Christ the King (23.11.14) http://www.liverpoolcatholic.org.uk
English Can Be A Foreign Language … For The English
“It is you who say it,” was Jesus’ answer to Pontius Pilate the Roman Prefect of Judea and Governor of Jerusalem. Pilate had challenged Jesus, “So you are a king then?” after Jesus had said: “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My men would be fighting so that I would not be surrendered to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.” (John 18: 35-36)
That two people speak the same language does not necessarily imply that they can communicate! Pilate’s understanding of the word ‘kingdom’ differed fundamentally from that of Jesus. For Pilate, ‘kingdom’ refers to an earthly, physical, geographically located entity where raw power supressed people’s freedom by coercing them into the service of the state. Pilate’s Governorate of Palestine formed a relatively small, not particularly significant but continuously troublesome, part of the massive Roman Empire.
For Jesus, ‘The Kingdom’ is his heavenly Father’s continuous creation of the whole world, the known universe. It is an expression of God’s active creative love. His heavenly Father has conferred upon his only begotten Son, Jesus, the role of leadership in ‘The Kingdom’. Only Jesus has the power to bring peace and justice to an injured, disturbed world. Pilate and Jesus, despite sharing a language, cannot communicate.
We see this in John 18: 38ff, Jesus attempts to give Pilate an explanation: “Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” Pilate’s response says it all: “What is truth?”
This Sunday, the 34th, marks the end of the Church’ year celebrating Jesus’ Birth, Life, Death and Resurrection. Traditionally it is called ‘The Feast of Christ the King’.
Jesus’ executioners mocked his claim to kingship. They wrapped a rough red cloak around his scourged, bleeding body; drove a crown of long penetrating thorns into his head and put a reed in his hand to represent a royal sceptre. To their political way of thinking, it was better for one man to die than for a nation to perish. Belittlement can be a very abrasive form of defence against what we do not understand. There are parts of today’s world where blatant physical abuse is still prevalent.
The Western world is referred to as ‘developed’. We are repulsed by crude barbarity reminiscent of Roman and other empires. But barbarity continues in subtler, less obvious, forms. Today, the ‘Body of Christ’, the assembly of the Baptised, is scourged and ripped open by, among other things, compromise. The crude lead-tipped whips, used on Jesus, have been replaced. We know from painful experience how the finely milled edge of notepaper can inflict invisible cuts on our skin. Politics, power and money, in the wrong hands, are capable of painfully lacerating human resolve and causing infection that can breach the soul, if left unchecked. The authentic acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty is belittled and largely ignored, other than for State occasions. In the House of Commons the Parliamentary day may begin with prayer but do the actions of the Chamber compliment or nullify the substance of that prayer?
The Church is also bleeding-out through innumerable self-inflicted wounds of unchecked personal infidelity as witnessed by the revelations of clerical and other abuse.
It’s hard to imagine the level of pain inflicted on Jesus when the crown of thorns was pressed into his skull. Yet, today, people freely buy mind distorting and disturbingly addictive substances that have the gloss of social acceptability.
People frequently use the expression ‘touch wood’ without a shred of understanding of its true significance. For many, it’s just an anti-jinx thing that they compound by reaching out to touch a synthetic wood lookalike. They may not know that, in origin, the phrase was a recognised, respected form of verification enabling a person to claim authenticity by affiliating themselves, and what they were saying, to the wood of Jesus’ Cross on Calvary.
Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, North Carolina, in the USA. He wrote recently:
“I have spent a lifetime, for better or worse, as a teacher. No doubt I deserve to be judged, as the letter of James in the New Testament suggests, with greater strictness because I have surely made many mistakes.
But I am also sure that, to the extent I have learned to speak truly, I have done so because I have had to teach others how Christians in the past have spoken. In truth, I have only come recently to understand that what I have been doing for many years has been teaching people how to talk.
I was startled by a remark a friend made to me recently. He is a graduate student in anthropology with whom I was writing a paper, in which we tried to challenge the presumption that “global Christianity” was an adequate description of what it means for the church to be “Catholic.”
He told me that, when his colleagues ask him what it was like to write with me, he has to say it is not easy because, in his words, “Hauerwas only knows how to write Christian.”
To speak and write Christian is an exacting discipline. It has taken the Church centuries to develop habits of speech that help us say no more than needs to be said. But I fear too often those of us charged with responsibility to teach those habits fail to do so in a manner that others can make their own.
For example: Confronted by a sudden and unexpected death of a “loved one,” it is natural to use the phrase, “they have gone to a better place.” It is hard to resist that language, not only because we want to help, but because that language helps them not feel helpless.
But this is not the language of our faith. God is not a “place.” Moreover such language can underwrite the pagan assumption that we possess a soul that is eternal and, thus, fail to gesture our conviction, as Christians, that our life with God on either side of death is a gift.
We belong to the Church that is an alternative to a nation state. That is, our (Roman Catholic) Church is not dependent for its legitimate existence on any nation state. It derives its right to exist directly from God through Jesus Christ, the Son of God made Man.
Therefore, where nation states have co-opted the word “god” as a means of legitimating the violence they call peace, makes it all the more vital that we, Roman Catholics, insist that when we speak of peace we must include the name of “Jesus” rather than just “god.” The peace we proclaim, after all, is unintelligible if Jesus has not been raised from the dead.
Preserving our gift, through the Holy Spirit, of being able to speak Christian means that what we say and write requires constant revision because the dominant speech habits in society also shape our speech and our thinking. We are under constant temptation not to acknowledge what our Baptism requires of us in the use of the Holy Name, “Jesus.”
(Stanley Hauerwas’ most recent book is Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Eerdmans, 2010). In 2001 he was named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine.)
Reading some of Stanley Hauerwas’ published work, for the first time, was, for me, a mind-arresting experience! I found myself reading what he had written several times in an effort to grasp the significance of what he wanted to communicate. In other words, I could read the English he wrote as words on a page, but that was not to understand him. I needed to respond to his invitation to take time to enter into his thinking process by reading his words several times. I also needed to give myself ample space to absorb his thinking and make it my own. It’s just the same with the Gospels!
Hauerwas claims: “To speak and write Christian is an exacting discipline”. Jesus is the preeminent exemplar of speaking Christian and acting in accord with Christian principles. Familiarity, through repeated reading and reflection of the Gospels, with Jesus speech and actions is essential if a Christian is to withstand the tsunami of secular speech and behaviour. Whereas, in past centuries, Christianity was the prevailing ethos in which many lived and thereby absorbed the principles of Christianity as a matter of course, today’s ethos is entirely secular. As Christians we need to practise the self discipline of analysing, at regular intervals, if our speech and writing are holding true to our Baptismal promises. Uniting with other Christians at Sunday Mass is the bedrock of this self discipline but the preservation of our Christian faith and practice requires that we make time for additional reading and reflection of the Gospels.
If Jesus had been allowed to respond to Pilate’s outburst “Truth! What is that”, we can only speculate as to where that conversation might have led.