🦁 Proper 29 👑
Readings: 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 93; John 18:33-37. Christ “the King”
From the TRNG Room;
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to First Formation. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from 2 Samuel 23, Psalm 93, and John 18. And there's a lot I want to say, but I'm going to try and keep it as clear and concise as possible. The Christ the King Sunday is always the last Sunday in ordinary time before we start a new liturgical year with Advent.
I've always had a problem with Christ the King Sunday, and a lot of people have a problem with Christ the King Sunday because of our baggage with kings, with monarchy, and not just our baggage as Americans, we threw off monarchy, but also as Christians, as if we are grafted onto the vine of Judaism as expressed in Torah and the prophets, which is to say, the law and the prophets, which is to say, Jesus's scripture we haven't taken it.
done the work, I don't think, to disentangle monarchy from our faith and in scripture. And you'll notice that I, in the reading from the gospel in John, I used the Messiah's anglicized Hebrew name, which is Joshua. When I say that, I mean, before the fourth century when Latin was made the, I won't say the official language, but before the Vulgate.
The, in the Greek, there is no difference between the name that the angel Gabriel is told to give Mary, or to give the messiah, Gabriel tells Mary to give the messiah, her son. There's no difference between that name and the name of the sixth book of the Bible, the first book of the prophets in the Hebrew Tanakh, which is the ordering the Jewish ordering of the Old Testament, what we Christians call the Old Testament.
And So Joshua Yehoshua is the same name, but what Jerome did, he wanted to distinguish the Messiah Joshua from the other Joshuas. The first one, the most known one, is the military commander in the sixth book of the Bible, Joshua, the military commander and Moses former assistant. But then there's another Joshua the high priest who comes home from exile and with the governor, you could even say the puppet governor, Zerubbabel, under the Persian.
Cyrus, the Persian to be specific, who is called an anointed or God's anointed in Isaiah and other places. The Joshua, the high priest was Joshua, son of Jehoshadak. Jehoshadak did not perform the priestly duties because they were in exile. There was no temple. And so Joshua is the one who built the second temple.
It was very modest compared to the third temple, which was Herod's. And I say all this because in Torah, in the first five books of the Bible, we get a political theology that directly confronts monarchic polity, which is to say a pyramid type polity with one ruler at the top, an aristocracy in between the king and the peasants, right?
Pyramid, it's pretty stable. But in Tor we get a bunch of hints. I'm not going to go into them right now. I'm just going to make the claim that they're there. And Joshua, the Messiah one of the things that he, or what he comes to do is to save the people from their sins. And in that nomenclature, in that language, we hear an echo of Samson.
whose mother, who remains unnamed, is told, you will bear a son, just like Miriam, or Mary, was told by the angel Gabriel, who would, who will come to save Israel from the hands of the Philistines. And Joshua the Messiah, or Joshua the Christ, comes in, in, redemption of Samson's role as a kind of a crappy judge.
The Messiah is the perfect judge. The three political functions within Torah are not prophet, priest, and king, but prophet, priest, and judge. The first political leaders was Deborah, a woman, and Barak with her overthrew Sisera, right? And then we go into Gideon, who is a judge, and Samson later.
And these judges are non hereditary. They're charismatic figures that free Israel from oppression for a amount of time. And then the priests are a satire of the worldly understanding of kings. High priesthood is hereditary. It's one person just like monarchy is. In the Israelite imagination, the Hebrew imagination, the king doesn't get any property.
The Levitical tribes do not get any territory, only cities. And they don't, The, the soft robes and palaces that kings get. Kings are a foreign concept in Israel. And it's in second, it's in the books of Samuel where we hear that kings for Israel grew out of a dissatisfaction with God.
The people rejected God and asked for a king. They already had judges. That's what God's intent was judges, and we screwed it up. So kings are a foreign concept. But Messiah, the anointed one, is like a judge in that it is not hereditary. It's hard to pin down, these charismatic figures that crop up and become saviors of the people, kinsmen redeemers of the people.
And so I have a problem with the language of kingdom and King and crown because I think we're missing the point when we read David as the exemplar because he's king. David represents, in a Hebraic imagination, if you want a king, David is the absolute best you can hope for. Saul, everybody knows he sucks.
Solomon, nobody really knows or talks about him sucking so much, but who was the last united king? Who had the responsibility to Govern in such a way to keep the tribes united, who was the one that built the temple opulently in contradiction to the tabernacle, which had been in Shiloh before. Solomon's father brought it into his own territory, Judah's territory.
And so there's a lot going on under the surface when our political theology is just being borrowed from the world. I'll say that again. We miss a lot of what the Bible has to offer when we only bring our own lens to it. And that includes political theology. So the final Sunday, the final proper before ordinary time I think is one redeeming quality is that it reminds us that kings come last.
If you think you're going to be first in the world, you'll be last into the reign of God. If you are satisfied in being last in the world, you will probably enter before most of your peers. And the king the irony in the gospel reading is that Jesus is the king of the Jews. And this is what God does to kings.
It happens throughout the Old Testament. Israel, in the wilderness and in the period of Judges, constantly finds herself confronting kings who, whose grasp on power and power. is so tenuous that the first hint of the status quo being rocked, they send spies to attack Israel in the wilderness. Sihon and Og are great examples.
God knocks kings down from their throne. But Israel, when Israel wants a king, God says, okay. And he gives them an example of the best and the worst. There can be David who screws up and fesses up to it. Who is burdened with his responsibility and we see it in the Psalms and the stories about him. Or you can have a shitty king like Saul who is afraid and insecure and wants power.
We see this in the story of Gideon. He is tempted. He is, the people come to him and say, You rule over us. And Gideon says, no, only God shall rule over you. And then it's Gideon's son, Absalom, or I'm sorry, Abimelech, who becomes the first king of Israel in Judges 9. It's this horrible story. And so what God is doing with kings is knocking them down.
And if there's a redemptive quality in Christ the King Sunday, it's that. It's this reminder right in front of your face. of what God does to kings and queens who think that their power comes from God and therefore they can do whatever they want. Power is like mana. If you take too much of it, it will spoil.
People who take too much power can be spoiled. It's interesting how that works even in English today. And so we have to do a better job of getting through our own context to meet the God of Israel, the God of the Hebrew people, where they are. Amen. God also challenges our notions of singularity and plurality, right?
Israel is both an entire people as well as one individual, Jacob. And Jacob takes a new name, those who wrestle with God. And so Christ the King Sunday is not about remembering kings, it's about mourning them. It's about looking them in the eye and say, your time has come. And it's at the end.
