Sermon: Christ the King, John 18:33-37

November 24, 2024
Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church
Pastor Jonathan Linman

The apocalyptic seer, Daniel, had a vision in the night: “I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One before whom he was presented. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his reign is one that shall never be destroyed.” (Daniel 7:13b-14)

And the apocalyptic writer of the Book of Revelation likewise offers up worshipful visionary poetry: “To Jesus Christ be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Look! He is coming with the clouds… So it is to be. Amen” (cf. Revelation 1:6b-7)

On this last Sunday after Pentecost, the last Sunday of the church year, Christ the King, we, of course, see Jesus Christ as the object of Daniel’s vision. And Christ is the focus of attention of the book of Revelation as well.

Christ the King. Dominion. Glory. Everlasting Kingship. Over all peoples, nations, and languages. And the specter of Christ’s coming again up in the clouds. All of these key words and phrases in today’s passages conjure up images in the popular imagination perhaps in keeping with Marvel Comics movies about superheroes. And we perhaps picture in our minds the conquering fights and loud explosions and destruction accompanied by extremely violent special effects. That’s the popular imagination’s vision of glory and dominion.

Dominion is a word rooted in the Latin, Dominus, which means Lord. But dominion can easily become domination. Kingship can easily become absolute power to lord it over all peoples, nations, and languages. And there are no term limits on such a king. No checks and balances. Serving such a king can easily become servitude. And glory is so often reduced to the spectacular and over the top. Big. Bold. Out there. Up there.

And it can be frightening as the author of Revelation suggests: “every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him.” (Revelation 18:7b)

All of these images and phrases informed by the popular imagination are worldly suppositions. And worldly ways of glory and dominion and kingship have, to be sure, been the norm for virtually all of human history. 

And the worldly ways of glory and dominion and kingship have caused untold suffering through millennia of our generations as a species.

But when Jesus, our Lord, our sovereign, was interrogated by a ruler very much in the worldly vein, Pilate, the Roman governor, Jesus replied: “My kingdom does not belong to this world.” That is to say, the dominion, the kingdom, that Jesus proclaims and embodies, does not operate according to the world’s notions of kingship and glory and dominion. 

If Jesus were a worldly king, the reaction to his arrest and trial would have been entirely different. As Jesus said to Pilate, “If my kingdom belonged to this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the… authorities. But as it is, my kingdom,” Jesus said, “is not from here.” (John 18:36)

So, if Jesus is not a king in the way we humans expect, what kind of king, what kind of ruler, is Jesus? 

To answer this, we need to set aside our popular imaginations and listen carefully to Jesus’ own words as recorded in John’s gospel. Jesus was evasive when Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus replied, “You say that I am a king,” likely calling attention to the failure of Pilate’s imagination to envision anything but the kind of violent, oppressive rule of the Roman empire. Jesus goes on, and here are the crucial words for our purposes today: “For this I was born,” Jesus said, “and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” 

Jesus’ kingship, glory, and lordship are all about those simple words: “to testify to the truth.” On first glance, that doesn’t sound very flashy or spectacular or even very powerful….

Testify means to bear witness, and the biblical Greek for witness is the root word for “martyr.” And Jesus was a martyr for telling the truth. He was executed on the cross for his truth-telling, a radical departure from worldly views of kingship. In short, in the language of our day, and in the eyes of the world, Jesus was a loser for dying on the cross.

And what is the truth about which Jesus testified and for which he was martyred? God’s truth, the truth about God, that God is all about love, grace, compassion, forgiveness, peace, and merciful justice and more. These are the divine truths sourced in sacred, heavenly realms in contrast with the falsehoods of the ways of the world: domination, hatred, mercilessness, retribution, vengeance, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. 

By telling divine truth, Jesus exposed the idolatry and lies of worldly ways. For the ways of the world trust in things and make idols of the habits of this world at the expense of trusting in and pledging our allegiance to the loving ways of God.

And telling these truths and living these truths got Jesus killed, martyred, which his trial in Pilate’s headquarters described in today’s gospel reading paves the way for.

Thus, the cross becomes Christ’s kingly throne. The cross reveals Christ’s paradoxical glory, his unexpected lordship, his monarchial rule that is contrary to worldly business as usual. And then Christ’s tomb rendered empty by God raising Jesus from the dead opens the floodgates to eternal life, cementing in place Christ’s everlasting reign and lordship. All of this turns worldly ways upside down and on their head. And that’s what Jesus means when he says that his kingdom, his dominion, is not from this world and its ways and logic. 

What becomes of us under the heavenly dominion of Christ? In short, this: by our baptism into Christ, we become Christ’s own people, his loyal subjects, ones who listen to his commands – “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” Jesus says. And baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection makes us Christ’s priestly people, as suggested in today’s reading from Revelation: [The One] “who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood…. made us a dominion, priests serving [our] God and Father.”

And Christ feeds us with his very kingly self at this royal banquet of the Eucharist as we become what we eat, again, a priestly people to serve our eternal Lord. 

By our confession of our faith, and by our trust in Christ, we pledge obedience and ultimate loyalty to the exclusive claims and reign of Christ as Lord. Which is to say, we do not pledge allegiance in any ultimate way to the rulers of this world. We have a singular sovereign, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Our obedience to Christ has implications for how we live our lives in our day-to-day circumstances in the modern world. In the early 1930’s in Germany when Nazism was on the rise and was putting pressure on the church to conform to Nazi idolatries, a small group of protestant Christians convened to make a public statement called the Barmen Declaration, which we’ll take a look at during our coming midweek Advent series, in which they declared their sole allegiance to Christ and not to German Nationalism in the form of the Nazi regime. In coming months and years, we may be called upon to make similar statements of our ultimate allegiance to Christ here in resistance to Christian Nationalism in the United States. 

So, that’s on the more global scene. Our pledge of allegiance to God in Christ also has implications for the stewardship of our lives, how we spend our time, energies and money. 

That’s in clear focus today when we’re asking you for your statements of intent to support the church in 2025, which ultimately is an expression of your commitment to Christ. Your generosity in giving reveals your allegiance to Christ and the work of his kingdom which is entrusted to us as church.

Then, too, our obedience to Christ the King, our Sovereign, informs the work we do in the world in showing mercy to the least of the members of the human family in whom we see the face of Christ. And our commitment to Christ also commits us to seeking God’s merciful justice for all people and all of creation in Jesus’ name. 

You get the point. And our clear commitments to Christ and his ways of peace and love and mercy and compassion and humility, of course, become healing balm in our divided and dangerous nation and world when we make our own testimony in words and deeds to the truth of Christ our Lord, our sovereign, our king. 

It may seem as though worldly powers and principalities are winning the day and are getting all of the attention and idolatrous pledges of allegiance, but we persist in quiet confidence that Jesus Christ, the very Word of God’s truth, will indeed have the last word, and that Christ’s reign will be eternal. To that truth, we offer our witness, our allegiance, and for some, maybe, even martyrdom.

Christ, our sovereign, Christ our King, Christ our Lord, have mercy on us. Amen.