Jeremiah 23.1-6, Luke 23. 33-43
“There was also an inscription over Jesus, “This is the King of the Jews”.
The inscription Pilate ordered to be nailed at the head of the cross was meant to be satire, designed to rub in even further the humiliation heaped on Jesus by this shameful death – “This is your king? This broken, brutalised man? Follow him and this will happen to you too – losers!” it says. All four Gospels record it. In some the Jewish authorities argue with Pilate, asking him to write “This man said he was King of the Jews”, but Pilate tells them, “I have written what I have written”. Pilate is convinced he has finished with Jesus, and he has underlined the might of Rome in doing so. The Romans will decide who is a king, who has power, who rules, and people had better remember that.
Three days later, and his confident assertion doesn’t look so clever, as Jesus’ followers insist he has been raised from the dead, and because of that they refuse to bow to Roman power, even if it costs them their own lives.
Two thousand years later, Pilate’s inscription stands as a challenge to us
We hear this Gospel reading today, because this – the last Sunday of the Christian year - is the feast of Christ the King, a feast that was instituted around a hundred years ago by the then Pope, Pius XI, in reaction to the rise of communism and fascism, and of the populist leaders who seemed to be grabbing the attention of so many across the world in the political turmoil that followed the First World War. I doubt whether the Pope’s own motives would stand up to too much scrutiny – it was partly about reasserting the position of the Catholic church – but nonetheless I think it is a useful challenge to us to think about what it is we mean by kingship, what good leadership looks like, who we decide to follow, and why. And that’s something that is just as valid and vital today as it was then..
Any group of people, left to their own devices, will tend to throw up leaders, whether they mean to or not. And it’s just as well; it’s very frustrating to be in a group where no one is prepared to take any decisions or responsibility. Nothing gets done. Those who find themselves in the lead may be willing or not; sometimes it’s just that everyone else takes a step back more quickly than you do. And those who lead may be good at it, or not. As one old, and supposedly genuine, report on a military leader said, “his men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.”
Generally speaking though, leaders won’t lead for long unless they deliver a bit more than this. Leadership is intrinsically tied up with followership – it’s followers who make leaders. However clever or strong the leader is they can’t make people come after them. So if we wonder why we have the leaders we have, we need to look first at ourselves, at the things we demand, the needs we expect them to meet.
In uncertain times there is a well-documented tendency for people to look for what seems like “strong” leadership, black and white certainty – might is right “warrior culture”. That was the case a hundred years ago, when the Feast of Christ the King was inaugurated, when dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco were on the rise, and it is the case now, with the growth of populist leaders around the world. When life feels complicated, when change is rapid, when we don’t know what to do, someone who gives us a clear direction of travel – even if it is the wrong direction – will always tend to be popular. At the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire provided what has often been seen as the “strong man” style of leadership, ruling through a mixture of reward and brutal threat. People were controlled, said the poet and satirist Juvenal through “bread and circuses”. Roman citizens were given free grain, as a reinforcement of their privileged status, but also gladiatorial games, in which opponents of the regime were forced to fight to the death or used as bait for wild beasts, a not-so-subtle reminder of what might happen if you stepped out of line. Crucifixions were a common punishment for rebellion – an excruciatingly painful, humiliating and most of all public form of execution. And that was what people expected.
That’s why Jesus is so counter-cultural, so hard for Pilate to understand. We’ve had two thousand years to get our heads around the pattern that Jesus shows us on the cross, non-violence, self-sacrifice, love. We’ve often been very bad at following it, but we know it at least as an ideal. At the time of Jesus, though, the idea of a leader who led through service, who didn’t want to lord it over others, who cared more for the people around him than himself, who was prepared to give up his life for people who would never be able to give anything in return, just didn’t make sense at all. If he can’t even save himself, say his accusers, as he dies on the cross, then how can he possibly be any use to anyone else.
It's only one of the robbers crucified with him who gets it. “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom” he says. It may look obvious that Rome has won, but this man at least sees that the real king is the man hanging next to him on the cross. What so impresses him is that Jesus has done nothing to deserve crucifixion, and yet here he is, coming alongside an outcast like this robber, sharing his fate. Jesus could have avoided death. He could have looked to his own interests. But he won’t go back on the message he has been preaching throughout his ministry; a message which proclaims the worth and dignity of every person, old or young, rich or poor, powerful or powerless, male or female, slave or free, Jewish or Gentile, good or bad, a member of the in group or a total outcast. Each one is a child of God, and because of that is equally loved.
That revolutionary message is the bottom line, the deciding factor, for Jesus, and if we claim to follow him that means it has to be our bottom line too, the thing that guides our actions, guiding how we lead but also how, and who, we follow, who we are influenced by, who we give our allegiance to, so that we are making a world in which, as Jeremiah put it, people need not “fear any more, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing.” Amen
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