Why He's Worthy--November 16, 2021

Why He's Worthy--November 16, 2021

"To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.  Amen." [Revelation 1:5b-6]

The usual thinking says you only get to be in charge if you are a winner, that it is victory over your opponents that makes you the rightful authority.  In the old days of kings and queens with squabbling factions and armies, you knew who was the sovereign by looking for who was left standing after they faced off in battle or a duel between contenders.  In other, perhaps less-respectable chapters of history, you took the throne by assassinating your predecessor or launching a coup to overthrow whoever was in charge before.  Even in our time and place, we still have a system based on winning--although our approach has something to do with elections rather than bloody battles, at least theoretically. We may use the polling place as the site of the conflict now, but there is still ruthless strategy about whose votes will get to count, how to arrange the field in the favor of your "side," and how to keep as many of your opponents' supporters from being counted. We are so used to defining the qualifications for being in charge in terms of "defeating the other guy" that we probably have a hard time even imagining that there could be any other way.  How else would one decide who is qualified to be the ruler, unless they have shown themselves to be a winner?

But Jesus is different--and the early community of his followers understood that.  The community that handed the book of Revelation onto us understood that Jesus' kind of kingship is completely different.  It's not derived from a victory on a battlefield where he killed his enemies--my goodness, there's not even a hint of Jesus zapping his foes in the name of "self-defense."  Jesus doesn't conquer any enemy lands or assassinate would-be competitors.  He doesn't even appeal to winning more votes than his opponents (after all, Rome's promise of "bread and circuses" always had mass appeal).  What makes Jesus worthy of "glory and dominion forever and ever" is... his self-giving love.

Notice that: the writer of Revelation gives praise to Jesus--and counts him worthy of being Lord of all creation--not because of looking like a "winner" at all, but because he was willing to lose everything for our sake.  It is because he "loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood"--that is to say, it is the choice to lay down his own life for ours that makes Jesus Lord. It is Jesus' willing to lose--to lose big and to lose it all--all the way to a borrowed grave, that makes him the rightful sovereign of God's upside-down kingdom.  It is what Frederick Buechner called "the magnificent defeat" of the cross--where Jesus doesn't kill his enemies or even escape their grasp with his life, but dies at their hands for their own sins--that makes Jesus king.

In a culture like ours that sees everything--literally everything, it seems--as a competition to be won or lost, and that certainly still thinks of leadership in terms of "defeating the other guy" (rather than--gasp!--the notion of "who can build consensus"), Jesus is beautifully subversive.  He brings about God's Reign, where the last are first, the nobodies are treated as somebodies, and the arrogant and proud are taken down a few pegs, and he does it without having to defeat somebody else on a battlefield.  It is his love that makes him worthy, and it is that same self-giving love that has grabbed hold of us, motley crew that we are, and made us into his kingdom.  

What would it look like if we stopped seeing things in terms of who we can defeat or who we have to overpower in order to look strong?  What could happen if we no longer had the impulse to have to look tough or threatening or intimidating to anybody else? And what might happen if we defined a leader's authority, not in terms of who they can "win" against, whether by percentages of polls or weapons drawn, but in terms of how they give themselves away in love for all? How will we be changed by giving our allegiance to Jesus, who doesn't think in terms of killing others to save his own skin, even when faced with enemies who want to kill him? And how will we be different because we confess the crucified rabbi Jesus as Lord of the universe, not in spite of the cross, but exactly because of it?

Go... be different.  Let the strange sovereignty of the King who reigns from a cross make you stand out from a world bent on "winning."

Lord Jesus, shape us in the likeness of you kind of kingdom, where love leads us to lay our lives down for others rather than taking life to preserve our own.