Proper 29B: The Reign of Christ. John 18:33-37, a reading from Matthew Fox
Rev. Dr. Ann Bolson
It has been a challenging week as I entertained ideas on how best to discuss what has been known for centuries as “Christ the King” Sunday, or more recently “The Reign of Christ” Sunday. How does a modern American speak of the royalty of Christ? We have no official royalty in this nation. At times, I think the royalty are people like Tom Cruise and his new wife Katie. They awaken in us, for all the wrong reasons, the desire within ourselves to connect to the notion of royalty.
One of the places this search for royalty took me in the past week was right to our very own hymnal. I studied the words of all the hymns listed in the section “the reign of Christ.” And, not surprisingly, I came up with evidence for two very different paradigms of royalty. The first and most prominent were the hymns that extolled the virtues of “the church triumphal” with Jesus as the one who is “mighty in battle.” Our opening hymn was an example of this. Jesus here is sovereign, all victorious and glorious. God rules from on high, sits on a throne and represents all wisdom and might.
I sat for quite a while with this image, and I asked myself why people cherished it so highly. To me, it seemed like a child on the playground saying to his classmates, “My dad can whip your dad.” I saw the need of those who feel fearful to invoke a protector in their lives. I came to understand, through a laborious reading of Michael Lerner’s book The Left Hand of God, that this image is indeed born of fear, which seems to be part and parcel of the human condition. Lerner’s book, in part, is a search for what the religious right is promoting that makes it so popular. He states,
“…the Right…has embraced a way of understanding the sacred that emphasizes the need to wipe out the evil forces in the world through war, domination, and the control of evil impulses. This is a view of God that has roots in the Bible and gains plausibility whenever people face an overwhelmingly oppressive reality—as did the Jews held as slaves in ancient Egypt or Jesus and his disciples under Roman imperialism—and can see no way to transform that reality short of a divine intervention to overpower the evil force.”
For purposes of simplifying his thesis, Lerner refers to this worldview as “The Right Hand of God.” He has made a case for why oppressed people long for a God who will smite their enemies. But he goes on to say,
“But when the Right Hand of God is embraced by the powerful (vs. the oppressed), it takes on a whole different meaning. In contemporary America, the most militarily and economically powerful force the world has ever known, the embrace of the Right Hand of God has been used to provide legitimacy to an American empire and a competitive and unjust economic marketplace.”
Lerner goes on to tell us that
“There is another view of God that also has roots in the Bible, as well as in the sacred stories and visions of most of the world’s spiritual and religious traditions. The Left Hand of God emphasizes the need to build a world based on love, kindness, compassion, generosity, mutual cooperation, recognition of the spirit of God in every other human being and an awareness of our interdependence with others, responsibility to the well-being of the planet, and a powerful sense of awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.”
Perhaps our second hymn moves a bit more in this direction, not focusing on “God mighty in battle” but lifting up a sheltering Presence: “Blessings abound where e’er Christ reigns: the prisoners leap to lose their chains, and weary find eternal rest, and all who suffer want are blessed.”
Here at Wild Rose, we have delved into the changes that were made in Christianity at the time in history when it was subsumed into the goals of Constantine and the Roman Empire. It is the job of each generation to study the aims of its faith traditions and with the help of the Spirit, ascertain where the salvation and redemption lie. During our “Prospective Members Class” last Sunday, Karen offered the notion that many times the questions we have are more important than the answers. I got the feeling from talking with our prospective members that the dogmatic church, the church triumphal was a harmful construct in their own inner kingdoms. We are seeing the results of the spirit of domination all over the world today.
Says Lerner,
“Throughout history, and within each of us, there are elements in our experience that encourage us to see the world through the vision of the Right Hand of God and elements that encourage us to see the world through the Left Hand of God. The more we are in a state of fear, the more the Right Hand of God seems intuitively correct, whereas the more we feel hopeful and trusting, the more the Left Hand of God speaks to us.
“…Every day billions of people interact through a set of economic and social institutions that teach us that our own welfare depends on using others to advance ourselves, teaches us that there is not enough to go around and that the bottom line of our world is money and power.
Living in that world, however is very unfulfilling. Human beings have a need for lives of loving connection and for a sense of some higher purpose than money and power. So the world that is built on the assumptions of the Right Hand of God is very unstable. It is a world that cannot provide ultimate satisfaction. Even the moments of the community and solidarity that can be achieved in the churches, synagogues, mosques and ashrams of a Religious Right cannot offset the massive spiritually and psychologically destructive impact of the daily grind of life in a competitive market society with its ethos of materialism and selfishness.”
I don’t want to be naïve about the Right and Left Hands of God. There have been times in my life when I was oppressed, and I depended upon the teeth and claws of justice to remedy my situation. Early on in my processes, I must admit I felt the urge to pray for a god who could smite my enemies. Yet I have eyes to see and ears to hear what will be the outcome of this vengeful mentality. If I hold onto it and fan its fires, at the world level it will be made manifest in the weapons of mass destruction.
To paraphrase Lerner, as we seek to build a different world, we need massive amounts of compassion for each other’s weaknesses, fears and tendencies to revert to the values of dominator societies of the past, with their emphasis on judgment and subordination. Those of us who embrace more cooperative values and a more equalitarian society must come out of the closet and become visible to one another. Certainly, those from the Right will tell us we are “soft” or “unrealistic.” But we made ourselves known in the last election, and we are not going away. We are increasingly unwilling to let our sons and daughters go to war for dubious goals.
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” It is a pleasure to pursue these truths with you.
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