George F. MacLeod - "The Kingship of Christ" (March 22, 1964)
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| - | Before thee, in token of our loyalty, | 0:04 |
| make us increasingly faithful by thy grace. | 0:07 | |
| We pray through Christ our Lord. Amen. | 0:10 | |
| (church organ music) | 0:15 | |
| - | In the passage which we read, | 0:38 |
| the Gospel according to St. John, the 19th chapter, | 0:41 | |
| the 19th and the 22nd verses. | 0:45 | |
| "Pilate wrote a title and placed it on the cross, | 0:49 | |
| and the title was Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. | 0:53 | |
| The chief priest, therefore, came to Pilate and said, | 0:59 | |
| 'Write not king of the Jews, but that he said, | 1:03 | |
| I'm king of the Jews.' | 1:07 | |
| Pilate said, 'What I have written, I have written.'" | 1:10 | |
| This is Palm Sunday when, for the first time, | 1:16 | |
| the people recognized the paradox | 1:20 | |
| of the kingship of the Messiah expressed in humility | 1:24 | |
| as he rode up on a donkey. | 1:29 | |
| What is the kingship of Christ, and where does it extend? | 1:33 | |
| I don't intend to speak this morning | 1:38 | |
| about the Palm Sunday story, | 1:40 | |
| but the challenge of the essence of the Palm Sunday story | 1:42 | |
| for 1963 as to what we mean by the kingship of Christ. | 1:46 | |
| People say the Bible is not about politics, | 1:53 | |
| and the Bible is not about politics | 1:56 | |
| because it doesn't write in that idiom. | 1:58 | |
| The Bible is not about theories. | 2:00 | |
| The Bible is about persons, and, therefore, | 2:03 | |
| politics are expressed in the rising and the falling | 2:06 | |
| of kings as persons | 2:10 | |
| who then represented the political scene. | 2:12 | |
| How far is Christ king in our society today? | 2:17 | |
| Is he king in some soul kingdom? | 2:22 | |
| Or is he king in the whole kingdom? | 2:26 | |
| This was essentially the problem | 2:30 | |
| that they faced on Palm Sunday. | 2:33 | |
| And this is, most topically, | 2:35 | |
| the problem which we face today, because as we all know, | 2:38 | |
| but try to forget, for the first time in recorded history, | 2:43 | |
| no one knows where true power lies. | 2:47 | |
| No one knows where true power lies. | 2:51 | |
| Or, as the Bible would put it, | 2:55 | |
| nobody knows who really is king. | 2:56 | |
| I'm not entering into political issues, | 3:00 | |
| but why was it simply without the merits of the case, | 3:03 | |
| why was it that we did not go to war about Hungary | 3:06 | |
| some years ago for the rather simple reason | 3:10 | |
| that if we'd gone to war about Hungary, | 3:13 | |
| there would've been no Hungary left when the war was over. | 3:15 | |
| Why will we never go to war about the Berlin Wall? | 3:19 | |
| For the rather simple reason that when the war is over, | 3:23 | |
| there won't be a Berlin Wall. | 3:26 | |
| This is the issue of power today. | 3:30 | |
| To whom does power belong? | 3:34 | |
| Say if you'd like, | 3:38 | |
| but this is touching on political issues, very good. | 3:39 | |
| Play it that way if you want to. | 3:42 | |
| If you play it that way, of course, | 3:44 | |
| we are indistinguishable from Russian Christians. | 3:46 | |
| In Russia, it is true that the archimandrite | 3:51 | |
| can speak in Moscow Cathedral | 3:54 | |
| and that Baptist churches proliferate | 3:57 | |
| across the Soviet Union, | 4:00 | |
| provided they confine themselves to the spiritual, | 4:02 | |
| provided they crown Christ king in the realm of the parties | 4:07 | |
| and of the personal purities, but, | 4:13 | |
| let the archimandrite of Moscow cross the Red Square | 4:17 | |
| and hammer on the door of the Kremlin | 4:23 | |
| and demand what the covenanters and the reformers | 4:26 | |
| used to call the Crown Rights of the Redeemer. | 4:30 | |
| Not just the sick visiting rights or the Sunday rights | 4:35 | |
| or the funeral rights, but the Crown Rights of the Redeemer. | 4:38 | |
