Word to the Wise
Friday, April 17, 2015 - 2nd Week of Easter - Fri
[Acts 5:34-42 and John 6:1-15]Since Jesus knew that they were going to come and carry him off to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain alone. [John]
Although we try, with varying degrees of success in the USA, to separate religion from politics, the very idea of such a separation would have been foreign to the people of Jesus' time. (Indeed in the Middle East, it is still a foreign idea.) Israel, during Jesus' time, was under Roman occupation. The unity of the Roman empire was sustained in large part by the cult of the emperor. The gospels show a sustained effort on the part of Jesus not to be considered a ruler of any kind. In the Gospel of Mark, he tries to keep every miracle a secret. (Such things could attract the wrong kind of attention.) The dialogue with Pilate in the Passion According to John is a good way to see how the idea of "king" plays out. Pilate places an inscription on the cross which has become a kind of Christian "icon:" INRI - Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews In short, the kingdom of God was and is not to be seen as a political kingdom. The problem is that too many believing Christians separate their faith from their politics.
We in America have a form of "civil religion" which has as its scriptures the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution. We have institutions (executive, legislative and judicial) which strive to govern according to these documents. But these documents are not particularly religious. The Declaration of Independence mentions "nature's God" and that is it! The Constitution forbids the "establishment" of a religion as part of government. Jesus would not have to fear that anyone would make him "king" here!
We celebrate a feast called "Christ the King." I suspect that this is our way of carrying him off to make him king. He multiplied the loaves and fishes and the crowd decided that anyone who could do that should be politically in charge as well. All he was doing was to reveal more about himself and his mission. If we want to live Christian life fully, we have to start from Jesus' teachings and not from our sacred civil documents. We cannot make Jesus a "king" in the civil sense, but we can put him in charge of our lives. That is a different kind of kingdom! AMEN
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