, a beautiful sentiment. But Jesus actually did that sort of
thing. People complained to his
disciples, asking them (in a sort of oblivious way, since they were also
hanging out with Jesus),
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors
and sinners?”
[Matthew 9:11]
Did he not understand how the world works?
Appearances
matter, and so do words. He wasn’t
always careful about that, either. A lot
of what Jesus said makes good material for inspirational posters, but Jesus might
also turn off the filter when he got going.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but
inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.”
[Matthew 23:27]
You just don’t say stuff like that, even if you
think it. And it won’t help you get
things done. If anything, it’s the way
to make the authorities dig their heels in, the way that pretty much anyone
else would. It’s the way to set yourself
up for trouble.
Earlier,
someone had wanted to trap Jesus and asked him:
“‘Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or
not?’ But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why are you putting me to
the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.’ And they
brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and
whose title?’ They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Give
therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the
things that are God’s.’”
[Matthew 22:17-21]
But what is Caesar’s and what is God’s? The answer that Jesus gives is not the answer
that Pilate gives. For our part, we have
to go with one of them at some point and not the other. Which will it be?
Jesus
seems to imply that deep in the human heart, we know the difference, if we are
ready to listen, and know what is right.
He said,
“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.” [John 18:37]
Remember the old RCA Victor logo? A dog cocks his head next to the speaker and
the motto is “His master’s voice”. Jesus
testifies by his very life to the ways of God.
In him we see what it is to be truly and fully the human beings that we
are made to be. By him we are freed from
all that would hold us back, and thanks to him we have access to the Spirit of
truth, who helps us both to know what is good and to seek it.
Jesus
stirs up the wills of God’s faithful people.
He invites us to be part of a kingdom that is broader than our
understanding, to be part of a purpose that is greater than we can imagine for
ourselves, to live in ways that confuse or amaze those who see them until they
realize that it is God himself who is at work and that, as the Bible says,
“the one who is in you is greater than the one
who is in the world.” [I John
4:4]
What are you hearing in your own heart?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stir-up_Sunday
[2]
Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy:
What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 4-5.
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