| And let the archimandrite of Moscow cross the Red Square | 4:45 | |
| and rap on the door of the Kremlin, | 4:47 | |
| demanding the Crown Rights of the Redeemer. | 4:49 | |
| You'd be lucky a man simply to be rusticated | 4:54 | |
| to his own home village with instructions to say his prayers | 4:56 | |
| in the parish church, but not to preach again | 5:01 | |
| until he confined the faith to the spiritualities. | 5:05 | |
| This, I take it, is not our ideal of the kingship of Christ. | 5:11 | |
| And I want to glimpse with you the nature of his kingship | 5:18 | |
| by seeing it through Pontius Pilate. | 5:24 | |
| The whole trial of Jesus, of course, | 5:29 | |
| if you care to read it and read it this evening, | 5:30 | |
| for instance, in the 19th chapter of St. John's Gospel | 5:33 | |
| and the 27th chapters in Matthew's Gospel. | 5:37 | |
| Together, they're very much shorter | 5:40 | |
| than a "Reader's Digest" article. | 5:42 | |
| Read it in the original, | 5:44 | |
| and you will see the essential nature of the trial | 5:47 | |
| is precisely, you might almost say only, | 5:52 | |
| as to how far Jesus is king. | 5:56 | |
| And after, of course, it's in the hands of Pilate, | 6:00 | |
| the procurator. | 6:02 | |
| Who was Pilate? | 6:05 | |
| I want to ask, at the end of this thought about Pilate, | 6:08 | |
| I want to ask you whether your middle name | 6:11 | |
| may be Pontius Pilate, and whether my middle name | 6:15 | |
| may be Pontius Pilate. | 6:20 | |
| Who was Pontius Pilate? | 6:23 | |
| Well, it can be made to mean the pillared see. | 6:26 | |
| The pillared see. | 6:30 | |
| I suppose, after the holy land, | 6:33 | |
| the most familiar map in our mind's eye of Europe | 6:35 | |
| is the map of the Mediterranean. | 6:39 | |
| And this was, as now, ended at what we now call | 6:42 | |
| the Straits of Gibraltar, | 6:48 | |
| where there were, of course, the pillars of Hercules, | 6:50 | |
| one of the Seven Wonders of the World. | 6:54 | |
| On either side, as we would say, on the European side | 6:56 | |
| and the African side, one pillar. | 6:59 | |
| And Pilate knew that, of course, you can only have society | 7:05 | |
| if you have in tension, held in fruitful tension, | 7:08 | |
| the state and the church. | 7:15 | |
| Pilate knew that the Roman Empire, one pillar, | 7:18 | |
| if you like, was the greatest political construction | 7:21 | |
| men had ever seen. | 7:26 | |
| Some still say the greatest political construction | 7:27 | |
| men have ever seen. | 7:31 | |
| But he knew also that the Roman Emperor | 7:33 | |
| was himself lecherous and the empire was going lecherous, | 7:37 | |
| this greatest political construction | 7:43 | |
| the world had ever seen. | 7:45 | |
| And he'd been appointed procurator | 7:48 | |
| in one of the provinces, and in this province, | 7:50 | |
| there was the Jewish faith, | 7:53 | |
| they highest and pulliest and far | 7:54 | |
| the purest expression of faith that men had ever achieved. | 7:56 | |
| But Pilate, because of his residence in Palestine, | 8:02 | |
| knew that if the empire was going lecherous, | 8:04 | |
| the church, or the symbol of the spiritual power, | 8:10 | |
| was going rancid. | 8:14 | |
| There was Caiaphas, high priest. | 8:18 | |
| Annas had been high priest, but Annas hadn't any sons. | 8:21 | |
| And for some time, the high priesthood | 8:25 | |
| had gone from father to son, | 8:28 | |
| but Annas has had maneuvered so that Caiaphas, | 8:30 | |
| his son-in-law, should succeed him as high priest. | 8:33 | |
| Jobs for the boys. | 8:40 | |
| So here was the Roman Empire, | 8:43 | |
| the greatest men that ever seen, going lecherous, | 8:45 | |
| and here was the purest expression religion, | 8:48 | |
| of religion, that men had ever known, going rancid. | 8:51 | |
| Now, not only was the Mediterranean | 8:57 | |
| exactly like the map that you see of it today, | 9:00 | |
| but for the mystery religions of Rome, | 9:02 | |
| the Mediterranean had a mystic meaning. | 9:05 | |
| It meant the known, the known. | 9:08 | |
