In
my home church they are celebrating Eternity Sunday, similar to All Saints Day
a few weeks ago here at GBC. Here it is “Christ the King Sunday”. We read three
passages of Scripture. Our
Old Testament passage from 2 Samuel 23 gives David’s last words as king, as his
son Solomon waited to assume the throne. David reminds us that righteous rule
leads to joy and evil rule leads to destruction. “He that ruleth over men must
be just, ruling in the fear of God!”
He
continues, “Is not my house like this with God? For he has made with me an
everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secure.” In Psalm One, the
psalmist contrasts the fate of the righteous with the fate of the unrighteous:
The righteous are like a tree planted by rivers of water, which bears fruit in
every season and prospers in every circumstance; the unrighteous are “like the
chaff that the wind drives away.” We have the same kind of contrast here. David
and his house are the righteous; those who would fight against him are the
unrighteous. David and his house will live forever; the unrighteous will be
consumed and vanish.
The
second passage, from Revelation 1, turns to another king, the King of the
Universe (Melech Ha Olam). John the Revelator greets the seven churches of Asia
[representing the whole church in Asia – and by extension representing the
whole church throughout space and time], wishing them grace and peace from
“Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler
of the kings of the earth.” We call Jesus “King of kings and Lord of lords.”
Jesus is the ruler of all from eternity to eternity. Jesus has loved us and set
us free from the power of sin to be God’s people, a kingdom of priests serving
God the Father.
This
greeting comes with the reminder that Jesus will return in power and great
glory: “Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those
who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.”
From this verse we get the wonderful Advent hymn,
Lo He comes with clouds descending, once the Lamb for
sinners slain.
Thousand, thousand saints attending swell the triumph of
his train.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! God appears on earth to reign.
Every eye shall now behold him, robed in awesome majesty.
Those who set at naught and scorned him, pierced and nailed
him to the tree
Deeply wailing, deeply wailing shall the true Messiah see.
We
see David the king, dying and ending his life on earth. And we see Jesus the
eternal king, coming to bring in the ultimate reign of God. Which brings us to
the gospel reading.
In
John 18, Jesus is on trial before Pilate. Jesus has appeared before the High
priest, and clearly the Jewish leaders want him executed. They have no
authority to condemn him to death, so they send him to Pilate. Pilate tries to
hand Jesus back, but the Jewish leaders make it clear they want Jesus dead –
and Pilate is the only one who can pass the death sentence. For this sentence,
Pilate needs more than a religious disagreement, so he explores the possibility
of political insurrection: “Then Pilate entered the headquarters again,
summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’” Jesus first
deflects the question and then observes that his reign is with God, not on this
earth. Pilate persists, “So you are a king?” Jesus replies: “You say that I am
a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to
the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
There
is more going on here than we can consider – especially that truth is both propositional
and relational. For this morning, we note that John’s gospel links together
David’s last words in 2 Samuel and John’s words in Revelation. David is more
right than he knows: His line will rule forever, but his line rules through the
son of God, Jesus. Jesus is the King of the Jews from the line of David. Jesus
is the eternal king, Melech Ha Olam. Jesus is the ruler of the universe, sent
by God to humankind. The trial before Pilate reminds us that Jesus is the link
between the earthly rule of David and the eternal rule of David’s Son.
Christ the King, the
King of the Universe
What
does it mean to acknowledge the reign of Jesus in our lives and in our world?
At one level, we are saying clearly that you and I are not the ruler of the
world. We are not even the ruler of our own lives. This is a simple truth, but
it is one we forget in our individualistic culture. We want to rule ourselves,
and we find that instead we must give up our very selves to be part of God’s
world.
In
his last novel, C.S. Lewis retells an old Greek myth, the story of Psyche, who
was married to a God whose face she was not allowed to see. The Greek version
is interesting and provocative, but Lewis turns it around and tells the story
instead from the viewpoint of Psyche’s sister, Orual, who Psyche left behind
when she married the God. It is in many ways the deepest and most complex of
Lewis’ books, but there is one simple line in it that speaks also to us. Orual
is nearing the end of her life, bitter against the world, and bitter against
God, when she hears a voice, God’s voice: “Die before you die. There is no
chance after.”
Giving
up the false idea that we can rule our lives is hard. It is indeed a death. It
is also the death that everyone of us must die if we would live with God. There
is room for only one ruler in your life and mine. Either I am in charge of my
life, or God is. It can’t be both.
This
truth is a reminder of our conversion. When we come to baptism, we give our
testimony, we tell our story of encountering God. Each of us has a different
story, but the point of each story is the same. When I hear the stories, I want
to know if the candidate submits to Jesus the King. If Jesus is Lord of your
life, you’re a good candidate! If you submit to God’s control in all that you
say and do, then you have died in this life and need not fear “the second
death”.
Back to David’s Last
Words
At
another level, we remind ourselves that justice and peace in our world are only
partly a matter of having and following good laws (important though they are);
it is more a matter of right relationship with the God from whom justice and
order come. There is an eternal reality of right-ness that we can know only in
relationship with the Creator who made us. To consider this truth, we take a
journey into the nature of the reality of God’s moral law – what we might call
(following C.S. Lewis) the Dao (see The
Abolition of Man.)
