Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the feast of Christ the King 2024

It can’t have been easy for Pontius Pilate—Roman governor of a fairly minor province. This wouldn’t have been the most plumb of political appointments, right on the edge of things, responsible for a peculiar people with their eccentric monotheism and spasmodic messianic controversies.

Here before him is probably just one more Jewish trouble-maker, upsetting the Pax Romana: a peace that was surely to everyone’s advantage, even if it was founded on the simmering threat of imperial brutality. Be at peace, or else.

Pilate knew the king of the Jews—it was Herod Antipas, who was well-connected in the Imperial court, and knew which side his bread was buttered. So, the question is laced with sarcasm; Are you the king of the Jews?

Jesus responds with remarkable style; with humour even. Do you ask this on your own—is this something you want to know; does it matter to you (surely it could be of no interest whatsoever—and could not be a serious question about Jewish royal succession). Pilate is playing a game in which he has no interest, and Jesus prods at that.

Perhaps Pilate is interested because he has heard what people are saying about Jesus? Pilate’s patience breaks. I am not a Jew, and so this can have no interest to me whatsoever. I’ve been drawn into a dispute that should have been managed by your own people—now is your chance to give your side of the story.

Jesus’ response must have been utterly baffling for Pilate. Jesus speaks of a kingdom not of this world, not from this world. He describes it as ‘my kingdom.’ It is a kingdom for which no-one is prepared to fight; a kingdom that cannot be won by conquest; a kingdom that presents no threat, only promise; a kingdom of truth, of true peace, not an uneasy semblance of it. Jesus is the voice of this kingdom.

Students and practitioners of realpolitik will share Pilate’s frustration with this dreamer. Someone offering a proper threat, with the forces to back it up, would be relatively easy for him to manage. Previous examples could be found hanging on crosses along the main roads outside the city.

Of course, Pilate is at a great disadvantage. He is in the middle of a story that is opaque to him. He is culturally disadvantaged, not being Jewish, but he also simply cannot imagine where this story will go. The narratives available to him are only those of power-play; of being the bigger dog. There is another story being played-out before him, in which he is reluctantly implicated, and this story-teller tells him it is a story about truth; the Truth.

The truth we perceive in global politics today, is the same truth that Pilate would have fully recognised. The truth of human greed and pretention, the truth of human anger and vengeance, the truth that you really do need to have the bigger stick in your hand, or make sure you are on the side of the one who does. Under this truth, peace can only be of the most uncertain kind; a fine balancing of interests and powers; a diplomatic juggling act, where you cannot risk taking your eye off any number of potential disasters and conflagrations; a constant, nervous vigilance. It is, surely, a miracle that such a peace manages to hold anywhere for any length of time.

This is the truth in which we live; in which our public servants, and we all to some extent, have to operate—but, tantalisingly, Jesus claims that this is not the truth that he perceives; not the truth he tells; not the truth of the kingdom where he is king.

Fifty or sixty years after this encounter between Jesus and Pilate, John found himself on the island of Patmos; forced there under the persecution of Domitian, in the name of the same Pax Romana. Christians like John had failed to assume their responsibility for keeping this ‘peace’; they would not submit to the cult of the emperor which divinised that status quo; that peace founded on violence; the truth that Pilate knew; the truth we all know.

But John had a vision, a series of visions, that placed the status quo in an entirely new context—the context of the one who is and who was and who is to come; the alpha and the omega.

His vision didn’t shy away from the difficult stuff, the horrific stuff that emerges when the powers of this world are provoked, and shown for what they are. His vision is a revelation, an apocalypse, an unveiling of the true character of what passes for peace in the kingdoms of this world.

John has been attending to the truth spoken by Jesus years before; not just spoken in his teaching, in his interaction with Pontius Pilate, but spoken in deeds, in miracles of healing, and in the passivity of his trial and execution: taking upon himself all the humiliation and suffering that human beings inflict on one another to prop up their approximations of peace.

John has been attending to the whole story, of which Pilate was a vital part: of Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, even to death; the firstborn of the dead, on that first Easter morn; and the ruler of the kings of the earth, who will come in love to claim his kingdom, his bride.

John uses the language of conquest and conquering; but the conquest Jesus wins is not by shedding the blood of his enemies in rivalry and vengeance, but in offering his own blood for them—loving and freeing them… and us. We become his kingdom, his priests, when we let this Truth interrogate the bitter truths of this world; when we let his peace unmask our pretence.

We have to live in this world as it is, with its kings and presidents; its rivalries and violence; in the realities of a dog-eat-dog world. We will get caught up in the lies, in the pretence, in the fakery; we will be complicit in the systems that crush peoples and lay waste the planet; and we will need forgiving for all of it. But we have heard the call of Truth, however faintly. We have been baptised into it, and fed with its life, even at this altar. We have glimpsed that peace which awaits us; sometimes we might even dare, like the martyrs, to give our lives for it. We have a kingdom that cannot be shaken, but will not threaten. We have a King who is not our rival, but our Saviour.

Pilate can perhaps be forgiven for not being able to receive this truth, nor to see it when it stood before him. It’s not easy for any of us. But, unlike Pilate, we have the whole story; we rehearse it in every Eucharist. By the power of the Spirit, we have been given, may we never settle for the cynical half-truths and the pragmatic phony peace, even if that is the world in which we have to learn to operate. May we yet learn how to live in the kingdom that is coming; in the Truth of the King who is standing in our midst.