This is the text of a sermon I wrote and read this morning when I led worship for a friend who was on vacation. It is a different topic than I would normally write about, or is aimed differently, because she is minister of a Christian church and follows the lectionary. Today was Christ the King Sunday, so a reading from John 18:33-7 is my reference.
Making Judea Great
Again
A
couple decades ago, when we were first married, my wife and I developed the
habit of describing anything that was garishly colored—cerulean, aquamarine,
taupe, copper, any neon hue—as a prom dress. As in, “That’s not a whatever,
that’s a prom dress.”
I
was working at a group home for adults with emotional and developmental
disabilities back then. One day, one of the residents had the day off from work
and I took him shopping. When we parked in the mall parking lot, we were a
couple yards from a small car that was colored a lurid lilac color. My
passenger, who loved cars, pointed it out to me. “Look at that car!”
Instinctively
I said, “That’s not a car, that’s a prom dress.”
He
looked at me, he looked at the car, looked back at me, looked back at the car. Then
he said, in exactly the same slow, deliberate cadence I’m sure had been used
more than once on him, “That’s a car.”
Words
mean. They make solid the ephemeral world around us. They can hurt and they can
heal. Before I became a full time preacher I was a full time writing teacher so
you can perhaps imagine how important getting the right word or choosing the
right interpretation of a word can be for me. When I taught technical writing,
I had an exercise asking students to imagine I was a knight from the Middle
Ages and they had to explain how a car worked to me.
One
of the most important elements of communication, whether written or oral, is to
meet the audience where he or she is. To use the language that makes someone’s
world real. This means using the terminology or words and phrases that the
person you want to communicate with uses to make them mean roughly the same idea
you want to get across. In my exercise, this meant using terms like “horse,”
“spark,” and “chain,” and avoiding words like “gas”, “combustion”, “engine”,
not necessarily because the words were unfamiliar but because their meanings
had changed so dramatically from how someone a millennium ago would have
understood them.
The
original speaker of what came to us as the Book of John may have used some word
or phrase his audience had long since come to understand by virtue of its
repetition. But a century later, the writer of John’s gospel, in trying to get
across the newness of God’s community without bogging down his readers with questions
about what exactly an unfamiliar word means, used words they had heard and
understood all their lives. Hence, we get a God who is king, a Jesus who is
Lord, and a place below them for the rest of us we comfortably understand.
“Are
you the king of the Jews?” “My kingdom is not from this world.” “So you are a
king?” “You say that I am a king.” Why king? The John writer’s Jesus, who’s
speaking Aramaic, a now nearly-extinct Semitic language related to Hebrew and
Syriac, being supplanted by Arabic eventually in most places a few centuries
into the Common Era, uses a word that seems, in nearly everything we understand
about his theology, contrary to the freedom he otherwise espouses. If Jesus
were to preach this message today, he would use a different terminology. We
might get instead a God who is Chief Executive Officer, a Jesus who is our
Supervisor. “Thy corporation come, thy will be done.”
To understand
this, and why the John writer makes a lot about it, we need to read ahead. In seminary,
I was taught two important rules in interpreting selections from the Bible:
read the chapters before and after the selection and place yourself in the
position of the original hearers of the selection.
We
know the books that comprise the Bible, like all ancient literature, were
initially oral recitation for small audiences of believers meeting to hear the
Word. These were eventually written down over the course of several hundred
years. The oldest scrap of the Gospel of John has been dated to the Second
Century Common Era, at least a hundred years after the death of anyone who
would actually have laid eyes on the historical Jesus So to make sense of what
is said, to hear it fully, we have to place ourselves in the minds of men and
women who have heard scraps of the teachings of this peasant killed by an
imperial force which was still very much in charge.
It’s in chapter 19
we are given the ultimate rejection of Jesus by the people he came to Jerusalem
to save. Having had Jesus whipped, Pilate presents him to the crowd gathered
for Passover, saying “Here is your King!” But the crowd refuses to accept
responsibility for Jesus, crying for his execution. Pilate, in John’s account,
tries one last time, asking incredulously, “Shall I crucify your King?”
