Christ the King

“It was politics that prompted him to level up the accusation of religious blasphemy against Jesus’ claims of messiah-ship to grounds of treason and libel against the emperor.

Pontius Pilate, then governor of Palestine, was being politically paranoid when he threw the question to Jesus: “Are you a king?” To which Jesus quipped an answer that Pilate would never understand, “You say that I am a king. I was born and came into this world for this one purpose, to bear witness to the truth,”

Pilate was even more perplexed and asked, “What is truth?”

But of course, for Pilate, the truth does not matter. He only knew one reality, namely, that if he let this ruckus created by politically insecure religious groups called Pharisees and Sadducees, accusing the Nazarene of religious blasphemy by claiming himself as the “messiah,” then his head might roll in the galleys.

His boss in Rome, Tiberius Caesar, had warned him that another unrest of whatever kind in his turf would mean a demotion to more dangerous zones in the Roman empire.

These claims of kingship really did Jesus more of a disservice as far as his political and religious survival was concerned.

The Jews bore a long record of history of wars and conquests; hence, the promise of a redeemer king, a messiah, a savior was a lingering flicker of hope for a freedom-deprived people.

Fake messiahs came around from time to time, most of them underneath political hides, but were unsuccessful to unify the “Chosen People” of God.

In the past, there were the early prophets such as Abraham, Jacob, Moses or Joshua, but they were never a cue for the promised redeemer. The lineage of the kingship of Jesus was from a monarch, King David, the founder of Jerusalem as capital of all Israel, and its greatest king.

The Angel Gabriel confirmed this when he broke the news to Mary in the gospel of Luke, “The Lord God will make him a King, as his ancestor David was, and he will be the King of the descendants of Jacob forever and his kingdom will have no end.”

However, being along the lines of David’s kingship, Jesus’ claims were totally misunderstood.

Even the mother of two of his apostles was definitely out of place when she made a request to the master, “Lord, in your kingdom, please put two of my sons, one on your right and other at your left.”

Judas Iscariot left Jesus to rot when he gradually discovered that Jesus’ messiah-ship was apolitical and nothing of the political kingship and conquest that he dreamt of.

The religious leaders led by Caiaphas, the high priest at the time, was more than convinced that Jesus’ claim as King of the Jews might spark another revolt that could compromise his comfort zone as leader of the autonomous rule granted by the Roman authorities.

It was politics that prompted him to level up the accusation of religious blasphemy against Jesus’ claims of messiah-ship to grounds of treason and libel against the emperor. “We have no king, except Caesar,” he chorused, along with his cohorts at the mock trial of Jesus before Pilate.

And the claims finally ended with Jesus at the cross.

But Jesus knew what his kingship is all about, something that evaded the myopic political sight of the perpetrators of his condemnation. He himself said before Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

And this exactly is what the feast of Christ the King today is all about, namely, that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, a geopolitical clamp of global dominion, rather a spiritual kingdom where he reigns in the hearts of men, effectively and affectively controlling their lives and leading them towards the right path, namely, the path to the true kingdom where he is hailed as “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”

“Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat! (Christ conquers! Christ reigns! Christ commands!)