King of the Jews

King of the Jews--January 24, 2019

"It was nine o'clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, 'The King of the Jews'." [Mark 15:25-26]

Christ not only knows what it is like to wear our human skin; in Christ, God knows what it is to be kept down because of the sort of skin he wore.  That is to say, God knows from personal experience what it is like to be the victim of racism.  God knows it, this piece of the human condition, more fully and truly than so many of us who have been privileged to be insulated from it in our lives.

The Gospels are clear about this, and if we miss it, it is likely because we  have let the dramatic irony of the story get to us.

If you have ever been anything of a churchgoer, or even have a vague awareness of the story of the Gospels, you know this scene: Jesus, at the cross, with an inscription above him that reads something like, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." (And side note, this is why lots of religious artwork includes the lettering "INRI" on the cross--this would be the initials for the Latin phrase, "Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm".)

Christians are "in" on the joke here, of course--the Gospel writers all want us to believe that Jesus really is the King of the Jews, the promised Messiah of Israel, and that the Romans don't know how right they've got it.  And yes, that is part of what's going on in the scene of Jesus' crucifixion--the sheer weight of the irony of the pompous and arrogant Romans actually being more right than they know when they nail up the charge against Jesus: "King of the Jews."  I can remember as a kid getting to this part of the story every year on Good Friday, almost shaking my head with disdain for those foolish Romans, and feeling like I was in on a secret that even that big shot Pontius Pilate didn't understand.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's just stay with this familiar moment in the story for a bit.  While it may well be that, from the perspective of the Gospel-writers, the Romans are set up as the butt of a joke--in that they don't understand how right they really are about Jesus--from the perspective of the Romans themselves, they think this is a power-move to belittle Jesus and the people from whom he traces his ancestry.  The Romans see this charge as a fantastic way to mock one more conquered people over whom they have casually trampled.  The inscription, "King of the Jews" wasn't simply meant to mock Jesus, but to mock his people--it was a way of saying, with so much imperial braggadocio, "Look what we do to Jews--if this is their king."  It was a way of threatening, while keeping a tight-lipped smirk on their imperial faces, "You conquered people are nothing to us.  See how easily we kill you?  See how negligible you are to us?  So... don't step out of line--you and your kind are all the same to us."

There is word for what happens when power is used to puff up one group of people--one nationality, one culture, one language, one complexion, one shade of skin color, or what have you--and to keep another group down: racism.  We didn't invent racism in the antebellum period of American history, and racism had plenty of other banners to fly before the invention of the Confederate flag. We have simply followed the lead of one powerful empire after another in history.  And make no mistake: what happened to Jesus at the hands of the Roman Empire was, for whatever else it meant for the salvation of the world, also about what happens when one people group constructs a system designed to control, abuse, and when profitable destroy, the bodies of another group of people.  That is to say, from Rome's perspective, killing Jesus was one more way of reinforcing a system designed to keep all the peoples they had conquered down and subjugated.  

This is a really important point for us to let sink in.  From Rome's perspective, they don't really care about the particulars of Jesus' words, actions, or religious claims.  Rome doesn't care if you call yourself the Son of God or a baked potato, so long as you aren't a threat to the "Rome First" agenda.  You see that in the Gospels, when Jesus is put on trial--the religious assembly cares about his claims of divinity and charges of blasphemy, but when Jesus goes before Pilate, the charges shift to Jesus being a threat to Roman political rule. Rome doesn't care if Jesus believes he has come to reveal the Father to the world--Rome cares that people are using the term "Messiah" for Jesus, and they will not tolerate that.  A "Messiah" would upset their system which allows Rome to rule over Judeans, to control their bodies, and to deny them their full humanity.  That's what makes Rome nervous.  So Rome wants to kill Jesus for the same reason lynch mobs left black bodies hanging in trees: as one more way of instilling fear in everybody else of the subjugated group, so they wouldn't make trouble or resist the system that kept the powerful ones in power.  As far as Pilate is concerned, the phrase "King of the Jews" isn't merely a condemnation of Jesus for claiming messiah-ship--it is a claim of Roman superiority over the people Jesus represented, and a claim of Roman control over their bodies.

Now, obviously, as I say, Christians see that there is more going on at the cross than killing a Jewish rabbi as an example to the rest of the Jewish people Rome sought to dominate.  After all, Rome did the same to countless other victims on countless other crosses, and yet Christianity sees something unique and powerful--salvific--in the specific crucifixion of this particular Jewish body.  But, to borrow a phrase of the biblical scholar N.T. Wright, while the cross of Jesus indeed means more than that, it cannot mean less than this.  In other words, we cannot ignore or cut out from the scene at Calvary the fact that Rome did what it did to Jesus as part of a deliberate system designed to control the people groups whom the Empire conquered.  We cannot ignore that the same Empire that paved roads across Europe and built aqueducts and coliseums was also powered by a system of domination that put Rome First at the expense of the peoples and lands they took.

And there is a Good News reason we need to remember it.  It means, because of what we believe about Jesus, that no less than God knows what it is to be the victim of systemic racism, and that none other than God was willing to endure its brutality, as a way of saying "yes" to all those who have ever been treated as "less-than" by another group of people with power.  To say that Jesus is God-in-our-skin also means that God knows what it is like to be killed--lynched--by the Empire as a way of trying to make other dominated people live in fear... and it means that the resurrection of Jesus breaks the power of that Empire to ever force anybody to be ruled by that fear any longer.  

It would have been easier--less painful for God, at least--if the Incarnation had been into the life of a well-to-do Roman citizen, wouldn't it?  It would have meant that the Son of God could have avoided being made an example of, and it would have meant a much more comfortable platform from which he could have launched a new religion.  But God was not interested in a cushy, insulated niche, or in starting new religions with the Empire's nodding approval.  God was committed--and always remains committed--to identifying with all of history's victims and "less-thans".  God remains committed to taking a stand and a place with all the ones whose bodies have been controlled, beaten, threated, and destroyed by systems of power.  God remains committed, in other words, to giving dignity to those whose dignity has been stolen by others.  And God does it, not by bringing in an even bigger empire with an even bigger army to blow the Romans off the map, but by suffering at the hands of the powerful for the sake of the weak.

This is the upside-down wonder of our God.  This is what it really means to say we believe that in Jesus, God entered into humanity and wore our skin.  It means that God has chosen deliberately to be counted among those who are kept down and regarded as "less than" because of their kind of humanity.  And it means that God is not ashamed or afraid to identify with a whole world full of people who have been stepped on in this life.

The Romans didn't understand how right they were when they called Jesus "King of the Jews," and they didn't understand how powerful a claim it was to say that the God of the universe was willing to be lynched in order to stand with all peoples, all nations, and all faces.

All praise to the God who was strung up at the cross. All praise to the God whose resurrection allows all who have been stepped on to rise anew.

Lord God, you astound us by coming near, not simply to watch safely at a distance, but to bear the worst of our inhumanity to one another by embracing our humanity.