Refractions of Power
Reflections on the Lectionary for Reign of Christ Sunday
The Bible is something like a prism, casting different light and color depending on how it’s held and how it’s seen. The angle and direction of view make a difference for what shines through.
When viewed from the angle and direction of Christian theology, the Bible—the Christian version with the Christian books in the order preferred by Christians—casts a certain kind of light. The Bible as ordered and understood by Jewish folks will look and mean differently, and the Bible shows different colors when it is read secularly, as literature or for historical data. But in the way the Bible is usually held by Christians, with the life and teachings of Jesus as the climax of the story and a future reign of Jesus as a yet-unrealized denouement, the prism throws off a specific kind of light and color, and the Bible means a particular kind of thing. Things line up to refract the stories just so, and it all points together to a triumph of divine power and authority.
This Sunday, November 24th, is the one traditionally called Christ the King Sunday, or more often these days Reign of Christ Sunday. This day stands at the end of the church year, the culmination of a long liturgical cycle, and so the day is an especially useful guide for understanding how the whole biblical story has been lined up by our traditions and our theologies. What does it mean that power—kingship and reign—are the culminating idea of the whole ecclesiastical year? What does it mean that everything points toward this idea of authority and dominion, with Christ at the apogee of it all? Why do things conclude here, instead of somewhere else, and how do we reckon with the reality that the light cast from our tradition is used to bathe a throne room?
The lectionary for this Sunday gathers together a number of texts from across the Biblical tradition that speak to the idea of kingship and reign, and together they kind of sketch an outline of what I mean when I say that the Christian ordering and reading of the Bible point toward power. From the standpoint of 21st century Christianity, all of these texts somehow participate in the idea of messianism. They all speak to the idea that Jesus was a messiah, foretold and envisioned by centuries of Jewish kindship and prophecy. When gathered together like this and lined up just so, these particular biblical passages shine light on the story of a divine plan for a just and righteous ruler who would put the world right and overthrow all illegitimate and inferior forms of earthly power. These passages all point toward Jesus. If we hold the prism just slightly differently—if we look first through the angle of Jesus’ crucifixion, or if we hold the story so that the light passes only through what the prophets and the psalmists said—then the story looks less like a triumph for Jesus and perhaps more conflicted, specific to ancient Israel, or otherwise complex. But the lectionary texts for Reign of Christ Sunday are arranged just so, in this particular way, to make us see the story of Jesus as a foretold messiah who reigns in power over the whole world.
So let’s follow the light through the prism.
The first text, the point of entry, is from 2 Samuel 23:1-7, which purportedly preserves the last words of David. If you want to cast light on messianism, you almost have to start with David, because David was, in the imagination of Israel, the great king. David had his serious faults, the Bible is quick to remind us, but in the Hebrew Bible David is also lifted up as an exemplar of godly devotion. In this passage from 2 Samuel, a kind of benedictory account of David’s pious relationship with God, David claims a special kinship with the Lord. “The spirit of the Lord speaks through me,” the text says, “his word is upon my tongue.” This kind of easy movement from divine to human is a hallmark of the way messianism ultimately gets described in Christian thought; Jesus, as the messiah, was understood to have an intimate connection with God, and indeed to be God, in many forms of Christian theology.
Psalm 132, too, praises David and his kingship. This poetic passage remembers many of David’s deeds, especially his idea of and commitment to establishing a temple in Jerusalem for the worship of God. It was David’s son Solomon who ultimately built the temple, according to the Hebrew Bible, but it was David who is credited with having the idea and with pledging his lineage to the establishment and maintenance of a house for God. In response, in verses 14-18, God affirms the temple as a dwelling place for God’s presence, and God promises patronage to David and his lineage. This is an important idea in messianism as it develops in Christian thought; recall, for example, how both Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ lineage to and through David. Davidic kingship is always the model for the gospel writers as they describe Jesus’ messianic identity, but they emphasize things like this—the connection to God—rather than the political and military aspects of messiahs. Jesus doesn’t fit very well as a political or military leader, but by emphasizing Jesus’ connection to God and comparing it to David’s connection to God, the gospel writers construct an argument for Jesus as messiah.
The book of Daniel is late, among the texts of the Hebrew Bible, and it is strange. Daniel is apocalyptic—a genre we talked a bit about last week—which means that Daniel often imagines revelatory glimpses of the future, heavenly scenes, and extravagant imagery. That’s what’s happening in this passage (7:9-10 and 13-14); the narrator relates a vision of a heavenly court and the empowerment of a newly introduced figure. “One like a human being” (literally “one like a son of man”) is given authority over the world: “To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.”
It’s easy to see how a passage like this one serves the purposes of messianism. The structure of the passage has an “Ancient One,” taken to be God, inviting “one like a human being” or “one like a son of man” to hold dominion over the world. For Christians, it’s hard to imagine a more useful scene. This part of Daniel is probably influenced by the kinds of mythologies that were common among the cultures of the ancient near east, including Ugarit and Canaan, that had layers or generations of divine figures. (It’s roughly analogous to the way the Greek pantheon is arranged with higher-ranked deities and lower-ranked ones, and how some of the gods and goddesses are children of others). But Christians see a passage like this one and recognize God (the creator, the “father,” etc.) and Jesus (the “son”) in the language. So although the author of the book of Daniel didn’t anticipate anything like Jesus or Christianity, the passage becomes a useful one for describing the kind of messianic figure Christians claim Jesus to be.
