Daniel 7:13-14
Psalm 93:1-5
Revelation 1:5-8
John 18:33-37

What Is God's Kingship?

Are you a king? the Emperor's viceroy demanded.

The first-century was about kingship. Walking about the Holy Land today, one finds everywhere a Roman world with its gleaming, white buildings, wide market streets and agoras, and, most imposing of all, its soaring temples .... now in ruins today, of course. At Caesarea, one of the ancient world's greatest harbors — as it brought the riches of the East to waiting merchant vessels bound for Rome — one could see the towering Temple of Roma from twenty miles out at sea. Why? Because Caesarea was the gateway to the East, a Roman city that declared the East also to be Roman and, therefore, Caesar's. When Jesus asked His disciples, "Who do you say that I Am?" they gazed upon the Master's face and just behind Him would have seen a Temple built to the Emperor-god, Augustus Caesar. This was the way of the whole world at that time: one culture: Roman, one language: Greek, one king: Caesar. Kingship was the atmosphere of this world. Wherever you went, the subject was pressed upon you, from which there was no escape.

"Are you a king?" Pontius Pilate demanded. And He replied,

If Jesus' kingship is not of this world, then, where is it? What is it? What is its nature and purpose? Its sovereignty and authority?

Let us pause here, for He is about to answer these questions, and His answer touches upon the purpose of our lives.

Jesus underlines this in Pilate's case. For he is a procurator (or prefect .... the matter continues to be debated) of a minor province. He is, therefore, the voice of the Emperor Tiberius. Emperors, kings, and governors must be very careful about what they say. For their high authority is such that the words they speak in an official forum constitute a speech act. That is, the reality of the thing lies in the saying of it. In our own time, the words of a judge in a court of last appeal constitute a speech act: "The court finds you guilty." The quality of guiltiness lies entirely in that sentence — one's world, one's identity, one's worldly estate, one's future, perhaps for a lifetime, all must conform to these five words.

Later, when Pilate orders that a sign be posted in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin stating that Jesus is "King of the Jews," he is contradicted by Temple authorities. And he replies, "What I have written, I have written." A speech act: "It is so. It cannot be altered."

As Jesus stands before Pilate on the pavement where the religious lifeworld and universal saeculum, the Roman Empire, intersect, at stake is the nature of truth — what is so, and what is not so.

When we were children, the matter of truth seemed inconsequential. We took it for granted that someone somewhere must know the real truth about each and every thing. But as we matured and became educated, we learned that things are not so simple. Looking upon the world around us today, we realize that the truth about anything is never a settled or stable thing. Indeed, a worldwide home-schooling movement is propelled by the simple fact that truth is up for grabs. And Pilate's question, "Quid est veritas?" (John 18:38), "What is truth, after all?" seems more relevant now than ever. For this has become the master question of our time.

At no period in human history have people challenged things as basic as their gender or the nature of marriage or even whether there is such a thing as morality. I heard an editor of Scientific American protest during an NPR interview, "Morality?! Morality is the artifact of a now-bygone superstitious period of human history." And recently I saw an article from The Atlantic Monthly (January, 2013) entitled "America Has an Incest Problem":

In the present era, claims to truth, even the most basic assertions of right and wrong, are challenged in the very places that once were entrusted to teach and protect truth. Which civilization in history, for example, has challenged their youngest school children to identify their "inner gender" or their same-sex attractions (children who have not reached puberty!) as we do in our public elementary schools? Just this past week the New York Times carried the headline, "Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say" (NYT, Oct. 22, 2018). But what this article does not mention is that nearly all people do conform to the long-held truth that chromosomes, and consequently anatomy, determine "maleness" and "femaleness," and that this is not up for grabs. In what continues to be a God-given miracle, we can reliably draw a line on the earth, and one side half will be boys and on the other side half will be girls. And try as they might, people have not been able to specify gender when they have children.

In compassion, we do see that a tiny, fractional minority do not conform so clearly along these lines. Such people struggle as all do who who find themselves outside the bounds of the normal. No one likes to be the outlier, remote from the norms of the group. And we are called to love and care for and understand these few people. But in the forum where truth is decided, we must also be clear that a tiny minority cannot propose to be the new norm. To frame a general rule on the basis of its tiniest exception turns the whole enterprise of truth on its head. And to enshrine the exception in the law is a form of social madness. Yes, the majority is always called to be compassionate, patient, and kind and especially toward those saddled with abnormality or mutation. But it is not kind to transform the public square into the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and then to raise our children in the midst of it.

