John 18:33
The end of the Church Year culminates in the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. In our Gospel reading, Pilate is face to face with Jesus and poses the infamous Good Friday question: “Are you the King of the Jews?” The response is a bit evasive, because Jesus knows what Pilate means by “king”—one more earthly ruler obsessed with power and all too willing to use violence to preserve it. Then Jesus adds: “My kingdom is not from this world.”
Care should be taken in the interpretation, because there is always a double meaning to the term “world” in John’s Gospel. Bishop Robert Barron points out: “On the one hand, ‘world’ designates the universe that God has created and that he sustains in love. This is the world that God loved enough to send his only Son as its Savior. On the other hand, ‘world’ means that manner of ordering things which is out of step with God’s intentions; it indicates a political and cultural realm in which selfishness, hatred, division, and violence hold sway.” So, Jesus does not imply that his kingdom is irrelevant to ordinary experience, but that his way of ordering is radically out of step with the way practiced by Caesar, Pilate, Herod, and others (even today). In short, Jesus’ kingdom has everything to do with “this world” in the initial sense of the term, and nothing to do with it in the second.
Jesus continues: “If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews” (Jn 18:36). “The mark of the worldly kingdom is violence and the maintenance of order through force and fear,” Barron rightly reminds us. Jesus’ reign, however, is devoid of any force and all fear. It will suffer injustice , but it will not perpetuate it. These dynamics of Jesus’ kingdom are on fully display in the events of Good Friday. Christ the King is crowned and he assumes his throne, but the crown is made of thorns, and the throne is a Roman instrument of torture.
This we know and believe: the Lord is King—a shepherd king though, a king of Love, who through his own death and resurrection saves us. With songs of glory and praise, we acclaim Christ the King this day!
Fr. Terry