| And through the Straits of Gibraltar, | 9:12 | |
| out into what we now call the Atlantic, | 9:14 | |
| was the breakaway into the great unknown. | 9:17 | |
| So, here was Pilate knowing about the church | 9:22 | |
| and knowing about the state. | 9:25 | |
| The church and the state were only two well-known. | 9:30 | |
| And here was Jesus with his claim to be a king, | 9:36 | |
| claiming that love is really the only power. | 9:44 | |
| And Pilate's concern, and a very remarkable concern | 9:52 | |
| for a pagan who was not a Jew, | 9:55 | |
| was whether he could break out into the unknown | 9:59 | |
| and make Christ king. | 10:02 | |
| Whether with the crumbling pillar of the state | 10:08 | |
| and the crumbling Hercules pillar of the church, | 10:12 | |
| he could dare to break out into a new | 10:17 | |
| religio-social conception all together, | 10:21 | |
| the kingship of Jesus. | 10:25 | |
| Poor Pilate. | 10:31 | |
| It was hardly fair on him to be faced with | 10:32 | |
| so vast a question. | 10:34 | |
| It was very early in the morning when the high priest | 10:37 | |
| rattled on the door of Pilate's house, | 10:41 | |
| it wasn't light yet, | 10:45 | |
| to say that there was an insurrection in the streets. | 10:47 | |
| The one thing that procurator cannot stand | 10:51 | |
| is rioting in the streets. | 10:55 | |
| Very early, but not only so. | 11:00 | |
| The khamsin was about to blow, that terrifying wind | 11:01 | |
| that takes so long to finally blow that storm hurricane | 11:07 | |
| that comes up out of Africa, still into Palestine today, | 11:13 | |
| presaged by a smothering heat that's hard to describe, | 11:19 | |
| except for those who've known it. | 11:23 | |
| Men have been known to go mad in the mere pressure | 11:25 | |
| and smothering intensity of the silence | 11:29 | |
| and of the weather before the khamsin blows. | 11:40 | |
| That khamsin that, of course, was going to blow | 11:48 | |
| at noon that day so that there was a dust storm | 11:50 | |
| and darkness over the whole Earth | 11:53 | |
| for the space of three hours as Jesus hung up on the cross, | 11:55 | |
| after the three hours in the scorching, smothering heat. | 12:01 | |
| Poor Pilate, I say, with this vast problem | 12:07 | |
| so early in the morning when it was | 12:09 | |
| so smotheringly difficult to think. | 12:12 | |
| And if you look it up, | 12:17 | |
| you'll find that his first question was, | 12:18 | |
| tell me, tell me, Jesus, are you a king? | 12:20 | |
| Jesus says, certainly I'm a king. | 12:28 | |
| And a discussion takes place, | 12:33 | |
| and Pilate finds no fault in this man. | 12:34 | |
| And then the high priest gets impatient, | 12:38 | |
| breaks through the door he's carefully put him in, | 12:42 | |
| hoping that Pilate will condemn him | 12:44 | |
| and hand him back for death. | 12:47 | |
| Comes in, impatient, and says to Pilate, | 12:51 | |
| you know, there's not just a riot in the streets here. | 12:55 | |
| This man creates riots up in Galilee, too. | 12:58 | |
| Pilate says, Galilee, that's outside my jurisdiction. | 13:04 | |
| Send him to the other court. | 13:12 | |
| Escape hatch number one, send Jesus to the other department. | 13:16 | |
| So you'll find that Jesus is brought up before Herod. | 13:25 | |
| Herod, who never gave head to prophets, anyway. | 13:30 | |
| Herod who had beheaded John Baptist, | 13:35 | |
| Herod who'd heard that Jesus did tricks, miracles. | 13:40 | |
| So, he tries to get Jesus to do one of his tricks, | 13:46 | |
| and Jesus doesn't say a word. | 13:53 | |
| So Herod hands him over to the soldiers, | 13:57 | |
| who jest and laugh and dress him up as a king. | 14:01 | |
| So, in no time, Jesus, with his problem, | 14:13 | |
| is back in Pilate's court. | 14:16 | |
| His attempt to get the state to deal with it has failed. | 14:22 | |
| So he says, what about the church? | 14:27 | |
| And he brings in the church. | 14:31 | |
| He says, you've got a custom whereby once a year, | 14:34 | |