Did you know that in the natural world, What is mostly true is what is true. In the statement just made concerning the miracle of a world constantly replenished as half-male and half-female babies is mostly true. The numbers constantly hover around 50% on each side — say 49.5% and 50.5% — but they rarely fall exactly at 50-50. That is why everyone who studies the living world, whether, biology, psychology, or ornamental horticulture, must learn about bell curves and take courses in statistics ... because what is mostly is what is true. No thing in the natural world is black or white absolutely .... not even black or white. The world is not on or off, this way or that way. Truth in the natural world is decided by the majority of cases, and it is never the case that a few outliers overturn the truth.

There are always outliers. On a scatter-plot of data, these are the little dots way off the right and to the left of the bell curve. But to decide that outliers can become the general rule is literally to turn the world of knowledge and truth upside down. Yet, this is our inclination. During recent revelations concerning child sexual abuse among Roman priests, people are inclined to propose a defense by pointing to a few outliers. And then we behave as if the whole catastrophe has been contradicted. But the facts remain:

How did we get to this point in American civilization? When did we decide that the minority view must be taught as the general rule, and that the laws must be changed to enshrine the exception? It turns out that this is not a mystery. The United States was designed to magnify the individual point of view over and above the general opinion. The U.S. was founded to oppose tyranny: first the tyranny of kings and princes, but, after the democracy was founded, the tyranny of the majority. This is an American ideal. Our Constitution's cornerstone, called the Bill of Rights, establishes individual rights first. Everything gets worked out from there. This functioned pretty well for two centuries. But recently a wedge has been driven into this cornerstone: and that is the wedge that debates the existence of morality. Morality is openly debated! "You have your truth, and I have mine." And the two great commandments of our age are "Live and let live" and "Don't judge me" — a world where nothing is discerned, and nothing ever comes to convergence. (And, by the way, we are not speaking of "Judge not" from the Sermon on the Mount, which Jesus glosses at Matthew 5:25. He does not mean "do not discern" or "do not assess meaning," which He constantly enjoins upon us.)

Once human desire has supplanted morality, you have the result that we have today: everything is sacrificed on the altar of the great god, sexuality, to the gods of homosexuality, transexuality, and of pervasive illicit sexuality, including free and easy access to porn. Woe unto you if you do not bow before these gods! On this altar, the U.S. has swiftly sacrificed its children, holy marriage, and the general welfare.

But if the Bill of Rights enshrines individual truth claims over those of the majority, and if our Constitution is holy, should we not, then, just go along? Should we not get in line with the majority who say, you know, morality is "judgmental"? Is this what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they framed the Constitution? Here are the words of two Founding Father who, by the way, were not known for their religious zeal:

The Sacred Scriptures teach us an equation. God alone is good (Mk 10:18). God is truth (John 14:6).

As we have just considered, God reveals truth throughout the book of nature ... but only in its fullness. Only in its fullness do we understand its truth. He has written His lessons upon our world and upon our hearts before He etched them in stone on Sinai. But we must mature and take in that fullness to see the fullness of truth — fullness beholding fullness, from depths to depths (the Psalmist writes). The earliest Greek Fathers understood this and explained the Advent of Christ and the atonement in terms of attaining to maturity and fullness:

"God is One," announces the Shema, the greatest prayer of Judaism and Christianity: Hear, O hear, Israel, the Lord thy God is One. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul ...." God is One. He is Unity, a unity of all things. Truth is stamped onto the world He created if we behold it in its abundance. Where we behold "facts" they are clustered in unity. Do you know that the bell curve works everywhere in nature? Yes, in a broken world, there are outliers, mutations, cells and groups of cells that have suffered biological misfortunes. When this happens to people, only kindness, compassion, and godly patience will do. For the Shema also enjoins us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Nonetheless, compassion does not call us to idolize the mutation or magnify it until it becomes a cultural ideal, seen everywhere: on Facebook, on television, in movies, on billboards until (of course) our children emulate it.

At Pilate's interview with the King of the Universe, he stood before the One Who made all things, the Eternal Word, which is God's instrument of Creation. In Him all things cohere and find their meaning. As we read today in Revelation, He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the One Who was and Who is to come (Rev. 1:8). He is all fullness and abundance. He is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life." He is life, which is "the light [that] shineth in the darkness" (John 1:5). We say that to attain maturity is to experience wholeness — all we were meant to be from our beginnings in the mind of God to the fullness of our own growth. And as truth is equated to good, so wholeness is equated to wholesomeness.

Coming to full growth, we are able to see God. This is the point of the atonement: abundance proceeding from Abundance understood by abundance, from depths to depths. And only then can we see Him truly. All who attain to maturity, this wholesomeness, this fullness, hear His voice:

The ancient world and our own is about kingship, about sovereignty, about authority. There is no escaping it. The geography of truth reaches beyond Caesarea, beyond the Far East, and beyond the stretches of vain imaginings. He will come again to judge both the quick and dead. And of His Kingdom there will be no end.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.