Transcript
Close Encounters: An Encounter with Pontius Pilate
First Baptist Richmond, November 24, 2024
Christ the King Sunday
John 18:33-37
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”
Twenty four years ago I was the relatively new pastor of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, DC, and that city was going through something it had never experienced before. It was an election year. There were two candidates for president: Al Gore and George W. Bush. But three weeks after the election we still didn’t know who had won; the race was too close to call. The whole thing had been turned over to the Supreme Court and day after day people were protesting on the plaza, demanding that their candidate be recognized as the next president of the United States. It was in that context that I came up with the title of my sermon for the last Sunday in November and asked our sexton to put it on the marquis in front of the church:
“We Have a Winner!”
I did it because it was Christ the King Sunday, and I was planning to say that whether Al Gore or George W. Bush became president, Jesus Christ was king! That seemed like a safe bet to me. It still seems like a safe bet. On the day after every recent election I have made it a point to say, “Jesus was Lord when I went to bed last night and Jesus was Lord when I woke up this morning.” Because we can get caught up in all this that’s happening down here at the political level; we can get so caught up in it that we think nothing else matters. But above all that, above
everything else in the world, is the sovereignty of our Lord Jesus Christ. We need to be reminded of that from time to time.
Perhaps, especially, in this time.
I did some research on Christ the King Sunday and learned that it is a fairly recent addition to the Christian calendar. It was established in 1925 by Pope Pius XI as “The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe,” and if you have ears to hear it there’s some defiance in that title, as if Pope Pius were saying to some earthly king, “Take that!” But who? I had to do some more research, and what I learned was that Christ the King Sunday was established in response to the political and social challenges of the time, particularly “rising nationalism, secularism, and authoritarian regimes in Europe.”i Let me break that down for you a bit:
1. Post-World War I Disillusionment. After World War I, Europe was grappling with disillusionment, rising nationalism, and the erosion of Christian values in public life. Leaders like Mussolini in Italy were gaining power, emphasizing state and party over God.
2. Response to Secularism: Secular ideologies, such as communism and fascism, were spreading rapidly. Pope Pius XI wanted to affirm the ultimate authority of Christ over all human rulers and systems, rejecting the idea that state power was supreme.
3. Message of Allegiance: The feast was intended to remind Christians that their highest loyalty is to Christ and his kingdom—not to any earthly government, ideology, or leader.
Those are all good reasons for establishing Christ the King Sunday, but I want to go back to that earlier question: who was Pope Pius saying, “Take that!” to? I had to
do some more research, but I think he was saying it primarily to Mussolini.
I looked him up on Wikipedia, and this is what I found: “Benito Mussolini was an Italian dictator who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 1943, as well as the leader of Italian fascism from 1919 until his execution in 1945. As a dictator and founder of fascism, Mussolini inspired the international spread of fascist movements during the period between the two world wars.ii And if you’re not 100% sure what the word fascist means, it is a “far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”iii
Beyond that (and this is also from Wikipedia), “Fascism’s extreme authoritarianism and nationalism often manifest as a belief in racial purity or a master race, usually blended with some variant of racism or discrimination against a demonized ‘Other,’ such as Jews, homosexuals, transgender people, ethnic minorities, or immigrants. These ideas have motivated fascist regimes to commit massacres, forced sterilizations, deportations, and genocides. During World War II, the genocidal and imperialist ambitions of the fascist Axis powers resulted in the murder of millions of people.”iv
So…not good.
I was curious about Mussolini’s “March on Rome,” I hadn’t heard of that before. When I looked it up I learned that it was “an organized mass demonstration in October 1922 which resulted in Mussolini’s National Fascist
Party ascending to power in the Kingdom of Italy. Mussolini, along with a number of fascist demonstrators and his Blackshirt paramilitary troops marched on Rome on October 28, 1922. Prime Minister Luigi Facta wanted to declare a state of siege, but King Victor Emmanuel III persuaded him to resign and then appointed Mussolini as prime minister in his place, transferring power to the fascists without armed conflict.v
What else happened in 1922? In February of that year Pius XI was elected as Pope. I’m guessing he was in Rome on the day Mussolini and his Blackshirts marched into the city. He had a front row seat as fascism began to spread across the city and through the nation of Italy. What did he do? Well, I tell you what he could have done. The Pope had something called “Papal supremacy,” which is the doctrine that the pope has supreme, universal, and full power over the entire [Roman Catholic] church. According to my sources his power would have been similar to that of an absolute monarch—that is, a king—or the leader of a Fascist state.vi In 1925 the population of Italy was approximately 40 million people, but the Catholic Church boasted numbers closer to 300 million. If Pope Pius had decided to go head to head with Mussolini he would have had the full backing of the Catholic Church. They could have put a boxing ring in the middle of the Roman Colosseum. They could have promoted a match between Il Duce and Il Papa. But I can promise you this: when it was over, even if Mussolini had won, they would have carried the Pope out on their shoulders, chanting his name and cheering his victory; there were more Catholics in Italy in 1925 than there were Italians.vii
What the Pope did instead of challenging Mussolini to a boxing match was draft a papal encyclical called Quas Primas (meaning “In the first”) in which he established the Feast of Christ the King. In his opening statement he referred to an
earlier work in which he had explained that the “manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and…that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.”viii In that encyclical he established the Feast of Christ the King, which was his response to the world’s increasing secularization and nationalism.ix He called it, “The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe,” just in case anyone was confused about who was ultimately in charge.
