Following the unKing
John Shuck
First Presbyterian Church
Elizabethton, Tennessee
November 24, 2013
Jesus and His Kingdom of Nobodies Sunday
Selections from the Gospel of Thomas
Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples,
"These nursing babies are like those who enter the Father's kingdom."
They said to him,
"Then shall we enter the Father's kingdom as babies?"
Jesus said to them,
"When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the kingdom." (22)
A woman in the crowd said to him,
"Lucky is the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you."
He said to her,
"Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, 'Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.'" (79)
The disciples said to him,
"Your brothers and your mother are standing outside."
He said to them,
"Those here who do what my Father wants are my brothers and my mother. They are the ones who will enter my Father's kingdom." (99)
Jesus said,
"Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me." (55)
Jesus said,
"Whoever does not hate father and mother as I do cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not love father and mother as I do cannot be my disciple. For my mother birthed my body, but my true Mother gave me life." (101)
Jesus said,
"I shall choose you, one from a thousand and two from ten thousand, and they will stand as a single one." (23)
Jesus said,
"From Adam to John the Baptist, among those born of women, no one is so much greater than John the Baptist that his eyes should not be averted. But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child will recognize the Father's kingdom and will become greater than John." (46)
Jesus said,
"If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established itself, and appeared in their image.'
If they say to you,
'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.'
If they ask you,
'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'It is motion and rest.'" (50)
Mary said to Jesus,
"What are your disciples like?"
He said,
"They are like little children living in a field that is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say, 'Give us back our field.' They take off their clothes in front of them in order to give it back to them, and they return their field to them. For this reason I say, if the owners of a house know that a thief is coming, they will be on guard before the thief arrives and will not let the thief break into their house their domain and steal their possessions. As for you, then, be on guard against the world. Prepare yourselves with great strength, so the robbers can't find a way to get to you, for the trouble you expect will come. Let there be among you a person who understands. When the crop ripened, he came quickly carrying a sickle and harvested it. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!" (21)
The end is here.
Next week the lectionary text features John the Baptist with his long hippie hair and sandals announcing that the kingdom of God is at hand. The end is near. That will be the First Sunday of Advent, which is the beginning of the church year.
Today is the last day on the church calendar. The kingdom of God has arrived. The end is here. That means that the beginning is also here. Once you get to the end you go to the beginning. Clever huh?
This Sunday has been traditionally called Christ the King Sunday. Liberals swooped in and decided that kings were politically incorrect. They changed it to Reign of Christ Sunday. I am neither a liberal or a traditionalist. In these matters I am more of a deconstructionist. I think the word king should be retained. In the time of Jesus it was all about kings. Kings and subjects. Kings and power. Kings and armies. Kings and violence. This is, to use a word by scholar Dominic Crossan, the “matrix” of Jesus. You can’t read Jesus or the New Testament without knowing about empires, kings, and violence. As Crossan has said, it would be like trying to understand Martin Luther King Jr. without acknowledging slavery, lynchings, and racism.
How did Christ get to be a king? Here is where my deconstruction comes in. Christ might have been a king. Jesus wasn’t.
Christ comes from the Greek, christos, which means “anointed” or “messiah.” There were many messiahs, christs, and anointed ones who thought they had been chosen to overthrow Roman rule, restore Israel and bring in the Hebrew God’s kingdom of justice. They all ended up dead. Add Jesus to that number.
The reason Jesus didn’t stay dead is because of Paul. Paul took the term Christ and ran with it. Paul didn’t care about the person Jesus. He cared about the enfleshed cosmic Christ, who existed from the beginning, who came down, was crucified in the flesh and raised to a newly embodied spirit being, the first fruits of a new creation of beings who would rule the cosmos in a new heavenly age to come. Those who participate “in Christ” through baptism and communion, will be and are becoming this new creation.
Paul’s letters are the earliest documents in the New Testament. He was so influential that the gospels, that is the stories about Jesus beginning with Mark, are heavily influenced by Paul’s theology.
For instance, communion. In Mark, Jesus supposedly says the cup is his blood and the bread his body. You need to eat and drink his body and blood to participate in him. That is Paul’s theology. It is more likely that the Gospel writers put those words on the lips of Jesus rather than that Paul got them from Jesus.
There were alternative ways of understanding communion. We will use an alternative text today, from a first or second century document called the Didache. The cup and broken bread symbolize the teachings of Jesus and the unity of the community.
Paul didn’t care about the human Jesus. He cared about the Lord, the King Christ. He looked toward the new kingdom that King Christ would inaugurate on his return in the sky at any moment. A kingdom that never came.
As the years rolled by, the immediacy of the return of King Christ was downplayed and the church geared itself for the long haul. Someday, supposedly, King Christ will return. In the meantime King Christ is still on his throne in heaven if not on Earth at least in any obvious sense. Of course, on Earth, King Christ has his viceroys, for the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope, and for Protestants, the institutional structures that surround the interpretation of the Bible and its enforcement.
As the church developed its liturgy and theology and its seasons of the church year and its lectionary readings and its hymnody it structured it all around the mythology of King Christ. From Birth to Death to Resurrection to Ascension to Rule to Promised Return, it is all about King Christ. Our lovely new hymnal is filled with hymns celebrating King Christ.
Today we bring it all home on King Christ Sunday.
Now we are in an era of deconstruction. People in many quarters are asking questions about this and challenging the story. Is King Christ the best or the only myth available to us? Might there be other ways of interpreting Jesus? Were there other ways of interpreting Jesus in the decades following his death? Might there be value for us in reevaluating our myths and making some new choices?
