King of Love
It is the season of Epiphany on the church calendar. It is when we remember the story of the three wise men coming to worship Jesus as King twelve days after he was born, which is where we get the famous “12 Days of Christmas” song. Many of the passages during this season focus on Jesus’ kingship. They reveal who this little baby boy actually is. He is no simple peasant boy, but he is King of the universe, the fulfillment of all of God's promises, the one that the whole world had been waiting for, and especially the Jews. He is the One! Like Neo in the Matrix. That is no small revelation!
The funny thing about this news is that there is a disconnect for us. We can't really relate to the idea of having a king or needing a king. Sure we know fairy tales that romanticize the concept of royalty. We all love the Disney movies that show princes rescuing Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. We like the idea, but that's just what they are, fantasies. They don't seem real to us. The closest thing we have now is the British royal family, which are less like royalty in the historic sense and more just fodder for the tabloids. We obsess about their weddings and pregnancies, but it has no real bearing on our actual lives. Again, it is just a romantic fantasy.
In fact, our concept of king as Americans is formed from a much different point of view. We have never had a king. Our country was built upon the premise that no person should be trusted with such power. We formed as a nation by rebelling against King George III in the Revolutionary War. We are largely suspicious of kings and monarchs, and we have a general distaste and disrespect for authority in many ways. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum we all have a very robust sense of our personal freedoms. We don't want others telling us what we can and cannot do. We are usually the country that goes to great lengths to "free" other countries or people groups from such types of singular rule or authority. We believe that people should rule themselves. Right? That's our idea of freedom.
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As I was thinking about this, a scene from the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail came to mind, and I think captures the modern view of kings and monarchy perfectly. In the movie King Arthur is on a quest to find the Holy Grail and he is looking for knights to join him in the quest, his knights of the round table. At one point he comes across some peasants in a field literally stacking flith (mud) up in piles. He tells the peasant named Dennis and his companion that he is their king, “King of the Britons.” The peasants respond, "I didn't vote for you." And Arthur says, "You don't vote for kings." They say, “How did you become king then?” And he tells them of when the lady of the lake in all of her glory gave him excalibur (his sword), showing him that he was chosen by divine providence to carry excalibur and become king. Dennis responds saying, "Listen, strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power is derived from a mandate from the the masses not some farcical aquatic ceremony." And it goes on in hilarious fashion with Dennis claiming Arthur is repressing him by ordering him to shut up. Dennis articulates our point view. Kings are archaic and the notion of them being chosen by divine providence is ridiculous to our enlightened minds. How could we ever relate to Jesus as King? There's a disconnect.
Well, a wise friend of mine once said that something does not matter to you until it matters to you. Meaning you can't really force or coerce yourself or anyone else into a position, thought, or belief. And I think that's true. We can't make ourselves care about Jesus as King until it matters to us, until it hits home on a personal level. And that is something that we cannot predict or control.
As humans we underestimate how much we will change in the future. No matter what stage of life we are in, we tend to think that we will more or less stay the same. We will continue to like the things we like now. We'll like the same kind of music. We'll enjoy the same foods. We'll have the same political views, etc. In a psychological study involving over 19,000 people ages 18 to 68 two things were consistent. Everyone thought they had changed a lot since they were younger, but none of them thought they would change that much in the future. We have a tendency to think we have arrived when we think about where we are. We have figured things out a lot more than when we were younger. We say things like: "If only I knew then what I know now." and so on. Now, in one sense this is not that profound of a discovery: people are not good at predicting the future. I think most of us knew that already. The interesting thing is that we are not very good at learning or internalizing the fact that we change quite a bit as we grow older, as we gain more experience, as life passes. We do not have it all figured out. A lot of what we know today maybe very different tomorrow. This is just another way to come to the same conclusion that things don't matter to us until they matter to us, until life changes to the point where we need something else, when we find ourselves in a place we didn't expect. Like Dennis, the thought of having a king may seem ridiculous to us today, but it may matter a great deal to us at some point in our future.
Well, I think there is something interesting in the Psalm 72 that gives us a clue as to how Jesus bridges this disconnect we've been talking about. In the case of Arthur, he became king because as Dennis says, "some watery tart threw a sword at him." It was arbitrary, unrelated to real life. It's abstract and has nothing to do with you and me. But Jesus, as you might have guessed, is different. Thank God! The Psalm says that all kings will bow down to him and all nations will pay him service, but then it gives the explanation as to why (v. 11).
"For he delivers the needy when he calls,
the poor and him who has no helper.
He has pity on the weak and the needy,
and saves the lives of the needy.
From oppression and violence he redeems their life,
and precious is their blood in his sight” (vv. 12-14).
Jesus' kingship is founded upon what he does for us. He completely shatters Dennis' and all of our preconceived notions or even experiences of a king or any authority for that matter. He is a different kind of King. He does not lord his authority over us rather he delivers us. He identifies with us. He preserves our lives and redeems us from oppression. This is the type of king he is.