Caiaphas and his cohorts answer him, “We have no king but Caesar.”
The
initial listeners of John’s gospel would have heard something very different.
At the time of its telling, a common hymn sung during Passover contained the
declaration, “We have no king but you [God].” Caiaphas and the high priests’
words make explicit their rejection not only of Jesus but of God. As followers
of the Scriptures, intimately familiar with the story known to us as Exodus, the
first century listeners would have heard something familiar and frightening.
Caesar is a Latin
word, and in Greek is Kaiser, a word we still use. But there is no word for
Caesar in Aramaic or in Hebrew, the languages the original hearers might have
heard. They would have heard the word malik
or king in close relation to Caesar, just as in Exodus they had heard the word Pharaoh.
What they hear is a demand to return to the slavery their ancestors had
escaped.
It would be a
return to, well, better the devil you know. God may have brought them out of
slavery, but the people are electing to return, metaphorically, to Egypt. Knowing
full well how badly most of them had it during that period, they wanted to
return to that semblance of comfort. Making Judea Great Again, as it were.
A jaded, servile Pilate
famously mocks what Jesus said, that his purpose is to testify to the truth of
the new community God will bring about. “What is truth?” Truth is just as
malleable today as it was when Pilate said this. We live in an age of “fake
news,” of “alternative facts.” We watch a video of a fight and we’re certain we
understand who started it and who ended it. But then someone points out that
it’s filmed from a perspective ignoring this guy over here, or that the video
starts just after the first punch is thrown so we don’t hear what the other guy
said. Or it’s been cropped, or speeded up or slowed down, or that the person
recording is friends with one of the combatants and shows him in a better light.
Or we listen to a
speech and we hear, quite clearly, the speaker make a racist comment. We are
certain of what we’ve heard. But when the Pilates who work for Caesar go on TV
or the Internet, saying, “That’s not what he said, or it’s not what he meant,
or he was clearly joking. You are the real racist for having thought you heard
him say something racist,” what are we to believe? When we’re told our eyes or
our ears or our intellect is suspect, that our news sources and our schools and
history books, the organizations whose intent are to collect what was said and
done and tell others, are purveyors of “fake news”, then we have to admit
Pilate’s mockery is justified. If Jesus’ intent is to testify to the truth, and
the truth is subject to alternative facts, where does the truth lie? Does the
truth lie? Scholars have discovered a Gospel of Judas. Will we someday unearth
a Gospel of Pilate?
This is a problem
inherent to continuing to use, thousands of years after the event, words that
were at the time an approximation of what the writer meant. Pharaohs built
monuments to themselves, Caesars named conquered cities and nations after
themselves, kings and princes kill people on a whim and declare themselves
innocent. They aggrandize themselves, not God.
What’s needed is a
different way of looking at the words we bring the world around us to life.
Instead of the kingdom of God, perhaps what is to come is the community of
beloveds, a phrase popularized by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The beloved
community, however, I tell you already exists. Like the John Gospel’s kingdom
of god, it is not a place but an agreement between people to care for one
another, to help one another, feed one another, keep one another warm and safe.
The beloved community is one of radical inclusivity, where someone looks out
not for himself but for everyone, knowing that in their humanity they are all
him. “My kingdom is of another place,” Jesus says, locating it not in the world
of then or now but to come. It requires a lot of work, and 2 millennia after
Jesus, we have barely begun.
But examples of
the work of the beloved community are all around us. Last month Milwaukee bus
driver Natalie Barnes was on her regular route when a stranger came up to her,
told her his house had been condemned, and that he was homeless and asked if he
could ride the bus all night to stay warm. She did so, and when she stopped for
dinner, she bought him some hot food too. When her shift was over, she bought
him clothes and supplies, then dropped him off at a homeless shelter where a
friend works.
Will there be a
happy ending? Well, I hope so. Barnes says she speaks to him every couple days
to let him know someone cares. He was a stranger in need asking for a kindness
and rewarded with more than he could have hope for. As that prolific speaker,
Anonymous, has it, if you have been blessed by God, build a longer table, not a
taller fence.
