Standing Under the Scriptures
November 29, 2009

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday, the first of Advent, are:

Zechariah 14.4-9: The apocalyptic notes sounded by the prophet comport with the Advent theme.

Luke 21.25-33: This is a section of Luke’s version of the Little Apocalypse. We had the corresponding section of Mark’s version Sunday before last, in my sermon.

Last Sunday, the final post-Pentecost Sunday, is also known as the Feast of Christ the King. Thus it invited consideration of the nature of Christ’s kingship, of its contrasts with worldly kingship, and of the conflict between the two. And our readings were well suited to this purpose. We began our discussion with the first, the introductory verses of Revelation. But it may be better to start now with the second, John.18.33-38.

This passage comes after the arrest of Jesus by the religious authorities and their turning him over to Pilate, the Roman Procurator. It describes a face-to-face encounter between the two, with apparently no one else present. Thus to a rare degree it portrays the confrontation of the two kingdoms, with Pilate in his Roman authority representing the worldly one and Jesus representing and indeed constituting the heavenly one. As we saw, in worldly terms Pilate, as the representative of Caesar, has all the power on his side. Jesus as a person of no apparent consequence, under arrest, and liable to execution has none. The contrast appears is the first verse, in which Pilate on returning to the Praetorium, the august Roman headquarters, summons Jesus, and proceeds to interrogate him: “Are you the King of the Jews?”---likely in irony, so as to make his powerlessness the more obvious. But Jesus in turn brings out the relative nature of Pilate’s authority, as only conferred on him rather than inherently his. He does this by asking whether Pilate is voicing his own idea or someone else’s. Pilate scouts the importance of the distinction. He had to have got it from the chief priests. As a Roman and not one of the Jews in their strangeness, he would never have thought of it himself. But still Jesus’ rejoinder leads him to generalize his question to him: “What have you done?” Jesus speaks first of what his kingship is not. It is not of this world, so that his followers would exercise physical force on his behalf. Pilate presses him further: “So you are a king?” Jesus then specifies what it consists in: bearing witness to the truth, for the sake of those who though in the world are of the truth. He himself of course constitutes the truth. Pilate responds to that by asking, “What is truth?” His question can be and has been variously interpreted. But conceivably it reflects a dawning on him that his worldly power in the end amounts to nothing, that only Jesus’ spiritual power has validity. His next action, which is to say to “the Jews” that he has found no fault in Jesus, would indicate this.

A pattern may be seen here. The worldly kingdom, effectively the state, has the worldly power, the heavenly kingdom having the spiritual power, and the two come into conflict, necessarily in view of the opposing natures. But in the end it is the spiritual power that prevails. And we may view our Revelation reading (1.1-8) as reflecting the extension of this pattern into history, namely that of the early church. In the class I said that these first verses did not particularly reflect the book’s nature. In fact they contain important indications of it. For they refer to the necessary conflict between the worldly and the spiritual when they speak of “what must soon take place… for the time is near.” When they say that Christ “is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, every one who pierced him,” they anticipate the triumph of the spiritual. And they confirm this triumph when they conclude with “’I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”

Revelation is both complex and obscure. Many have sought to decipher it. But the hypothesis which seems to fit best is that it is concerned mainly with the massive and sustained persecution of the church in its early centuries, up to the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and his Edict of Toleration, issued in 313 AD. I had some discussion of this in my sermon. The Roman state, with its ultimate reliance on force, felt threatened by the very existence of the church, which needed no such reliance. And it tried by all the means at its disposal, psychological as well as physical, to wipe the church out. John may be seen as writing to “the seven churches of Asia [Minor]” to alert them that this persecution is about to start, if it has not already. He writes also to assure them that God’s power will enable them in the end to prevail, so long as they remain steadfast. “’I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, the Almighty.”

But the experience of persecution, with its wholesale arrests, its infliction of horrible tortures, and its putting to death of those who still refused to renounce Christ, was necessarily an intense one. And in such times there is a tendency to express things in apocalyptic imagery. This tendency can be seen also in the Book of Daniel, which evidently arose out of the Maccabean Rebellion of the 2nd century BC, a similarly intense time, and from which much of the imagery of Revelation is drawn. In these terms the obscurity of Revelation can also be accounted for. It was necessary to speak obscurely to avoid coming to the attention of the Roman authorities. Chapter 18 goes on at length the downfall of Babylon. Babylon can be taken as a code word for Rome.

But having with its spiritual power prevailed over worldly power, the church proceeded to become involved with worldly power. This was an effect of the Council of Nicea, which in 325 AD turned to the Emperor Constantine for help with a doctrinal question (Arianism) which it had been unable to resolve itself. And thereafter church and state have continued to be involved in each other’s affairs, a condition known as Constantinianism. This has taken the form mainly of the state seeking to control the church but also, as in the medieval papacy, of the church seeking to control the state. And it has resulted, fairly clearly, in a loss of the church’s spiritual power. We may suppose that with our American separation of church and state this no longer concerns us. But there is now a phenomenon which, while more subtle, is no less pervasive. This is control by society, through its infusion of the values of the culture into the church. It might be termed social Constantinianism. This is not to say that the state, or society, ought to be done away with. Both perform indispensable functions. Still less is it to call for the institution of a theocracy. But it does imply that the right relation between church and state, and society, has yet to be arrived at.

Our readings, as also church history, pose a further issue for us. This concerns the extent to which we impute to the state aspects of divinity. To be sure we do no such thing overtly, although it has been done in other countries in the not distant past. But do we do so unconsciously, as when we profess our loyalty to the state? Can patriotism become a form of idolatry? If we are to stand under the Scriptures, we are obliged to question ourselves about these things too.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted