"Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth." [Revelation 1:4b-5a]
This past Sunday the church did a wonderfully provocative thing: we confess and celebrate Christ Jesus as King, exactly because he looks nothing like the powerful, privileged, and politically potent people. It is actually one of the reasons I find practices like the church's liturgical year (so often treated as just "too confusing" or "outmoded and irrelevant to what people want these days") to be exactly what we need. (I love this day in the church's year even more when I reflect on the fact that it was added to the liturgical calendar just under one hundred years ago as a response to the rise of fascism and nationalism sweeping across Europe--as a way of resisting and protesting against fascism and "Our Country First!" thinking.) We desperately need the reminder, constantly, that the real and true ruler of the kings of earth doesn't coerce, doesn't threaten, and doesn't carry a weapon, much less rattle a saber. Jesus shows up on the world's battlefield armed only with the truth, and he just keeps telling it.
That is such a beautiful and strange notion, isn't it? That Jesus is worthy of our allegiance and praise, not because he is louder than others, or because he dominates and crushes others, but because he is "the faithful witness"--the One who just keeps telling the truth about things, and who lets that truthfulness be enough to win the day. It is amazing to me that the early church, threatened as it was by the brute military force and relentless propaganda machine of Rome, recognize that Jesus triumphed over the Empire by refusing to play by its rules. He simply kept on speaking, and doing, and embodying, the truth, even when it got him into trouble with the authorities. And that relentless truth-telling, that insistent honesty about ourselves and about God that was Jesus' way of showing his true authority.
Jesus is the one, after all, who doesn't go toe-to-toe with the Romans by riding into the Capital City on a white horse like the occupying Roman governor would have done--he borrows an ornery donkey and mocks the puffed-up pageantry of the Empire as he does it. Jesus is the one who doesn't bargain or threaten or yell when he is on trial before Pontius Pilate. There are no whipped-up tears from Jesus on trial before Pilate, nor does Jesus go railing on a tirade trying to force his way on others in the name of national unity. Jesus' sole weapon is to tell the truth, and his willingness to bear in his body the costs of telling that truth. That is decidedly un-king-like--and that is exactly why we confess this "faithful witness" as "ruler of the kings of earth."
We live in a time when truth-telling seems awfully rare, or naive to believe in. In a time like ours when you can choose whose version of the facts you want to listen to, and thereby remove yourself from ever having to hear anything unpleasant or that runs counter to the narrative you want to tell yourself, it seems awfully weak to insist that the truth matters. In a time when we easily confuse "complaining from a place of privilege" with "telling it like it is," it sometimes feels like we don't really care about who is being honest--just who sounds the most incensed and angry. In a time when we often feel like courts and courtroom antics are more about putting on a convincing show than about getting at justice, it can feel hopelessly naive to believe in the power of a "faithful witness" rather than the power of the violent to cast themselves as victims. And in a time when folks get headlines for insisting they should be able to impose their particular religion on everybody (while claiming to name the name of Jesus), it seems incredibly counter-cultural actually to follow the way of Jesus, which doesn't coerce or threaten or cajole. He just tells the truth...
It's worth sitting a while with this idea, I think. What makes Jesus different from the echo chambers and spin-doctors of our time, as well as the Roman military-and-propaganda complex of the 1st century is that he is utterly committed to the truth, at whatever cost it brings. One of the ways we get better at learning the way of Jesus, then, is actually to practice truth-telling, and with it, truthful listening, to others. It will mean we make the attempt intentionally to get outside the echo chambers of our consumer-chosen news and media bubbles, to listen to voices that we know will challenge us. It will mean we find the courage to admit where we were wrong, or where something we thought at first turned out not to hold water after all. It will mean we are willing to learn from people we didn't think could teach us anything... and also to be able to see places in ourselves where our thinking is less than solid.
Of all the titles we church folk ascribe to Jesus--King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Mighty God, Savior, Healer, Great Physician, and the like--maybe today is the day to recover and to think about the way the ancient community that gave us the book of Revelation saw Jesus: as "faithful witness" who was, by virtue of that relentless truth-telling, worthy of being ruler of the kings of the earth. What would it look like today for us to be people committed to embodying the truth like Jesus?
Let us dare it today.
Lord Jesus, let us embody your way of telling, and of doing, the truth, in love.
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