While it wasn’t established in response to American politics, some have noted that “Christ the King Sunday holds particular resonance in the context of Christian Nationalism today.”x My friend Amanda Tyler, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington, DC, is speaking at River Road Church tonight, sharing excerpts from her new book, How to End Christian Nationalism. She has called it the most significant threat facing democracy today and founded a movement called “Christians against Christian Nationalism.” You can look it up online, and if you feel led to do so you can sign the statement.
I’ve done it twice.
Christian Nationalism is not the same as patriotism. You can be a Christian and a patriot at the same time. I love flying my American flag on all the national holidays and when I come home from any overseas trip I want to kiss the ground I walk on. Christian Nationalism (or “White Christian Nationalism,” as it is sometimes called) is something else. The simplest definition I have found is this: “White Christian Nationalism is the belief that America was founded by White
Christians, and that if you’re not White, or Christian, then you don’t really belong here.”xi
I want you to pause for a moment and consider what a dangerous ideology that is. If you get it into your head that America is for White Christians only then you may conclude that anyone who is Black, anyone who is brown, anyone who is Muslim, anyone who is Jewish, doesn’t really belong here. It’s the same mentality that dominated Nazi Germany, the mentality that led to the extermination of some six million Jews. It’s the mentality America rejected in World War II when we joined our European allies in fighting against fascism. And in relation to the theme of today’s worship service, it’s a mentality that Christ the King would never embrace.
In John 18:33 Pontius Pilate asks Jesus if he is the King of the Jews. It’s an important question, because Pilate was the Governor of Judea, one of the smaller provinces of the sprawling Roman Empire. He represented Caesar Tiberius, who would have been recognized by most of the people of that time as the “king of the world.” If Jesus is a king then Pilate has a problem: there can be only one emperor in an empire. But Jesus redirects the question. He says, “My kingdom does not belong to this world,” which means that Jesus is not leading an insurrection; he’s not going to war against the Roman Empire to gain the independence of Israel; and he’s not trying to overthrow the Empire, or take Caesar’s place on the throne. Those are all earthly, political ambitions, and they are not his. He has bigger plans. He’s looking at a bigger picture. He might even agree with Pope Pius XI who referred to him as the King of the Universe.
Have you ever seen a picture of Earth from outer space? All you see is this beautiful, blue-green planet, wrapped in fleecy white clouds. You don’t see any of
those ugly black lines that divide one country from another. I think that if you were the King of the Universe you might look at the world like that. And if you were the one who had been there in the beginning (as the Gospel of John says), a co-creator with your heavenly Father, you might be able to see that all people are created in the image of God. Genetically speaking we human beings are 99.9 percent the same, which means that none of us can claim to be better than another, or more deserving of place or privilege. It must have been something in the way Jesus held his head, or returned Pilate’s gaze, but Pilate could see that there was something regal about him. He said, “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.”
I don’t like to judge, but I don’t think Mussolini belonged to the truth; I don’t think he listened to Jesus’ voice. Pope Pius, on the other hand, may have. Not always, certainly; he was human like the rest of us. But in that moment when he was trying to come up with the perfect response to the rise of nationalism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and fascism, he didn’t do it by calling down the full force of the Roman Catholic Church, he didn’t do it by mobilizing 300 million faithful in the name of God and having them march on Rome and overthrow Mussolini. He did it by establishing “the Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe,” a brief pause from the madness of secular politics, a moment to lift our gaze above all other allegiances and alliances and let it fall on Christ and Christ alone. When we do that, we will see that no one else compares to him, no one else can. He alone is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He alone is worthy of our worship and praise.
A few days after the election I posted something on my blog that must have seemed strange to the people who saw it. Even I was curious about where it had come from, but I have given up trying to figure out how my mind works. I asked the question: “How did a poor, dark-skinned, first-century, Middle-Eastern Jew of questionable parentage become the most powerful person in the universe?” And then I answered my own question. I wrote:
According to the Apostle Paul:
Although he was in the form of God, He did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
That’s Philippians 2:5-11, and it illustrates the vast difference between the way we humans lord it over one another, and struggle to claw our way to the top of the heap, and the way Christ empties himself, humbles himself, takes the form of a servant and becomes humble to the point of death, even death on a cross. That may not be your way, but if you were going to choose someone to be your king, king of the world, king of the universe,
Who else would you choose?
—Jim Somerville © 2024
