Sermon, Sunday Next Before Advent: My Kingdom Is Not From This World

In the name of the living God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

God grant to the living grace,
to the departed rest,
to the Church, The King, the Commonwealth and all people,
unity, peace and concord,...

These words are part of the blessing often used at services with a civic, national or military theme. And we tend to hear them rather a lot during November. I used them on November 5th as we recalled the plot to unseat James 1 in 1605, Sarah used them on Remembrance Sunday, and Jonathan on Armistice Day when we gathered with local regiments. They help remind us that, as the established church of the nation, we have a relationship and responsibility to the Sovereign; and even more so here at Christ Church, where the King is the Visitor of the House.

But today—the Sunday next before Advent—is kept as the feast of Christ the King. The Feast was introduced in the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI in 1925, in response to what he saw as a growing culture of secularism and nationalism at the time. The Church of England adopted it in 1997, and other churches have followed suit. And in today’s geopolitical climate, in the light of current conflicts and recent elections, it seems to speak ever more strongly than ever before. But what sort of King is our Lord Jesus Christ?

The first reading today was from the Book of Daniel, and is part of the latter half of that book. After the stories of Daniel and the people of God in exile in Babylon come Daniel’s visions – visions that were going to influence the thinking of Jews and Christians for many hundreds of years to come. Some are taken up and reproduced wholesale in the Book of Revelation; and some have given rise to innovative and challenging works of art. Today’s passage is one such: a vision featuring the Ancient of Days, re-imagined many centuries later by the visionary artist William Blake.

In Daniel’s vision we are given a picture of thrones being set in place and the Ancient One, or God the Father, taking his place. The picture is awe-inspiring and, quite frankly, frightening, with fire flowing out from God’s presence. It’s utterly other-worldly. Someone is described as coming ‘with the clouds of heaven’ who turns out to be one ‘like a human being’ (or as some translations put it, ‘a Son of Man’). He is presented to the Ancient of Days, and is given authority to reign as king, but unlike the human kings of Babylon:

His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed. (Daniel 7.14)

Then, in today’s Gospel we see, in a sense, a mirror image of this passage. Jesus, the Son of God is presented, not to the Ancient of Days, not to God the Father, but to Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor in Jerusalem, a ruler whose kingdom is very clearly of this world.

This passage read as this morning’s Gospel is just a small fraction of John’s account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate – we are given a snippet of the dialogue between the two of them. To get the full picture, we must read the whole of Chapters 18 and 19 of John’s Gospel. In that account, the gospel writer, with masterful clarity – takes us with him on Jesus’ journey to the cross.

It’s important to realise where this journey is heading. For John, in the fourth gospel, the cross is Jesus’ great moment of glorification: it’s the point at which he fulfils two of his own prophetic words. In chapter 3, Jesus has said to Nicodemus: 

'Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.' (3.14-15)

And then, having entered Jerusalem to complete his saving work, Jesus said to the listening crowd:

'And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (12.32)

This is where we are heading – to the ‘lifting up’ of Jesus on the cross. And as the drama unfolds throughout John’s account of his trial and death, at no point is Jesus portrayed as a helpless victim. He suffers at the hands of both Jews and Romans, yes, but through all this, the choreography of the Gospel is such that the other characters on the stage move around him. He retains great presence, and always seems to be in control. He conducts himself with a royal dignity, as befits Christ the King. And finally, when he is lifted up on the cross, it is as one who, in the words of the great Passiontide hymn:

            Reigns and triumphs from the tree.

Artists and sculptors have responded to this portrayal of Jesus. The statue of Christus Rex—Christ the King—at Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire by the sculptor Peter Eugene Ball captures well the essence of the crucified king. (It’s on the back page of the order of service.) Jesus wears the crown of thorns, but he is very clearly in control, and although his head is bowed, it seems to be more out of compassion for the world than as the head of one wracked with pain. This is the Jesus of John’s Gospel: Christ the King.

But what about Jesus’ exchange with Pilate? We have only a few verses which are part of a much longer trial narrative. At the heart of the exchange are these words:

‘My kingdom is not from this world......’ Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. 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.’ (18.36a, 37)

And, in the verse which follows: 

Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’ (18.38)

‘My kingdom,’ says Jesus, ‘is not from this world.’ Daniel’s vision, which is about as other-worldly as you can get, would agree with this. But what exactly does Jesus mean here?

Throughout the fourth Gospel, John makes great use of the words ‘the world’ (ton kosmon in Greek). We’re probably most familiar with it from these words:

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (3.16).

But there are other important uses of the word. Right at the beginning of the Gospel, when John unfolds the mystery of the Word made flesh, we are told of God Son that

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. (1.10)

So the relationship between God and the world is this. God loves the world – after all, God made it – and it’s because of God’s love for the world that he sent his Son as a human being, because God’s desire is to be with his people. Despite this, the world failed to recognise God’s Son when he arrived. In other words, there’s a deep fault line between God, who made and loves the world, and the world as it is. This fault line between God and world can be seen in terms of a clash of values. One God’s side are love, truth, goodness, peace and trust. On the other side are hate, lies, evil, conflict and fear. This clash of values is seen in Jesus’ trial before Pilate. On the one hand is the Roman governor: a political functionary in a regime maintained through violence and fear. On the other is Jesus, the embodiment of God and of love and truth. ‘What is truth?’ asks Pilate – and with those words we see the chasm between the two of them open, and we realise that if Jesus is indeed a king, then his kingdom is certainly not of this world.

So where does this leave us as disciples of Christ the King? The short answer is ‘between a rock and a hard place.’ Maintaining the values of God’s kingdom in a world which persistently denies them is very hard indeed. Christians have struggled with this for centuries, and we always will. Putting ourselves firmly on God’s side will mean conflict and opposition, as many know too well on a daily basis.

Jesus made this clear to the disciples:

'In the world you face persecution. But take courage; 
I have conquered the world!’ (16.33)

‘Take courage, fear not,’ he said, I have conquered (or overcome) the world. What did he mean by this? Was it perhaps, what St Paul was getting at when he wrote of Christ’s followers as citizens of heaven, that this world is only a temporary home, where ‘we have no abiding city.’. This has given rise to the thought that we might be ‘in the world’ but that we are not ‘of it.’ That is quite an attractive idea, but it has within it the danger that we separate ourselves from the world, rather then being God’s salt and light within it. I suspect Jesus actually meant something else. 

Remember that in St John’s world view, Jesus’ greatest triumph is when he is lifted up on the cross, when he reigns in triumph from the tree. This is Jesus overcoming the world, not through force, or might, or violence or coercion, but through sheer unadulterated love. It is love which reigns supreme from the cross, because God ‘so loved the world.’

And so, if we are serious about being disciples of Christ the King, it’s not a case of us being ‘in the world but not of it’ and waiting patiently until the time comes for us to claim our citizenship of heaven, but that, like Jesus, we are to be God’s arms of love extended to the world in which we live. We’re not called to overcome the world in the way that Jesus did—that’s the king’s job—but we are called to follow in the king’s footsteps, and to show the same quality of love – the same values – as he did. 

The final hymn at this Eucharist sums it up as well as anything. Written by the Anglican priest Bill Vanstone as part of his book Love’s endeavour, Love’s expense, it is a profound reflection on the God who risks everything out of love for the world. Here, in the final verse, the writer looks upon Jesus on the cross and concludes:

Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.

Peter Eugene Ball's Christus Rex, Southwell Minster