Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
24^th of November, 2024

Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ Whenever we celebrate the Feast of the Reign of Christ, the last Sunday in the church year, I remind us of what a new festival this is, introduced by the Roman Catholic Church in 1925 as fascism and communism began to dominate Europe. Protestant churches then adopted it, realising that in the nineteen twenties and thirties a statement of Christians’ loyalty to Christ over all earthly rulers had become both necessary and radical.

I have mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his 1933 radio broadcast after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on ‘The leader (Fuhrer) and the individual.’ Bonhoeffer argued that no mere human could have ultimate authority over other humans. Ultimate authority lies with God, and ‘[t]he fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of the Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him’.[1] This was so incendiary at the time that the broadcast was cut.

There have been times in the past century when celebrating the reign of Christ and declaring our ultimate loyalty to him may have seemed less urgent than it did in 1925. Those times are not now. We are again in an age that cries for the authority of ‘the Leader,’ whether that leader is Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Donald J. Trump. We are watching the resurgence of authoritarianism and religious nationalism, and we know how that story ended in the twentieth century. It would be good if we could manage not to make the same mistakes in the twenty-first.

In a world in which power corrupts Christians can only responsibly talk about Christ as king if we remember that Jesus was not the military messiah for whom many of the Jews of his day were waiting. As he tells Pilate in today’s reading from the Gospel according to John, his kingdom is not of this world. If the kingdom he was announcing were like other kingdoms, his followers would be fighting to keep him from being handed over. One thing the kingship of Christ does not include, according to Jesus himself, is imposition by violence and military authority. Instead, it is kingship seen through the cross, where greatness is lowliness, the last are first, kingliness is compassion, and love matters most of all.

Sadly throughout history many Christians have tried to impose their faith and their version of God’s reign on those around them through violence or coercion. There are many reasons that Donald Trump was just elected President of the United States for the second time, but undoubtedly one reason was the work done to ‘get the vote out’ by Christian nationalists who believe that they have responsibility for ‘taking dominion’ over politics.[2] Given this, when we talk about the Reign of Christ we must be clear that Jesus does not have an army or a police force; that we are not claiming that followers of Jesus should control governments; that we do not believe that only Christians should have citizenship in majority Christian countries. Christ’s kingship is not the sort of reign that Pilate represents.

That would have been clear to the Christians to whom John was writing in Revelation. They knew that they were not Rome; they were living under constant threat from an empire that made being Christian dangerous. The Book of Revelation is an example of apocalypticism which is, as I said last week, the literature of the oppressed and dispossessed, the genre of powerless people. It is also an exuberant celebration that draws on all the imagery of pomp and power the ancient world knew to describe Jesus’ victory over the powers represented by Pilate. John writes that the One whose body was pierced by the soldiers of the Roman Empire is the same One who is ‘the ruler of the kings of the earth,’ who will have ‘glory and dominion for ever and ever’.

In the greeting from Revelation that we read today we have John’s description of the Trinity: ‘Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth’. The Creator is described not in chronological order: the one who was and who is and who is to come. Instead John begins by describing the Father as ‘him who is’ to remind his readers that God is with them now and that God reigns in the present, even as it looks as though Rome is in charge. God is also the one who was, the one who liberated the slaves from Egypt and brought the exiles home from Babylon. And God is the one who is to come, because while God’s reign has been inaugurated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, there is still more to happen. The God of the Exodus and of Jesus remains active in history, bringing about the transformation of the world. In the beginning: God. In the end: God. Here and now, in the midst of life: God. These are less statements about time and place than statements of hope and trust. John was writing in a world at least as dangerous and broken as our own, but he proclaimed with joy that God is always with us.

The ’seven spirits’ that are before God’s throne are the Holy Spirit – seven indicating perfection. And part of this threefold God is Jesus, who was God’s faithful witness on earth, testifying to the truth. In Jesus, God came not to fill the armour of a warrior but to walk beside us. He is the firstborn of the dead; he defeated death and now reigns with his Father; because he died and was raised again we believe that we too, in the fullness of time, shall be raised from death. In the meantime, he ‘has made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father’. In Jesus, we have seen what God is about and become his people.

Jesus taught that the reign of God was near, among us, something to be experienced here and now. But there is a ‘not yet’ as well as an ‘already’ about it. We are still the subjects and citizens of human rulers, whether those rulers are as malevolent as the Roman Empire was to John’s community, or as Nazi Germany was to the Confessing Church, or as benevolently indifferent as the Australian government has always been to churches. But we are also simultaneously citizens of the reign of God and nothing can separate us from the Christ who rules with love rather than power. Human powers can use the ultimate sanction, murder, as the Nazis murdered Bonhoeffer. Later in Revelation John will describe seeing those martyred for their faith: ‘a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands’. (Revelation 7:9) But while states may have the power to impose death, nothing, ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’. (Romans 8:38-39)

Jesus calls us to live as citizens of the kingdom that reconciled a Samaritan woman and a Jewish man, a Roman soldier and a Palestinian peasant, the leprous and the clean, the stranger and the resident, Jew and Greek, tax collector and exploited farmer, male and female, slave and free; the new community that broke bread together, shared their goods and their lives, and resisted the Roman Empire’s powers of division. We are to remember that, unlike any earthly kingship bound by geographic borders, Jesus’ kingdom is boundless and everyone is welcome to belong to it, especially the chronically unwelcome ones.

It has been a while since I ended a Reflection with a poem; let us hear a warning from American poet Mary Oliver. The poem is titled ‘Of The Empire’.

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

We are citizens of the kingdom that Jesus rules, not of the Empire. Let us not allow our hearts to be ‘small and hard and full of meanness’. Amen.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, (London: Collins, 1965) p. 203.

[2] Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), p. 25 and throughout.