When the Worship Committee asked me to preach, they told me that today would be "Christ the King Sunday."  I thought I had better get with the program, so I read the assigned scriptures, all about David and his victories and Jesus and his confrontation with Pilate. There's no doubt about who was the better king:  David was young and handsome, brave and clever, a military hero and even a gifted writer -- not unlike John F. Kennedy as a matter of fact.  No wonder the Hebrews loved him.  He would have been the perfect messiah.

Jesus may have been a son of David, but he was hardly a chip off the old block.  It's hard to imagine anyone less kingly.  Compare David standing up to Goliath with Jesus standing before Pilate.  I will grant you that both were courageous in their own way.  David was clever, but so was Jesus, only not at the crucial moment.  Pilate kept giving him openings, and he kept refusing to take them. This would not have been David's strategy; he killed his enemies, by the tens of thousands, whereas Jesus let his enemies kill him.  David became a national hero and founded a dynasty. Jesus died a national disgrace, but he founded a religion.  You might almost say that he won by losing.  And yet what is kingship about if not victory, success, power, and glory -- right here, right now?

The phrase "Christ the King" seems at best ironic, at worst wishful thinking. I have struggled with it over the years, along with many other things I hear in church or read about in the Bible.    

When I was growing up during the Cold War, we used to recite the Lord's Prayer every day in school.  They told us to think about what we were saying, so  I visualized a comic strip unrolling along with the words.  "For thine is the kingdom" was an old white man in a robe and a crown sitting on a throne.  "The power" was a dynamo with lightning bolts shooting out of it.  "The glory" was a fiery sunset with sea and clouds. Not very subtle, but at least I was connecting scripture to something I knew.

In Sunday school, we read Bible stories, and David really appealed to me.  I was a skinny kid; I was not good at sports or fighting, but I was clever.  Even though my world was full of Goliaths, I never got into fights; I usually talked my way out.  But, like most boys, I was insecure about my body, and I used to fantasize about lifting weights and getting buff so that I could defend myself on the street.  I read all the hero comics; in fact I would have liked to be Goliath, just for a day. But of course if you were a guy like me, it was even better to be David. You could be small and clever and brave and have God on your side and take down the big guys.

Meanwhile, church was basting us with images of battle and empire.  Remember those old hymns:  "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war!" The Battle Hymn of the Republic?  In the Old Testament, God is depicted as the ultimate generalissimo, the "Lord of Hosts."  He really likes war; he supports the Israelites in battle (provided they do what he says); he even micromanages to the extent of ordering attacks and directing reprisals. Much of the Hebrew rhetoric of praise is the sort of thing designed to flatter a king:  extolling God's power and might, his victories, his charisma, his superiority to all other rulers.

Now this was OK to an extent, because it felt good to be on the winning side.  But the imperial rhetoric also reminded me -- uncomfortably -- of Hitler and Stalin, the bad guys we had just been fighting.  I thought of massed formations goose-stepping past medal-encrusted generals, idolatrous cults of personality, totalitarianism, genocide, concentration camps.  As a child of democracy, I found these abhorrent; I preferred the down-home, good-guy image of American generals like Douglas Macarthur in his rumpled khakis and corn cob pipe.

Moreover, the God of the Old Testament was not an appealing character.  His behavior was erratic, self-serving, and frequently violent.  He could be jealous, vindictive, cruel, arbitrary, and capricious. He was quick to anger and slow to forgive, even to the second and third generation.  In fact, he was behaving in lots of ways that my parents had taught me were really awful.  There were a lot of things in scripture that did not help to build my faith. 

Then there was the New Testament, which, admittedly, offered a more benign view of God.  Jesus was not bad either, although I did have trouble with many of his pronouncements. For example, imagine that you are a fourteen year old male person, sizzlng and frying with hormones, and Jesus says to you, "Whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery." Did this mean I was doomed, or did it mean I was OK because I was just like everyone else?  Was Jesus accepting me or rejecting me? (It was only much later that I discovered that whole denominations had split over just this sort of question.)  And what about, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven?"  This did not seem like very practical advice.  Who needs depression?  I felt that the church was not relevant to my life, so I quit. 

But, as I got older and accumulated the usual share of failures, betrayals, and disappointments, the New Testament began to make more and more sense.  Tribal societies mark the passage into adulthood with rites of initiation that involve ordeals and wounds.  People carry the scars with them into maturity.  I've always admired the wisdom of this process:  it empowers the young to accept and manage suffering.  For what is adulthood but learning to live with wounds in a wounded world?  By age 40 everyone is a survivor.  The thing is not to let your wounds get the best of you, but to overcome them by turning their pain into learning.  If you are a warrior in youth - and who is not? - by midlife you have to become a healer.  You have to turn your wounds into springs.  Otherwise you are doomed.

Now Jesus' sayings and behavior make a lot more sense, especially when I campare them to David's.  Jesus was no demagogue.  I can't imagine him haranguing a crowd or leading troops into battle.  He was more likely to feed the masses than lead them, more likely to tell a story than make a speech.  The Gospels show him most often in close, intimate settings: sitting at someone's dinner table, ministering to the sick, teaching in the synagogue.  Most of the time he is dealing with one single person.  His quintessential gesture is the laying-on of hands, the simple touch.  He makes contact. He reassures.  He heals.  And he never takes credit for anything.