I have serious issues with King Christ and his legacy. It is otherworldly and many of the aspects of it that are this-worldly often ally themselves with hierarchical power structures. To be sure, there have been those who have found King Christ to be a source of resistance to domination systems, but I wonder if King Christ has done more to reinforce domination systems than to subvert them. I don’t have a definitive answer to that. I invite you to explore that question yourself.
Obviously, you can’t just turn off the switch on 2000 years of King Christ. The whole apparatus is built on King Christ. I am not sure I want to turn off the switch if I could. I like a lot of it. To say I like it is strange. Do I like my parents or do I like speaking English? It is in me. It is in all of us. Even if we are not participants in the church, we are influenced by King Christ mythology because of our history. King Christ mythology even as it is being deconstructed is with us for some time. We can however subvert it.
One of the ways I think we can subvert King Christ is through the human Jesus. We do this by asking questions like:
Who was this guy really?
What did he do?
What did he say?
What was he up against?
How did this human being become a myth?
Asking those questions doesn’t mean we will get the answers. I am less sure about Jesus than I have ever been. I don’t know the contours of his vision. I don’t know if he knew. I don’t know if he even had a plan. From what I know about him, he was caught up in some movement of resistance to the violence of the Roman Empire. He was executed, brutally and publicly, as part of a systemic effort to control the populace. He was in the way. He was tortured and killed by Kings.
In my mind, to turn Jesus into a king is an insult. If we look through history at the brutality and oppression enacted in the name of King Christ, you’ll see what I mean. Holy wars, heresy hunting, and inquisitions are the work of Christ the King. It still goes on today.
A tiny example this past week was the trial against Frank Schaefer, a United Methodist minister, found guilty for officiating at the marriage of his gay son and son-in-law. Rev. Schaefer could lose his ministry credentials because he is not going to stop. He has two other gay kids to marry. He is tired of the bullying church. That inquisition is King Christ in action. When Jesus became King Christ, the values of his enemies became his values.
If Jesus knew what became of his memory he would turn over in his grave.
Jesus the human being was no king. He had no standing army. He had no subjects. Those who tagged along after him made their living by begging. Jesus had no weapons. Jesus owned no land or ships or castles. He didn’t even own a stick.
The only thing that Jesus had at his disposal was poetry.
“Study the wild lilies. They neither work nor spin; yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his splendor was not robed like one of these.” Matthew 6:28-9.
We can’t even be sure what poetry went back to Jesus and what was later credited to him, but we can be sure that he did tell parables and aphorisms and in his way he subverted the power of kings. The power of kings is known throughout history regardless of a government’s polity. The power of kings is displayed through weaponry and spectacle and fear and most importantly the rhetoric of morality.
“We are on the side of goodness.
God blesses us.
Nuclear weapons are a force for good when we use them.
Drones bring peace.
We start our wars with prayer to Christ the King in the National Cathedral.”
If Jesus were here and alive today I don’t think you would find him in church worshiping Christ the King. Oh, he would go. He’d sit in the back. Or maybe just to be ornery, the front. He would observe. He probably would weep. Then he would say something witty and outrageous:
Don’t react violently to one who is evil…
Love your enemies…
You know, crazy, subversive, and impractical stuff like that.
Stuff that may be the only solution to humanity’s self-destructive madness.
In an attempt to be subversive, I call today, Jesus and Kingdom of Nobodies Sunday. It should be Jesus and his unKingdom of Nobodies. What might it look like to be a disciple and to follow this unKing?
Here is the Gospel of Thomas understood it:
Mary said to Jesus,
"What are your disciples like?"
He said,
"They are like little children living in a field that is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say, 'Give us back our field.' They take off their clothes in front of them in order to give it back to them, and they return their field to them. For this reason I say, if the owners of a house know that a thief is coming, they will be on guard before the thief arrives and will not let the thief break into their house their domain and steal their possessions. As for you, then, be on guard against the world. Prepare yourselves with great strength, so the robbers can't find a way to get to you, for the trouble you expect will come. Let there be among you a person who understands. When the crop ripened, he came quickly carrying a sickle and harvested it. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!" (21)
The Gospel of Thomas is not in the Bible. The Jesus of Thomas is no king. I am not sure if Jesus said this. He is remembered to have said this or something like it. But what is he saying? I see him as offering wisdom in a world of violence. How do we resist? How do we keep our “soul” our integrity, our sanity?
The wisdom here is the wisdom of all subversive poetry. That wisdom is this:
You are not what others say you are.
You are not what others say you are.
The values of the domination system do not have to be yours.
The clothes of empire are not yours. They don’t fit anyway. Take them off.
You are a human being.
Don’t let the world take that from you.
Guard your integrity.
Be patient and trust. When the time is right, you will produce a harvest.
Following Jesus in this sense is not about following another set of rules or blindly obeying one authority figure in place of another. It is finding yourself. It is making your own meaning.
Christ the King tells people what to do. His mythology is alive and well. He provides meaning for you whether you like it or not and if you don’t like it he sends you to hell. If you obey he promises a spot in heaven.
Jesus the unKing isn’t alive anymore. He died around the year 30. He lived then he died. I think he lived with integrity. He resisted violence with his words and with his body. He won’t send you to heaven or hell. He won’t answer your prayers. Nonetheless his legacy lives on in the wisdom that he left us.
We have the freedom to take it or leave it.
I find that inspiring.
Amen.
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