November 24, 2024. Texts: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37.
Psychic or psychotic? It’s a legitimate question to ask about Daniel. Are we hearing the disintegration of a mind in terrible distress? Daniel’s visions were set in perilous times, reflecting trials ranging from the Babylonian deportation of Israel, to Greek occupation and subjugation under a particularly horrific ruler.
You could argue for psychotic with the jumble of images in today’s text. The Ancient One (or more properly, Ancient of Days) is an idea borrowed from the Canaanites. A throne with wheels of flaming fire sounds like a UFO sighting. This disjointed raving could be a psychotic episode.
Yet Daniel also foresees a hopeful future. A heavenly court sitting in judgment. A mighty figure at once both angelic and messianic being received by the Ancient of Days. And a truly glorious scene of humans of every language from every place on this whole round earth united in serving under the rule this unearthly being.
It’s safe to say that Daniel inhabits two realms. One is the physical space in which expressions of human power are accepted as normative and necessary. Some even claim authority over nature despite ample evidence to the contrary. The other is the spiritual space in which God’s rule and way is normative in every circumstance and sense.
Daniel bears witness to both realms but knows that one is preferable to the other. God’s rule is without beginning or end. God’s authority reliably renders justice and good for all. Daniel’s message is that people may choose to live under God and defy the isolating claims that the other realm makes on human minds, hearts, and spirits.
We see the collision of these worlds in the gospel today.
Pilate is the voice of human authority speaking from the seat of Roman political power in Jerusalem. He believes in the emperor, in his own good governance, and in the virtue of Rome’s peace imposed upon the people through violence.
He does not know what to believe about Jesus. So Pilate sets out to determine the truth. This is his job as the Roman governor in Judea – to sit in judgement. For Pilate, this moment is a simple matter of determining if Jesus is a threat to Rome or not. On the basis of what he says to Jesus, it would seem that he thinks Jesus is a problem for Jewish leaders, not for Rome.
Jesus upended Pilate’s plan for a simple conversation leading to a verdict. He countered Pilate’s leading question with his own query, an act of resistance and a demand for dignity. Then Jesus led Pilate through a thought exercise about a reign and rule unbounded by Roman borders or authoritarian ideologies. But Pilate could not follow him.
“So you are a king?” If these were not the last hours of Jesus’s life, it would be comedy. See how Pilate unintentionally ends up announcing the rule of Jesus?
And we discover that this is a tragedy – in more ways than one. Pilate is the voice not of authority or certainty, but of a person lost and confused. A snared soul unaware that a better, freer realm exists than the one he knows and to which he has committed his intellect, his energies, his devotion.
And, in the end, Jesus is not a king. It’s an idea that has more basis in early Christian hymnody and church tradition than in scripture. Even Christ the King Sunday was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925.
He wrote a Papal Encyclical responding to Italy’s emergence as a nation from numerous small principalities and kingdoms. A new sense of citizenship was being crafted by political leaders. The Pope himself had been born in Lombardy, once a small independent kingdom, later absorbed into the Austrian Empire.
The energy behind the new state of Italy was increasingly secular, controlling, and nationalistic. It would soon evolve into Fascism. The pope wrote to remind the largely Roman Catholic population that God’s people find their citizenship in God’s reign first. All other allegiances are secondary.
No, Jesus was never a king. The Savior of this world is so much more than that. He came to reveal God’s reign and rule, unbounded by human borders.
Jesus is a safe space in which we may rest whenever things around us go to pieces. Jesus is God’s shepherd whose voice calls out to the lost, and whose rule is steadfast love. Jesus witnesses that God was, is, and ever will be. What other truth can possibly be as sufficient as this? Amen.