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Church of Our
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191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
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Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
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This page revised 28
Nov 00
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Now There
Arose a New King
Reflections on the
lessons for the Last Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
John 18:33-37
Today -- in the Anglican Communion's calendar -- is the Last Sunday after Pentecost. The last Sunday in the church calendar which starts up a new year next week with the beginning of Advent. It's all very orderly and logical -- quite apolitical. And in an election season like the one I hope will end later today, it's refreshing to me to be practical rather than political.
In some other churches, today is a little more political. Many Episcopal parishes, and plenty of other Protestant congregations, and all Roman Catholic churches call today "The Feast of Christ the King". They use the same lessons we heard today. And the collect the BCP designates for today is pretty kingly. But, Episcopalians still don't have a day in our calendar that blatantly celebrates Christ as a king on a throne. I like to think it makes us look with more complexity at how God's authority prevails in this world.
The Feast of Christ the King is an "idea" feast. Like Trinity Sunday it commemorates a concept, not an event in the story of Jesus' life. It's all about doctrine, not action. It was an anachronism when Pope Pius XI instituted it in 1925. His explanation: The new holiday was out "to counteract the growing ... atheism of our time". But he chose an unfortunate theme for that, if you ask me. In 1925 few monarchies were left with any real power in Europe -- and the ones that were in place were fading fast. With no tradition of royalty, the image of Christ as a sovereign leaves American Christians - and those growing atheists -- cold. Certainly no monarchy anywhere in the modern world has had the kind of stupefying dominion described in the readings from Daniel and the Revelation to John.
The Book of Daniel is a thoroughly political book. Fundamentalist Christians love to read the signs and portents in Daniel's visions as a blueprint for "the end of the world". However, that's really an unacceptably ill-informed thing to do. And it cuts the richness and significance of the text down to nearly nothing. Actually, Daniel's writings strike directly at the heart of the situation the Hebrew people suffered in his day. The book is not about the end of the world. It's about the end of Greek dominance and tyranny in Palestine. Something that must have seemed about as disruptive as the end of the world would be.
Daniel's day was somewhere around 600 BC, the height of a Greek program to enforce the adoption of Greek culture in all their territories. Religion, politics, justice, literature -- everything. It was causing a crisis - religious and political - for Jews of the time. Daniel's symbols -- presented as visions - are his way of negotiating that crisis. His vision proclaims that God is steadfastly with the People of God no matter what the crisis. His message: God is not going to abandon you regardless. And, in turn, you must not supplant God's supreme power with a lesser kind. Daniel is a hard-line opponent of letting Jewish culture get to "Greek", too "pagan", too "blended". He flies against not only the oppressors, but also against the Jews themselves who were in growing numbers beginning to see the advance of Greek culture over their own as more an opportunity than a threat.
Daniel's vision depicts a progression of cultures that rise and fall and are soon forgotten. The Babylonians, the Medes, The Persians, the Seleucids (who would have been crushed by Alexander the Great within living memory at the time). Daniel sees them all as a procession of "beasts" - some scarier than others. But constant above them all - watching in majesty as history plays itself out - is the "Ancient One".
I have to cut across detail here, but all the language about the "son of Adam" who is "like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven" at that time and in that context was a representation not of one particular hero -- a Messiah -- but rather of the perseverance of a greater and eternal authority that goes far beyond the presumptions of power made by the people of the earth. Only centuries later did Christians begin to associate this vision with the person of Jesus. To Daniel's readers it was about real power and false power.
The challenge is to avoid reading this vision (and many others like it) as a secret-code story about Jesus. It's a political masterpiece with lots to say about God, humanity, transcendence, and folly. But it's not a look into a crystal ball. No matter how you read this text -- with the fundamentalists or with the scholars -- you can still come to the same bottom line. Daniel's vision proclaims the absolute dominance and endurance of the power and wisdom we call God over all human affairs no matter how arrogantly self-assured people might be. The presumptions will one day be gone. And God will remain, presiding, before and after everything. Empires rise and fall, the Bible says, but God will not pass away. That's what God is: The ground of wisdom, love, and justice that stands behind and above everything. And that's where we are called to place our trust and where we are called to turn for understanding and sustenance - not to the noisy things strutting around us here below.
God's genuine kind of power and majesty, we read, is of an entirely different variety - serene and steady - from the kind of royalty we hear about in some of the triumphalist hymns we're singing today about many crowns and worshipping the king. But people have really tended to go in for the imperial stuff over the years. There seems to be an inclination to reduce the profoundly mystical and unworldly authority of God until it looks as much as possible like the kings we've seen here on earth.
I once went to a church with a big stained glass window over the altar. Really big. In it there are angels and saints and potentates all bowing down and swinging incense and waving their hands around the edges. And in the middle is Jesus. Not teaching. Not feeding hungry people. Not hanging around with sinners and lepers. Not beating Pilate at his own game of wits. The window was made in the 1950s when Elizabeth II was the glamorous new Queen of England. So this Jesus is sitting on a golden throne that looks exactly like the one the Queen used at her coronation (the chapel's tour guides loved to point that out). This Jesus wears a big crown based on the St. Edward's Crown - the one the Queen wears to open parliament. He's got an orb and scepter right out of the Tower of London. Only in an Episcopal Church. And he wears a long purple and ermine cape that fills up the whole lower part of the window.
The color purple has long been associated with royalty. The Phoenicians were the first people to invent purple dye. Their name means "red-purple" in Greek. The only way to get that color in the ancient world was to gather a certain kind of mollusk available in the area. Many thousands of the little shells and months of labor-intensive processing would result in just a dab of rich purple dye -- fit for a king. Because only kings could afford it. Clothes dyed with that stuff were worth double their weight in gold. And only the finest, richest fabric - of course - would be worthy of such a treatment.
It's one more time when I prefer the windows here in our church to those that are so much more "realistic" - or literal. I don't like the picture of Jesus propped up like the kings and queens and presidents and dictators that the Bible tells us strut around in folly until they finally pass away leaving God to know all and understand all in the way that only profound permanence and radical steadfastness can.
People of faith - all faiths - believe that human beings can step behind the surface of history and connect with the divine. Christians say that when God came to show us that, God came to live with us not clothed in purple velvet robes like a normal king, but nobly enough robed in human flesh - a whole new kind of king. So doesn't it stand to reason that we look to broken and hurting bodies around us when we want to worship and serve God? The highest calling of a Christian is to use our hands and feet and voices to display God's love and faithfulness and endurance. After all, that's the way Jesus chose to show the pompous and confused world we live in what real royalty looks like.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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