| you can release one or other of two criminals. | 14:37 | |
| What about releasing Jesus? | 14:43 | |
| And they cried, Barabbas, Barabbas. | 14:50 | |
| Jesus, crucify him. | 14:53 | |
| So, his attempt, escape hatch number two, | 14:59 | |
| to the church, has failed. | 15:02 | |
| Then, Pilate says, what about the people? | 15:07 | |
| State's failed, the church has failed. | 15:11 | |
| Perhaps the people will release Jesus to be king. | 15:15 | |
| So, he has Jesus flogged, | 15:21 | |
| and he brings him out before the people all bloodied up. | 15:26 | |
| Only his eyes are now steady. | 15:35 | |
| This man who had done nothing but go about doing good. | 15:42 | |
| Pilate, in effect, says to the people, | 15:47 | |
| have I done enough to him? | 15:51 | |
| Behold, the man. Behold, the man. | 15:56 | |
| And the people say, crucify him. | 16:10 | |
| Then, I think Pilate goes mad. | 16:17 | |
| It's very hot, very difficult to think clearly. | 16:24 | |
| But Pilate now goes into his apartments | 16:31 | |
| and puts on the robe of a chief justice. | 16:34 | |
| He's been acting up to now, and acting correctly, | 16:40 | |
| as a magistrate. | 16:42 | |
| He now puts on the robe of Rome. | 16:45 | |
| Anything he now says may be taken back to Rome | 16:50 | |
| and used in evidence against him. | 16:55 | |
| He goes out to the pavement. | 16:59 | |
| He's now a chief justiciary. | 17:02 | |
| He's talking directly for the Emperor. | 17:08 | |
| And he says to the people from the pavement | 17:14 | |
| in a terrible hush, | 17:19 | |
| because now he's speaking for the Emperor, | 17:22 | |
| behold your king. | 17:28 | |
| I think Pilate must've gone mad. | 17:35 | |
| For nearly 200 years, | 17:41 | |
| Rome had given to the turbulent people, Israel, | 17:44 | |
| concession upon concession | 17:50 | |
| that they'd never dreamt of giving to any other vassal state | 17:52 | |
| because of their turbulence. | 17:56 | |
| But the one thing that Rome had never given to the Jews | 18:00 | |
| was the only thing they really wanted, | 18:05 | |
| and that was to have a king | 18:10 | |
| And here, Pilate, speaking for the Emperor, | 18:17 | |
| says, you can have a king. | 18:28 | |
| For the first time for nearly 200 years, | 18:35 | |
| Rome said to Israel, you can have a king. | 18:39 | |
| And for the first time, for nearly 200 years, | 18:44 | |
| the Jews said to Pilate, we have no king but Caesar. | 18:48 | |
| It was in prophecy, the end of the Roman Empire | 18:59 | |
| and the end of the Jewish people. | 19:04 | |
| And then the people say, | 19:11 | |
| whosoever makes this man king, | 19:15 | |
| whosoever lets this man go, is not Caesar's friend. | 19:19 | |
| So, Pilate, who's done his best, shrugs his shoulders | 19:31 | |
| and hands Jesus over. | 19:38 | |
| And in our parlance, | 19:43 | |
| you can almost hear the firing squad getting ready. | 19:46 | |
| Pilate wasn't quite finished. | 20:01 | |
| He took a board and put on it a title | 20:04 | |
| and put it on the cross. | 20:08 | |
| And the title was Jesus of Nazareth, King. | 20:12 | |
| And the high priests of the people came and said, | 20:25 | |
| "Write not king of the Jews, | 20:30 | |
| but that he said, I'm king of the Jews." | 20:34 | |
| Pilate said, "What I've written, I have written." | 20:39 | |
| His last effort to split the kingship | 20:54 | |
| and to keep the treasury and the army for Rome | 20:58 | |
| and let the Jewish people have their king, | 21:04 | |
| if he was going to be like Jesus, had failed. | 21:08 | |
| And I'm here today on the day of the kingship of Jesus | 21:17 | |
| to ask you, as I ask myself, | 21:23 | |
| whether your middle name may not be Pontius Pilate. | 21:27 | |
| Very sudden, the movement of history today, very sudden. | 21:37 | |
| Moves too quick for most of us. | 21:44 | |
| The last thing on God's earth we want to face up to | 21:49 | |
| is where true power lies. | 21:52 | |
| So, all that is smothering, and it's very hot. | 21:59 | |
