I fell in love with Arthurian legend as a child, and not long after that with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—they both feature irresistible kings, and they manage (quite convincingly) to make many believe in the possibility of not merely benign but even benevolent monarchies. Those stories often lulled me into a peaceful sleep as I dreamed of dwelling in fairy-tale kingdoms, maybe even living as a knight myself.
I carried those images with me into my Christian imagination, substituting King Jesus for Arthur and Aragorn, embracing a full-throated apocalyptic vision of God’s coming “kingdom” to set things right at last (with plenty of knights on horseback).
But I just can’t do it anymore. It has always been challenging to thread that needle for the sake of a “good king,” and these days even more so while living in a patriarchal society currently shaped by the ascendancy of White Christian Nationalism. But even more than today’s cultural currents (though they are strong indeed), the biblical witness to a livelier —and indeed, lifegiving—image of God’s realm of love has shifted my vision dramatically.
More than only setting aside potentially “unhelpful” images (to put the matter mildly), I have come to appreciate that this is about ongoing conversion for me, a conversion to a genuinely different way of thinking, and conceiving, and imagining whatever we think the word “God” means and how Jesus manifests divine presence—and it’s not about “royal splendor.”
I realized all this in a fresh way this past week as I was preparing for the seventh and last Sunday of the Easter season, the Sunday after the Ascension. For reasons I couldn’t at first discern, I found the traditional liturgical texts for the day annoying, then abrasive, and suddenly directly at odds with what the lectionary seemed to invite.
We’ve been using the 1979 Prayer Book lectionary at my parish this Easter season as a way to include texts from the Hebrew Bible. Reading the portion assigned for yesterday from the first book of Samuel (12:19-24) felt at first jarring and then suddenly liberating.
The ancient Israelites made a serious mistake, with consequences that lasted for centuries. The portion assigned from that book captures the moment when they realize this. Prior to that moment, the people had lived in a loosely organized confederation of tribes. They enjoyed the leadership of those whom God appointed on occasion to serve as “judges,” as they were called, insightful and inspired leaders to help the people live more fully into their covenantal relationship with God.
Samuel was the last of these judges and the first of Israel’s prophets. This was at a time when the people had grown restless: they had mostly forgotten the charismatic leadership of Moses and Joshua, who had led them out of their slavery in Egypt, and they were increasingly unhappy with the judges God appointed.
The time has come, they said to Samuel, for us to have a king.
Oh, Samuel said, that’s a really bad idea. He tried to explain that having a king and living in a kingdom would change dramatically what it means for them to be a people and how they live in relationship with each other.
But no, the people insisted: we want to be like all the other nations; give us a king.
So Samuel prayed about it and then reluctantly gave them what they wanted; and it did not turn out well. Samuel had warned the people about this very thing—your familial, economic, political, and religious lives will change, and not for the good, he said, if you have a king; and of course he was right.
Monarchies by definition create hierarchical societies; everything is structured vertically, in relationship to the monarch. The monarch’s subjects are related to each other only because they are all subjected to the authority of the crown. This is always true, regardless of the character of a given monarch—whether benign, benevolent, or brutal. Samuel himself made quite persuasively made this argument in detail just a couple of chapters earlier (8:10-18).
So it was of course more than a bit unnerving to reflect on that passage and then prepare Sunday’s liturgy with the collect appointed for the day from the Prayer Book, a collect in which we name God as “the King of glory.” We then praise God in that same collect for exalting “Jesus Christ with great triumph to God’s kingdom in heaven.”
It is of course quite easy, and very common, and probably perfectly natural for most of us to think of images of royal triumph for the Eastertide Sunday after Ascension Day. Yes, and…how curious that on such a day the lectionary would assign a biblical story that calls into question the value of kingly power—even warning us against any attachment to thrones, of any kind.
Reading Samuel’s caution about royalty together with a passage from John’s account of the Gospel deepened the day’s dissonance for me—and in a good way. That pairing reminded me that John always scrambles the most typical assumptions about power.
Very early on in his account—in the second chapter—John’s Jesus overturns the moneychangers’ tables in the temple, and that image of “overturning” runs throughout John’s account and all the way to the end. At the “last supper” the master becomes the servant, washing the feet of those whom he now calls friends; and John even refers to the suffering of Jesus on a cross as the very “glory of God.”