I was trained as a high
school teacher in the United States – I never became a HS teacher there, but I
remember an important part of my training. One part of that training called
“values clarification”. A google search showed me that values clarification
remains an important part of training in some areas of education. I found a
quote from a course at Weber State University (Ogden, Utah):
Think
about the people who we tend to respect the most in our culture. They are
usually those who have clearly defined values and live by them. Mahatma Gandhi
was a perfect example of a person who was very clear about what was most
important to him. Despite going up against impossible odds, living according to
his highest values ultimately brought about the freeing of an entire nation.
Gandhi was very clear about his values. He knew that his choices and behavior
followed them. He was driven by his values instead of being driven by his
emotions or the circumstances in his environment.
There is much in this
movement that is admirable. It is good to clarify what we value most and to
live on the basis of those values. But there is a faulty assumption within the
movement, which “Christ the King” challenges. That assumption is that I can
choose the values that fit best with me and what I like, regardless of how
those values fit with the world around me.
Here is how I see the
universe. The reality in which we live is governed by physical laws. If you
throw a cup into the air, it will fall to the ground – illustrating the law of
gravity as it falls and other physical laws as it breaks. [Physics is not my
strong suit! I can’t tell you what laws are involved, but I know that it shows
us the reality of the physical world.] If you break the physical laws of the
universe, you will suffer the consequences. If we decide to pump greenhouse
gasses into the atmosphere, our climate will become more erratic and less the
way God made it.
There are also moral laws
in the universe, placed there by God in creating the world. Nobody knows those
laws perfectly, except God (any more than anyone understands all of the
physical laws perfectly). Everyone knows something about God’s reality – both
because God has planted God’s reality in our hearts and because God has planted
God’s reality in cultures.
Some people assume that “values
clarification” means there are no moral absolutes. Instead, they think, every
one of us makes up our own rules or values. In place of moral absolutes, they
have an absolute relativism. Now relativism is good in its place. Every culture
sees a different part of God’s full reality. Each person sees something
different in God’s full reality. We need all of our insights in order to
understand better what it means to say that Christ is King. We read Scripture
together; we praise God together; we bring our insights and differences of
understanding and interpretation together. In dialogue and submission we
discover what God wants us to do and how God wants us to live.
David reminds us that the rulers
of this earth “must be just”; submission to God shows us what that justice
looks like. The Prime Minister of Canada doesn’t decide what is right. The
President of the United States doesn’t decide what is right. Neither do you or
I. Not even your pastor can do this! We find it together as we read Scripture,
listen to God’s Spirit within us, and seek God’s wisdom for our lives today.
The Dao
I teach a course in world
religions, and I observe that different regions have widely differing
explanations of reality. At the same time, the moral and ethical principles of
life (the moral law) are remarkably consistent across time and space.
In an appendix to The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
collected a set of sayings from various religions and cultures – from the
ancient Egyptian to the Babylonian, from the Analects of Confucius to the
Torah, from Buddhist and Hindu sayings to the Christian Scriptures. Such values
as truth-telling and acting considerately of other people appear to be
universal. Lewis called these “the Tao” (using the spelling current in his
day); I am using the more modern spelling of “Dao” – the way of God, the order
or dharma of God, the Torah, the Law of Love that Jesus taught. We find this
moral law in many cultures and across the centuries.
As we noted earlier,
teachers in the USA during the 1970s and 1980s promoted “values clarification”
– trying to help young people discover their own values without reference to
the larger world of values. They discovered that young people grew up without the
values that fit the reality of God’s creation. In 1987, Michael Josephson
founded the Josephson Institute, which has as its mission, “To improve the
ethical quality of society by changing personal and organizational decision
making and behavior.” In 1992, the institute brought together youth leaders and
educators and asked them what values they thought we should teach young people.
The result was the Character Counts program.
I met “Character Counts” in
our sons’ schools in Indiana, in the 1990s. There are six pillars of character:
Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship.
Think of them in Christian terms:
·
It is good to
tell the truth and to keep your word. Lying is bad.
·
It is good to
treat others with respect. Bullying and hurting others is bad.
And so on. We could find
Scriptures that address all of these. This is what I mean by God’s reign – the
moral law of the universe that fits the way God made us.
You might wonder if I am
saying that it doesn’t matter who you worship so long as you follow the Way of
God, the moral law of the universe. It is no surprise that God’s Law is found
in all religions and cultures, but we see it most clearly in the person of
Jesus Christ. We find echoes of God’s voice everywhere. It would be odd if we
didn’t. But we see God most clearly when we embrace Christ as King, and we hear
God most clearly when we embrace Christ as King, and we can follow God best
when we embrace Christ as King.
Conclusion
I have a friend who lived a
dissolute life before his conversion. I don’t know how many children he has
scattered around the world. I wonder if even he knows. By his own testimony, he
has lived a very different life since he met Christ, and one of his many sons
has told us the same thing. When Jesus became my friend’s Saviour, he also
became his Lord, and Christ the King gave him a new way to live. We celebrate
Christ the King this Sunday best when we follow him as Lord in all that we
think and say and do.
Grace Bible Church
2 Samuel 23: 1-7
Revelation 1: 4b-8
John 18:33-37
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