Think about times when you have been the victim of someone abusing their authority over you. It is one of the worst experiences. You feel so powerless. Like you don't have any options. I used to have a heavy foot when I was a younger man, so I had my fair share of run ins with the police due to speeding. Once in particular I was picking up a friend from Duquesne University for Spring break and driving back to our neighborhood north of Pittsburgh, and I got pulled over. I was certainly going over the speed limit, so I deserved the ticket, but instead of simply giving me the ticket and letting me go, the officer proceeded to lecture me about how young kids like me are wreck less and how we make his life so hard and on and on…for literally over 10 minutes! That is an incredibly long time when you're sitting on the side of the road. But there was really nothing we could do. He was in a bad mood, and we knew if we objected or anything that would just feed his power trip. We just had to sit there and take it. Now I know this is a relatively trivial example, but the emotions are there. Abuse of power is dehumanizing.
But Jesus is the opposite. He lays down his power for the perpetrator like me. As he said, He did not come to be served like a typical king, but to serve (Matt. 20:28). He identifies with the lowly, with the weak, with the oppressed, and that is all of us. It is much more than simply class related. It is not economic or political. It is spiritual. We are all impoverished spiritually. We are all oppressed by our sin, by our inability to love. We need deliverance; we need rescuing.
Still, how does a King meet all of those needs? Why is the fact that Jesus is King particularly good news? It is good news because He uses his authority as King over all things to pay the penalty for our sin. He uses his authority to lay down his own life for ours. Think of the situation of the cross. Jesus is the ruler of the universe, the Son of God come to earth, and he stands accused and condemned by his own creation, by the Romans and the Jews, the perceived authority at the time. But they had no authority that was not given to them by him (John 19:11). He could have just wiped them all out and displayed the fact that he is the true authority in the world and the universe, but that wouldn't have ultimately helped us. You see, as I said before, our poverty is not primarily physical. It's not that we are oppressed by human rulers or human institutions. It is first and foremost spiritual. Any physical manifestations of weakness or oppression or poverty are merely shadows of the spiritual reality in our hearts. We are broken on a heart level. For Jesus to come and purely deal with the physical forms of oppression in our lives would not even begin to be good news for us because we would still be stuck with our broken hearts, with our inability to love in the way that we should.
Jesus uses his authority to submit himself to the accusation of the law, the verdict that we as sinners stand condemned to death. We have not loved God with everything we are and we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. That is the law, and we have broken it in every way. But Jesus is the King who says I will take their fault upon myself. We need the whole system of law on the spiritual level to be dealt with. We need it to be fulfilled so that it would never be able to accuse us again. We need it to be done. Because otherwise, there would always be that potential for it to come back and stand over us once more. If Jesus simply excused us of our sin, then we would still always have that sneaking fear that we really are not ok. The law, if it is allowed to remain as the ultimate authority, still has power over us to condemn us to death. But Jesus confounds the law. He not only fulfills it perfectly for us by living a perfect life as a human, he then willingly (by his own authority) allows himself to be hanged on a cross condemned by the law as a guilty sinner. This brings an end to the law you see because it condemned the sinless One to death. It saw him hanged on a tree, which the Bible tells us is the sign of being cursed, and the law said that He was cursed (Deut. 21:23, Gal. 3:13). The problem is that the law was not just condemning our sin to death in Jesus it was condemning its own King. Jesus fulfilled the law. He was perfect. This put the law in a quandary, to put it very mildly.
It was right in that Jesus took our sin upon himself and hung on a tree for it and deserved to die, but then it was wrong in that it was condemning the Author of life itself, the true King of heaven and earth, the perfect Lamb of God. All of this revealed the law to be inadequate. It did not have the authority to condemn its own Lord to death unless he willingly submitted to it. This is why death could not hold Him. The verdict against Jesus could not stand. He rose again displaying his authority over death, conquering it for us. At the cross and resurrection, Jesus showed us what authority really is. He showed us the deeper magic that C.S. Lewis' Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe talked about. He is the King of love, a love that lays down his life for his friends. There is no greater love than this (John 15:13). Against such love there is no law (Gal. 5:22-23). Jesus is the true authority. Jesus is the King of love. He is the true King.
And this matters to us because we have no authority over our sin. We have no authority over the law. It rightly exposes, accuses, and condemns our sin. It says we do not love God, our neighbor, or ourselves as we should. We have no ground to stand on. But Jesus says, I have loved for them. Jesus says to the law: You no longer have any authority over them. Their sin is mine, and I gave my life for it. I am the authority over them now. And as we saw earlier, the law cannot handle this mystery: God himself, the righteous One, becoming sin for us. It simply has to condemn him and prove itself inadequate. It is removed, and instead we are given love and grace.
It matters to us because we find ourselves out of control. Unlike the American idea of freedom that I talked about earlier, we are unable to rule ourselves. Too often we are subject to the forces within and around us. In those times when we've surprised ourselves again with our sin, we can know that the One with the true authority in the world has done everything for us to set us free. When life happens and we are overwhelmed, and all that we thought we knew is challenged, it is then that we can know He has delivered us. When we the poor cry out in distress, and we the oppressed have no helper we are given the promises of Psalm 72: he has had pity on us the lowly and poor; he has preserved the lives of us the needy. He has redeemed our lives from oppression and violence, and our blood is dear in his sight. This is our King. Jesus Christ, the King of love. Amen.
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