| There's a storm coming up. Perhaps it's out of Africa. | 22:03 | |
| And Jesus, the great unknown power, | 22:17 | |
| suddenly confronts our civilization. | 22:24 | |
| What do you and I do? | 22:31 | |
| It's too big for us. | 22:34 | |
| We can't decide this. | 22:37 | |
| Let the state decide whether Jesus is king. | 22:40 | |
| Are you satisfied with that? | 22:53 | |
| Hiroshima was supposed to be (indistinct). | 23:00 | |
| President Truman speaking in the name of us all, | 23:07 | |
| speaking in the name of us all, | 23:10 | |
| said he had allowed this thing | 23:14 | |
| to ensure that the nations found other ways | 23:19 | |
| of settling their disputes. | 23:22 | |
| And I'm sure he was 100% sincere. | 23:30 | |
| The potential now, as everybody knows, | 23:38 | |
| is a million times Hiroshima, a million times Hiroshima. | 23:42 | |
| So, the state can't do it. | 23:53 | |
| Jesus comes back to you and to me. | 23:57 | |
| What about the church then? | 24:04 | |
| What about the Bench of Bishops? | 24:10 | |
| The Methodist Conference? The General Assembly? | 24:13 | |
| The National Council of Churches? | 24:19 | |
| The World Council of Churches? The Vatican? | 24:23 | |
| What does the Vatican say? | 24:31 | |
| What does the World Council of Churches say? | 24:35 | |
| Nothing at all, nothing at all. | 24:40 | |
| What about the people, then? | 24:50 | |
| Behold the man, still all bloodied up. | 24:55 | |
| Now, the people, so strange, isn't it? | 25:10 | |
| We go on and talking about if only the church would do this | 25:15 | |
| and that in all sorts of issues. | 25:17 | |
| If only the church would say this or that. | 25:19 | |
| Oh, the humanists. | 25:23 | |
| It's interesting that suddenly, unexpectedly, | 25:26 | |
| at the cross of Christ, the humanists had their chance. | 25:29 | |
| When the state had done its worst | 25:36 | |
| and the church had done its worst, | 25:38 | |
| the humanists had their chance. | 25:39 | |
| And when it came to the showdown, they said nothing at all. | 25:45 | |
| Sociology and psychology | 25:58 | |
| simply don't know how to begin to deal | 26:07 | |
| with a situation that's all bloodied up. | 26:11 | |
| So what did we do? | 26:21 | |
| Well, we split the kingship. | 26:25 | |
| And for the state, the treasury, the amen. | 26:31 | |
| And Jesus, king for little children | 26:41 | |
| and to comfort the old. | 26:51 | |
| You can almost hear the firing squad getting ready. | 27:00 | |
| There's one hope | 27:13 | |
| does that in all of us, | 27:17 | |
| which still says Jesus of Nazareth, king. | 27:21 | |
| There's still a danger that in all of us, | 27:31 | |
| which, as of now, is saying, write not king, | 27:38 | |
| but that he said he was a king. | 27:47 | |
| But that, thank God, is not the end. | 27:57 | |
| There is that in all of us, | 28:03 | |
| and it's the only hope, | 28:08 | |
| which, quite sincerely, says, | 28:12 | |
| what I have written, I have written. | 28:21 | |
| But the word of God wasn't written. | 28:34 | |
| The word of God, Jesus, acted. | 28:39 | |
| And now, to God, the Father, God, the Son | 28:51 | |
| and God, the Holy Ghost, | 28:54 | |
| be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion and power. | 28:57 | |
| Now and forever more. Amen. | 29:01 | |
| Would you stand? | 29:07 | |
| Now may the God of peace, | 29:16 | |
| that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, | 29:18 | |
| that great shepherd of the sheep, | 29:21 | |
| through the blood of the everlasting covenant | 29:25 | |
| make you perfect in every good work to do His will, | 29:29 | |
| working in you that which is well pleasing in His sight | 29:34 | |
| through Jesus Christ to whom be glory forever. | 29:39 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 29:50 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 29:54 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 30:02 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 30:08 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 30:13 |
