Good Friday — 19 April 2019
Trinity – 12:15 pm
Isaiah
52:13-53:12 | Psalm 22
| Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9 | John
18:1-19:42
Pilate asked them, "Shall I crucify your King?"
The chief priests answered, "We have no king but the emperor." [John 19:15b]
As you may be aware, especially if you have been wandering
around in the Books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings (and haven’t we all?!), Israel
always had a problem with kings. In the first generations after the
deliverance from slavery in Egypt and the entry into the Promised Land, there
was no central rule among the Israelite tribes.
Sometimes a charismatic leader would arise to repel outside oppression,
but that was not a long-term solution, and eventually there arose a desire for
a single national king. The prophet
Samuel said, “That’s a bad idea – the Lord God is your king.” The people said, “Yeah, but we want one
anyway, like all the other nations,” and so God and Samuel relented and gave
them a king, Saul. Well, that didn’t
work out very well. So they tried again,
this time with David, and that worked out a little better, though probably not
as well as they recalled it in retrospect.
David was succeeded by his son Solomon, who was remembered for being
very wise, for reasons not very well supported by actual history. And then the kingdom split up into two, each
with their own king, a few of whom were pretty good but most of whom were not
(you remember Ahab and his queen, Jezebel.
Lovely couple!). And then first the
Assyrians, and subsequently the Babylonians, put an end to the whole Israelite
King business. Eventually the Jews put
together a kingdom of sorts following the successful revolt of the Maccabees
against the Greek empire, but that really didn’t work out very well, and ended
up with the sort-of-Jewish Herod (“Herod the Great,” at least that’s what it
said on his baseball caps), installed by the Romans as “King of the Jews.” And we know how that worked out.
For people of faith, God is King. Period.
The prophet Samuel tried to tell us three thousand years ago, and we
didn’t believe him then. We still don’t.
Actually, I think Pontius Pilate rather enjoyed the notion
of this Jesus of Nazareth being King of the Jews. (“Shall I crucify your King? You bet – just watch me!”) He had a sign made for Jesus’ cross, and
according to St. John’s Gospel it was in three languages, to make sure that
nobody would miss the point. The high
priests whined to him, “Don’t say that!
Say ‘This guy claimed to be
King of the Jews’!” To which Pilate
replied, “Yeah, well, get over it. This
is what Rome thinks of your ‘King of the Jews’.”
“We have no king but Caesar.” (That’s what the text actually says; it
refers to “the Roman emperor” of course, but Tiberius was a member of ol’ Julius
Caesar’s extended family, the stepson and adopted son of Octavius Caesar
Augustus, and Tiberius still used the family cognomen. But by the end of the century when John’s
Gospel was being written, Julius’ family dynasty was long gone and “Caesar” had
become an imperial title, no longer a familial proper name.)
“We have no king but Caesar.” This wasn’t just about the high priests. It’s about us. We still have a problem with it. The Church has had a problem with it through
most of our history, and we still do today, as you will have noted if you have
read a newspaper or watched the TV lately.
We are confronted with the same choice, the ultimate choice – a choice
we must make, a choice we are making
every day of our lives: Who is to be our
King? Caesar, or Jesus? our own world, or the kingdom of God? Wealth and power, or justice and love? Death, or life?
