Reflection by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings on Christ the King:-
We have come to the end of Luke’s Gospel and his study of Jesus for his convert master Theophilus, and find ourselves at the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Luke’s entire account has been designed to challenge the way Theophilus, a wealthy aristocrat and magistrate, even the possible governor of a Roman province, thought and lived. He was one of the elite 1% who made up the top of Roman society in the first century CE. During his periods in office he would have condemned many to death, frequently by crucifixion, and by the time Luke and his fellow gospellers wrote, after the failure of the Jewish Revolt, there would have been thousands of rebels crucified between Caesarea and Jerusalem. Luke reaches his finale with yet three more such deaths, yet insisting that one in particular has changed the world; has changed eternally the human relationship with the One sole God, and this is the claim our faith continues to make 2,000 years later. One death has altered the world.
Our exploration begins with the elevation to power over all the twelve tribes of Israel at Hebron. (2 Samuel 5:1-3) Hitherto Israel had lived with its prophets and local judges, and unlike their neighbours had rejected kingship and the inevitable scrabbles for power this brought. Samuel the prophet had strongly advised against it, and earlier attempts under Saul had led to anarchy as his many sons fought for pre-eminence. David was seen in many ways as the great ‘saviour’, but we should never forget that under his rule, and ultimately that of Solomon, the country was divided and subsequent members of the ‘house’ were viewed very poorly by observers of their reigns, bringing ever more division and chaos. Kingship became a very dirty word in Israel, and eventually ended with surrogates placed there by the then all powerful Roman Empire; and we can speak of ‘occupied Palestine’.
By the time of our Gospel, (Luke 23:35-43) we find Israel and Judah completely under Roman rule, with puppet kings of their making installed for show, remnants of the corrupt and imported Herodian line. In our account of the crucifixion of Jesus, we find him under the jurisdiction of Pontius Pilate, the second rank equestrian governor. But Pilate was a weak man, placed in power due to Sejanus the Praetorian Prefect who in effect ruled the empire as Tiberius lived in retirement. Yet shortly before, Sejanus had been exposed as plotting to take the throne, and was executed; and with it his clients, from great to small found themselves in a very precarious position. The Jews who were determined to get rid of the popular Jesus knew this, and put pressure on their once mighty governor who crumbled to their demands. Jesus is condemned to death in consequence of this combination of corruption amongst the Jewish hierarchy and the ruling powers from Rome. A lot of people had a lot to gain, or so they thought, from this collusion; and all four Gospels insist that Jesus’ trials, and the evidence against him were corrupt. What we see then in Luke’s account is the process whereby crowds can easily be manipulated by the powerful for their own ends, and within this the failure of earthly power – it’s a frequently occurring scene even today in what we like to call democracies, and woe betide the challengers to power in Russia and the like, who find themselves on the end of ‘rough justice’. Luke neatly makes the point by playing the scene of the ‘good thief’; this is played quite differently by Matthew where everyone gangs up against Jesus except for the incident of Pilate’s enigmatic wife. Here we find one of the robbers, guilty as charged, who must have witnessed Jesus’ preaching and healing ministry, and who in his final moments of life stands up for the truth after a lifetimes criminality, ‘Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ In a world of viciousness, from the crowds whipped up by the Jewish leadership, from the soldiers fulfilling their duties of ritual humiliation of the condemned, and a world full of hate, one man, and one totally unworthy at that acknowledges Jesus as Lord – the only one truly worthy of such acclaim at the point of his death.
What we are witnessing here in Luke then is a moment of recognition. Luke, who spent his life as the precarious client of a ‘great’ master, who might on a whim desert him at the next moment, shows Theophilus just what the world and its powers are truly like, and takes him into a very different world, the eternal LIFE of Jesus the Son, and life lived as it is truly meant to be lived with integrity and grace, and as it always was lived by Jesus who had neither status nor home, and at the end, neither friends nor any advocates, for all had deserted him. I guess Luke wrote as much for himself as for Theophilus and for the rest of us, deniers of the truth offering a vision of a future transparent to God the Father as his Beloved Son always was. That’s kingdom life.
Paul, was writing from prison around 53 CE to Christians in Colossae. (Colossians 1:12-20) Clearly he has a very high opinion of the Christians there and the work of Epaphras and he writes reminding them of their ultimate destiny in Christ; for they too lived under the earthly rule of an Emperor, Claudius and the Governor of Asia, one of the richest and likely most exploited and corrupt provinces of the Empire. Paul wrote of God the Father, ‘who has taken us out of the power of darkness and created a place for us in the kingdom of the Son that he loves, and in him we gain our freedom.’ For all of us, Paul remarks, are prisoners of this corrupt world and his great victory hymn gives glory to Jesus the ‘image of the unseen God,’ true icon in Greek, and who is the creator of all those earthly powers we hold so important, ‘Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers’, all of which are his creation, subject to Him who is the reconciler of everything that is. By his death and resurrection, Christ the Son has opened the way for a thoroughly tarnished creation and a lost humanity to become the children of God eternally, and finally to become what we were created to be, creatures made in his image.
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