For John, Jesus does rise but not with royal power; John doesn’t include any account of the “ascension” at all. For John, the glory of God is instead divine solidarity—the one who dwells among us as one of us, the one who washes our feet, the one who dies just like us is the risen Jesus, who takes our humanity right into the very heart of God.
That’s not what most people expect to hear about God. Indeed, it’s much easier to speak of the exaltation of Jesus with more familiar images of power and in ways that we might more commonly expect—with images of kingly splendor, for example, and with the language of “ascending” and “going up and high above.” I suspect our traditions use such language to inspire praise and worship. After all, kings and crowns are symbols easily understood across cultures to convey a sense of divine sovereignty and lordship.
But that familiarity and ubiquity is exactly the problem. From Samuel to John, and many others in between, the problem is this: the language of royal power obscures the power of love.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is “good news” precisely because it overturns our expectations about divine power—just like those tables in the temple are flipped. The Gospel scrambles what “Lordship” even means when speaking of God.
As John describes it, Creator God enters God’s own creation, takes on creaturely life itself, its joys and sorrows, even death—and then raises it up, raises up creaturely life into Creator God’s very own heart.
Let’s be clear: that’s not how a “proper god” ought to behave; this is nothing less than scandalous.
We know how kings and queens should behave—they reign over a realm, just like gods and goddesses dwell above their dominions. But that’s not how the God of Jesus behaves and that’s not where we should look to find Creator God. As the angels say to the post-ascension disciples (and I now hear their tone of voice as chiding), “why are you looking up?” (Acts 1:11)
God, the Source of Life and Creator of all things, is not “up there” but found in the very things God creates and loves so deeply—including us. This is the astonishing insight we heard from John’s Jesus yesterday (17:20-26). God bless John, but his convoluted language all but guarantees most will miss the life-changing claim in that passage.
Jesus envisions that we ourselves would enjoy the very same unity, the loving union, that he enjoys with God—the very same.
By entering into deep solidarity with us, God invites us into deep and loving solidarity with each other, and indeed with the whole of God’s creation.
That’s the textual bread-crumb trail that led me to wonder what possible difference any of this might make for the world today, which is devolving and unraveling all around us.
The daily news now chronicles a world increasingly divided into insiders and outsiders, a world divided into “acceptable people” and “dangerous people,” and as we enter into LGBTQ Pride Month, we should be sure to note this: all those divisions are inscribed on the most intimate and closely held aspects of who we are in our gendered, sexual, racial, ethnic, and relational selves—on all of us.
These heartbreaking divisions are created by systems of domination and sustained by imperial regimes, and I am more convinced than ever that the Church must be very careful not to attribute that kind of power to God; far too many already assume that God looks and acts just like that—as monarch, king, and even tyrant.
Or less severely, many grew up (as I did) loving the old standard hymns like “Crown Him with Many Crowns” and enjoying the old paintings of heavenly thrones and thrilling to the sound of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” with its stirring vision of the “King of kings and Lord of lords.”
Yes, and still, and yet in some of the equally significant strands of biblical and theological traditions these kingly assumptions are quite remarkably overturned—yes, flipped like those temple tables—and all for the sake of love. Many of us heard the sound of those tables flipping yesterday morning, from the very last chapter of the Bible.
In the Revelation to John (22:12-14,16-17,20-21), just as we might expect (and as Handel set to music), we do find images of royal power—and then precisely what most do not expect: even the vision of a heavenly throne has no king! That throne is occupied instead by a lamb who was slain, and the invitation issued from that throne is not to a coronation but to a wedding feast.
“The Spirit and the bride,” John writes, “say ‘Come.’
“Let everyone who hears say ‘Come.’
“Let everyone who is thirsty come.
“Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”
Everyone who hears.
Anyone who is thirsty.
I do not hear any conditions, not a single caveat, not one exception in that invitation.
Let everyone who is thirsty come and drink.
Honestly, I believe with all my heart that this simple invitation would change the world. The world is not interested, not one bit, in yet one more king sitting on a royal throne in some distant heaven dividing the world into yet one more time in “haves” and “have-nots.”
What does interest the world, and indeed what the world is desperate to know is whether all the thirsty will ever find drink, and whether anyone who is hungry will ever find food, and whether every single lonely heart will at last know the love that is freely given, with more that enough to spare, like living water in the deserts of a barren land.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is precisely that good news, the proclamation of exactly that Realm of Love—which has no king.