As for his words and sayings, they aren't the kinds of speech you expect from a king.  He doesn't harangue or exhort.  He tells stories, he poses riddles, he drops a paradox in your lap and then, slyly, walks away.  He wants you to think about it, like a Zen master posing a koan. But kings don't want you to think; they want you to adore. They want you to sign up, line up, and assume the position.  They want you to die for them.  But Jesus died for us.

I believe that Jesus understood all about power.  He knew that kings want only to gain it and keep it.  He knew that the urge for glory and honor and recognition stems from a deep inner sense of insecurity, of fear, confusion, or distrust about who you are and what is right and true.  He must have realized that those who dreamt of a military messiah were deeply afraid; they had lost faith in God and no longer knew who they were.  That is why they sought to cast themselves into an ideal, the perfect king, the new David, the messiah.

Kings want power, but Jesus wanted to give power away.  That's what it means to be a healer; that's what is meant by the laying-on of hands.  Empowerment. Jesus' teaching is all about dealing with pain, the pain of life in a fallen world. You can't escape it.  You can't expect God or anyone else to fix it for you.  You have to learn to live with it, to live through it, to live by faith.  And what is faith but a discipline of memory and imagination?  It is a technique of suffering, and Jesus taught it to us by word and example.

As I grow older, his sayings make more and more sense.  Now I see them as therapeutic, like koans.  "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  It's not meant to be answered; it's meant to open the mind by upending common sense.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."  I used to think of this as pie in the sky advice.  Now I remember what happened when I lost my bid for tenure.  It was the worst disaster of my career, but it clarified all my relationships. People that I had counted on began to avoid me while others, many others, came forward with aid and comfort.  Professionally devastated, I began to feel spiritually enriched, as if a table had been spread for me in full view of my enemies. 

It was then I began to realize that the Kingdom of God has nothing to do with politics or authority but everything to do with community.  In fact, "kingdom" is just a contradiction in terms.  It's not about imperial grandeur but personal connection, not about shock and awe but the healing touch.  It's not about charisma but compassion, not about moving the masses but empowering persons.  It's not about power at all;  it's about love.

Love and power: by age 40 you realize that these are the two pathways open to us in this life.  If you live for power, you may indeed gain the whole world, but people will cleave to you as long as you have it;  they will desert you the moment you lose it. But if you live for love, people will cleave to you no matter what, especially when you are down and out.  This, I think, is what Jesus meant by laying up treasures in heaven.

You have to forgive your enemies -- not because they deserve it, but because if you don't, you'll keep on picking at your wounds, and they'll never heal.  You'll never be able to get away from your enemies, because you'll be carrying them around with you, and what a drag that is!  Forgiving them is the only way you'll be able to get up and move on.  That's what Nelson Mandela learned from two decades in prison.

You need to love your enemies -- not because they deserve it, but because by challenging and threatening you they make you think and learn; they keep you alive.  If you can't or won't learn from life, you might as well be dead.  But if you are in a learning mode, you can never lose.  That's what Viktor Frankl learned in the concentration camps.

You need to render unto Ceasar that things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.  Things such as honor, integrity, and love belong to God, not to the state.  The state, even this great American state of ours, fears nothing so much as a truly free person, someone who thinks for themselves and might therefore "run amok."  But it is better, as Thoreau observed, to let the state run amok against you,  and thereby expose its pretense and vanity.  The state is no more than a false idol.  That's what Thoreau, Gandhi, and King learned from spending the night - or indeed many nights - in jail.

The thing about states, kings, and kingdoms is that they never last.  When Stalin was advised to seek the Pope's backing in the war against Hitler, he sneered, "The Pope?  How many divisions has the Pope?"  He spoke like a king.  But look what happened to the Soviet Union.

I admit, it is hard always to live for love.  Power is frequently easier, more expedient, more profitable in the short run.  It's easy to rejoice when enemies bite the dust by the tens of thousands.  And it's still hard to wrestle with Jesus' teachings.  Maybe that's why the mega churches and the evangelical fundamentalists are having such success these days.  People don't want challenges, they want programs; they want security, instead of the dizzy vistas and breathtaking responsibility of freedom. No doubt there are some who still envision Jesus as a kingly messiah, who take the words of the Lord's Prayer in their most literal sense.  But when I think about those words now, I see not comic strip images, but bridges toward a whole new way of thinking.  I know that if I can just walk across those bridges, in faith and fear like Peter walking across the water, I will meet Jesus, and everyone else that I care about, on the other side.  "The kingdom" - it's not about empire but community.  "The power" - it's not about shock and awe, but empowerment.  "The glory" - it's not about royal magnificence but joy, the radiance that pours out of us and lights up the world when we recognize that we are all God's children, now and forever.  Amen. 

John Tallmadge

November 23, 2003

Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church
Cincinnati, Ohio