The gospels are filled with things that Jesus said that we sometimes wish he had never said. About taking up the cross and following him. About the difficulties of being concerned about money and success. About how treatment of the poor is how we are measured as Christians. All those difficult phrases that stay with us, and bother us, and help us understand him better, difficult as they are.
But today, on this feast of Christ the King, in the gospel we hear something that I wonder if Jesus himself regrets having said. Not because it isn’t true, but because it has long been so easy to misinterpret him, and by misinterpreting him, to misinterpret ourselves. That sentence he might like to have back to try again is that famous reply to Pilate: “My kingdom is not from this world.”
The whole concept of Jesus being a King is a troubling one in the gospel. Troubling, especially, for Jesus himself. For it’s as if Jesus does not like the title — more than any other title that people use about him, he’s worried that people will misunderstand this one.
It’s obvious what extreme he is avoiding by saying, “My kingdom is not from this world.” He is no political leader like Pilate, carefully weighing what is going to keep him in power, cause the least trouble. Jesus is not there to lead a revolution, to restore the kingdom of Israel. He takes pains to distance himself from any of these suggestions, indeed he nearly takes flight several times in the gospels when it seems as if a crowd is going to try to lift him on their shoulders and insist that the Jewish people had finally found their leader, their king to succeed King David, King Solomon.
That’s the last thing that Jesus wanted, even though he was the descendant and true successor to David, and it’s why in this little sparring match with Pilate, he says that his kingdom is “not from this world.” He wants no confusion of political kingdoms with the kingdom of God.
But what we sometimes imagine, since Jesus took such pains to make this distinction, is that because the kingdom is not political, not from this world, that it is other-worldly, belonging to some other time and place, that Jesus is putting the kingdom off to some future time when we’ll really see things start to happen. Today is the end of the church year, a time when we traditionally try to understand something about the future, our future. And there is a danger if we regard the future as something that is far off, if we take divine justice and divine love and push them off as something we have no hope of now, no expectation of now. We start thinking that the real kingdom isn’t coming to this world at all, that there is some other world in which we’ll see God’s kingdom but not this one.
We hear readings like that today from the Book of Daniel, these night visions about the Ancient of Days, sitting in judgment, as a king, thrones being set in place, and it seems to us like a vision, but a vision of the future, the distant future, perhaps the comfortably distant future. We see this judgment and liberation as something that won’t be resolved right now in our lifetimes, and certainly not by us.
We live, in fact, as though we don’t really expect to see much now, we live as people who have put a great deal too much off to the future. We’ve lowered our sense of God’s kingdom in the present, lowered our expectations, of God, and the world, and ourselves. We don’t really believe that there’s going to be that much more justice than we see now, that the lot of the poor in our cities will get that much better, that starvation will be alleviated, that prisoners will find freedom. God’s kingdom, after all, isn’t of this world. We shouldn’t expect a lot here, we think.
In one sense, we’re right to leave God in charge of the ultimate resolution of all the injustices of this world. But we’re wrong if we postpone our expectations until the future. Christ is King, and King now. The first words of his public ministry were, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” Not in the future, somewhere else, but now. It also means that it is a kingdom where we’re not here waiting for a leader to come down and rescue us and resolve our waiting. That has already happened. Those visions of justice for the poor and the end of worldly powers are visions of now, not some other time. Visions that are truly happening? Not for those who don’t live in expectation of seeing that kingdom here, and now.
In a few minutes, in the first words of the eucharistic prayer for today, we’re going to hear that kingdom described once again as “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.” Some other time, or now?