In the Gospel reading last Sunday on the Feast of Christ The King, the rulers sneer and the soldiers jeer at Jesus because the one who was supposed to the chosen one, the one who has a sign hung above him that reads “King of the Jews” is dying on a cross as a common criminal. So, to the rulers and soldiers, Jesus was a joke. A joke is defined as the juxtaposition of incongruous things. We laugh when incongruous elements come together. For example, in the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian, which takes place in Israel during the time of Jesus, Brian, who hates the Romans like everyone else, sneaks into a public square at night and attempts to write in very incorrect Latin: “Romans go home” as graffiti on a wall. A group of Roman soldiers catch him doing this. The leader of that group is most upset that the phrase is grammatically incorrect and so he makes Brian rewrite it correctly, changing every part of the graffiti that is incorrect. And then he makes Brian write the phrase 100 times on the wall to make sure he got it right. These are incongruous elements that don’t fit together. We would expect the Roman soldier to kill Brian for writing such a thing, but instead makes him write it correctly 100 times.
G.K. Chesterton said that at the heart of Christianity is something very much like that, for Christians claim that God became human. Divinity and humanity met. This is incongruous. It joins together two things that don’t belong together in the thinking of fallen humanity. I mention of this because of the feast that we celebrated, the Feast of Christ the King. Kings are powerful, majestic, splendid, Lords of armies. But here we see Christ crucified, abandoned, condemned by society, betrayed by his closest friends. And we say, there is the King. So, the rulers and soldiers see it as a joke: the juxtaposition of completely incongruous things: power and weakness, majesty and degradation.
The earliest depiction of the cross that has been found is in what archeologists think was a training center for gladiators in Rome, probably for young people. There’s a little bit of graffiti on the wall at the archaeological site. It shows a crucified figure with the head of a donkey and then there’s a little figure kneeling at his feet. The caption reads: “The Christian worships his God.” Obviously it was meant to make fun of Christians. Probably some poor kid in the school was a Christian and his friends are making fun of him. But it gets right to the heart: that is the strangeness, the incongruity of Christianity, which I would like to explore here.
Let’s go back to Genesis. God creates Adam and Eve and gives them power and dominion over the earth. Eat of the fruits of all the trees except one. Name all the animals. Go forth and multiply. St. Irenaeus once said that the glory of God is human beings fully alive. God is not in competition with us, but God wants us alive using all of our God-given powers and all of our skills of mind and will and imagination in being stewards of all He has given us. So, there is a very legitimate exercise of power. Power is legitimate when it is tied to the will and purposes of God and that was the state in paradise before sin: human beings exercising their power, their skill, their gifts, but in connection with the commands of God. It all went wrong when Adam and Eve said we, our minds, our wills, we decide where and why our power gets used. When they listened to the serpent and took the fruit of the forbidden tree, what they were saying was, the ultimate reference point of my life is no longer God and God’s purposes but me and my desires. At that moment their egos became like a black hole that draws everything into itself and lets nothing out. Now they began to say, the whole world exists for me. You exist for me and to satisfy my desires and my purposes. As Saint Augustine said, they became in curvatus in se, caved in on themselves, again like a black hole.
In that moment, love and power were separated. Love is, as I’ve said many times before, willing the good of another. In sin we never say “I will the good of another”, we say “I will my good.” If you get involved, it’s to satisfy me. Power is now defined as my dominion over you and the world. The last thing a powerful person wants is to succumb to love. Love means giving up power because it means focusing on the other. The face of sin is the separation of love and power. Note what Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street said: “We’re smart enough not to buy into the oldest myth running – Love. A Fiction created by people to keep them from jumping out of windows.”
In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most influential philosophers of that period, said that the basic truth of reality is the play or struggle of power. He was noted for saying “God is dead. -Nietzsche”. Me against you. Us against them. He saw it in nature. He saw it in institutions. He saw it in individuals. What’s the last thing a powerful person should succumb to? Love. In fact, Nietzsche saw clearly that Christianity was the great enemy. Any religion that teaches love of enemies or following a code of conduct that we didn’t invent ourselves, forget it, that means you surrender power. In August 1900 when he died, the newspaper headlines in Weimar, Germany read: “Nietzche is dead. -God.”
In the twentieth century came one of the best known philosophers of that period, Jean Paul Sarte, the founder of existentialism. He defined existentialism as the precedence of existence over essence. It’s a fancy way of saying Who I am, I decide. What I am, that’s a result of my freedom only. Power and love, in Sarte’s thought, must be separate. Of course, Sarte also said in a famous line, “Hell is other people.” That’s exactly what happens when we succumb to sin. Hell becomes other people, because they distract me from my power. If you don’t believe that Sarte had an effect on the world or of our country, hear this. This is a short quote from the Supreme Court Case entitled Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” We hear this now and agree, this is what America believes. But remember, it wasn’t the state that made the majority of us agree on the fact that God has defined all these things for us. We were a religious nation. And because of that we agreed, for the most part, on existence and meaning. As we push God further and further out of every institution, we will slide deeper and deeper into Sarte’s view.
The solution for us is the revelation that Love and Power belong together. In Jesus Christ, God, the power that created the cosmos, becomes incarnate as love, as a little tiny child, not even strong enough to lift his own head, as someone who gives himself away, seeking out the poor and the lost, one who finally poured out his own life on the cross in love for the sinful world, forgiving those who killed Him. We have been shown that Love and Power belong together.
Calling Christ “King” is a joke within the confines of a sinful world. But in terms of a transformed world, in terms of the deepest truth, it’s not a joke. Real Kingly power, the power that made the universe, looks like self-emptying love. You might say, all of this sounds very Pollyannaish. It doesn’t work in the real world. I have to disagree with that viewpoint. Martin Luther King. Jr., following in part the example of Gandhi, transformed all of American Society, turned and uprooted institutions, set aside obstacles that had been in place for centuries. Through powerful methods such as the Black Panthers wanted to use? No. By the power of love and forgiveness, which resisted non-violently. Look at St. Pope John Paul II, who faced down the Soviets, what I knew as a kid as the “evil empire”, this mighty empire backed up by tanks and guns and nuclear weapons. He faced it down by the power of love. Christ the King is a joke in a sinful world. But in the more real more true world of God’s grace, it’s the deepest truth. We need to get back there and reinsert God into our nation, institutions, and hearts, if this Constitutional Republic is to survive, continue, and thrive.
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