As we come closer to Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, I can’t help but notice an irony in what I’ll call the first “No Kings” protest, as relayed to us in the Gospel of John:
They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” (John 19:15, ESV)
The irony is that the Jews wanted a Messiah who would overthrow the Roman government. Seeing that Jesus claimed to be God but had a different purpose than fulfilling their immediate desires, they sought to have Him crucified, preferring to submit to the lordship of their hated Roman overseers. To shout “We have no king but Caesar” was to capitulate to living on in chains.
But by willingly going to the Cross, Christ accomplished His purpose. He sacrificed Himself in atonement for human sin.
Was this a universal atonement? It is universally offered, though not everyone chooses to accept His free gift on their behalf. Many reject it, as they don’t wish to submit to this new King, even if He were raised from the dead.
The issue is one of authority. We want to claim for ourselves authority to define what is good and evil. This was the original sin of Adam and Eve.
Rather than accept Christ as King of our life (the One who sacrificed Himself so that we might thrive as the humans we were intended to be), we happily sell ourselves short, submitting to any lesser authority that affirms our willfulness in pursuing whatever paths seem right to us. We reject God’s laws, replacing Him with ourselves as our own law-giver.
In today’s world we further reimagine Christ, not as a King with true authority over us, but as our ever-affirming friend, one who tells us what we want to hear. To quote H. Richard Niebuhr, for we moderns, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
But Christ did die on a cross that he chose for a purpose, that of our justification and redemption before the one true Holy God.
In a world that is currently consumed with concepts of identity, it’s worth noting that Christ did not die so that we could henceforth find our identity in our tribe (political or otherwise) or in our appetites (sexual or otherwise). He died so that we could find our identity as sinners redeemed by His blood, shed on our behalf. Our unity is found as fellow recipients of His grace.
His resurrection demonstrates His victory over the chains of sin and death that have bound us. Our choice is to either make Christ our King, picking up our cross to follow Him, or to return to chains of sin and death where we accept lesser rulers of our own dying little kingdoms.
Trusting and following Christ is to submit to His authority, allowing Him to live in and through us toward His redemptive purposes in this world. None of us do this perfectly, though one way or another, it seems there will be a king on the throne of our hearts.