Notice the role of dominion in this passage, in the section quoted a couple of paragraphs above. The “one like a human being” in Daniel is offered control over the whole world, and everyone, individually and collectively, is a servant of the “one like a human being.” The kind of power this figure receives is eternal. For Christians who claim that Jesus is the messiah, this fits very neatly. Jesus, in this way of thinking, is a kind of cosmic ruler who gains authority over the whole world—or, who will, at some point in the future—and subsumes all the other forms of power in the world under his own. We will return, in a moment, to the question of how we might feel about that image of Jesus.
Psalm 93 is one of a grouping of Psalms that are collectively called the “Enthronement Psalms.” These Psalms offer images of the king of Israel (and/or Judah) in a moment of anointing and installation as monarch, conflated with or alongside images of God in the same moment. These Psalms (which cluster in the mid-to-late 90s to 100, plus some others like perhaps Psalm 24 and Psalm 47) might have had a liturgical function in moments of kingly inauguration or high ritual significance in the temple. In Psalm 93, the trappings of kingship (robes, strength, a throne, decrees) are applied to God, thinning the distance between people’s ideas of God and ideas of a king. As it appears in this day of Christian liturgy on “Christ the King” or “Reign of Christ” Sunday, Psalm 93 underscores the connection between Jesus and divine reign; it reiterates Jesus’ messianic identity.
Revelation 1:4b-8 is an odd selection, in terms of genre. While Revelation itself is almost completely apocalyptic in character, with lots of heavenly visions and violence and strange symbols, this beginning part takes on the trappings of a letter, and it has some of the parts of letters that might be familiar from Paul’s epistles and other New Testament writings. That’s because the author of Revelation (who calls himself John) organizes the first major section of the book of Revelation as a series of open letters to congregations in western Asia Minor. So in 1:4b we get “Grace to you and peace,” which is a familiar formula from Paul’s letters, and the readers are told that the greeting is actually from God and Jesus themselves. Revelation seems to have been influenced by the book of Daniel, and in 1:6 you can see an echo of the language of Daniel above: “to him be glory and dominion forever and ever,” and Jesus “coming with the clouds” in the same way Daniel describes “one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven.” You can almost see, in real time, how early followers of Jesus were constructing his messianic identity out of the raw materials of Jewish tradition, and ascribing the kind of power, rule, glory, and dominion to Jesus that had been part of Jewish apocalypticism already.
Finally, in John 18:33-37, we find a familiar scene. This is the part of John’s gospel where Jesus and Pilate are having a conversation—a verbal sparring match, really—on Jesus’ way to the cross. Pilate’s question, “are you the King of the Jews,” reveals a lot about Pilate’s anxieties in the moment. It’s a very useful diagnostic question, meant to tell Pilate what kind of action he might need to take. If Jesus said yes, then Pilate would know that his duty was to execute Jesus, since Roman rule allowed no room for any newcomers to the title of King of the Jews. But if Jesus said no, then he might still have been executed or otherwise punished, but the calculations for Pilate would have been different. Jesus, though, demurs, turning the question back on Pilate and asking why Pilate was asking in the first place. (Note that in Mark 15:2, Jesus responds with “You say so,” rather than this more pointed accusation in John, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”). Pilate and Jesus then go on to discuss kingdoms and kingship, and Jesus allows that he is a king, but not of an earthly kingdom. That response was probably enough for Pilate to seal Jesus’ fate.
This is a good place to take a step back take another look through the prism. In the time and place where Jesus and his first followers lived their lives, kings and kingship offered a handy and useful model for thinking about how and why Jesus was important. Jewish messianism, the expectation that someone would come along and restore the lineage of David, was a strong and important part of their world. The New Testament and other early Christian traditions, then, spent a lot of time and energy trying to describe Jesus as a Jewish messiah. They linked him with David genealogically, and they described him in kingly terms (despite him having spent his life as an itinerant healer and preacher). Jesus’ first followers mined Jewish tradition and texts for descriptions of Israelite kingship, like the ones in Daniel and the Psalms and 2 Samuel, that they could apply to Jesus. The earliest Christians worked hard to make Jesus look the part of a messiah, because that was the most useful category they had for claiming that he was important.
We, though, have a different relationship with kings and kingdoms. In our 21st century world, monarchies are either a regressive form of government, or they are tabloid fodder with very little real power. And, in the wake of another contentious presidential election, many of us have a pretty conflicted relationship with power itself, especially power with grand claims to dominion over the whole world. Descriptions of absolute divine power might have been reassuring two millennia ago, but they show up differently in our world today. How do we think about a “reign of Christ,” about “Christ the King,” about a “kingdom of God” or a “kingdom of heaven,” as the people we are in the 21st century?
I’m not sure what the answer is. But this Sunday is a great opportunity to think it through. It’s a nice chance to hold the prism differently, and look through it from another angle. Is there a way to turn all of these traditions and texts away from claims of absolute dominion, and toward something that offers us strength for the present moment? Is there a way to claim “Christ the King” without it turning into just another form of supremacy? What does a “Reign of Christ” look like if we take it out of the political/governmental register and think about it in spiritual terms? Can we imagine something like an enthronement Psalm, an apocalyptic vision, or a gospel text that proclaims Jesus’ power and importance without using the language of geopolitical domination? And if we can, would that come as welcome good news to a world that has grown weary of power and its abuses?