6 Pentecost/Year A/July 9, 2023
Readings: Psalm 145:8-15, Zechariah 9:9-12, Matthew 11:16-19,25-30
(SERMON BY CHIP CAMDEN)
Our Psalm for today and our reading from Zechariah use the metaphor of king and kingdom to describe God's relationship to us. This may seem unfortunate. In the United States, we have had a less than trusting attitude towards monarchy since before 1776, and just this past Tuesday we celebrated the anniversary of our formally dispensing with it. Much of the twenty-first century world views kingship and other forms of dominion by a single individual as at best outdated and at worst dangerous to liberty and justice. To oppressed peoples, “kingdom” represents a caste system that places some people over others in order to justify and perpetuate oppression. From the feminist perspective, kingship is the pinnacle of male dominance.
The Bible uses the words king and kingdom hundreds of times, in reference to both human and divine kingship. In earlier polytheistic religion, it was natural to conceive of the society of the gods along the same lines as human society, and the idea of a high god who is the king of all the other gods predates the Bible. In the Canaanite religion of the Ugaritic texts from the late Bronze Age, for example, this high God was named El. El and Yahweh are identified as the same god throughout the Hebrew Bible. A belief also circulated that each god ruled over a specific nation, and Yahweh was the god of Israel (see Deuteronomy 32:8-9). But being identified with El placed Yahweh over the council of the gods (see Psalm 82, Psalm 95:4, I Kings 22:19-22, Job 1:6-12), thus giving Israel an exalted status as well. Eventually the other gods in the council were reinterpreted as angels.
The Biblical God is not only the king of the gods, though. As the god of Israel he is also Israel's ultimate king -- and eventually the king of all nations (Psalm 82:8). In I Samuel 8, the Israelites ask Samuel to anoint a human king for them. Samuel, though not pleased with their request, agrees to it -- but he warns them about the abuses of power that will be the inevitable result (verses 10-18). Here we begin to see that when the word "king" is applied to God, it does not mean the same thing as when it is applied to a human. A human king will make the people his slaves and seize their property for his own purposes. By contrast, as it says in our Psalm for today right after extolling God's kingdom, "The LORD is faithful in all his words and merciful in all his deeds. The LORD upholds all those who fall; he lifts up those who are bowed down."
The prophetic tradition in the Bible maintains an uneasy acceptance of human kingship throughout the monarchical period. Even though the prophets often call the kings to repent for their misdeeds, they are nevertheless God's anointed ones (משיח, meshiach in Hebrew, from which comes the English word Messiah). The king is called God's son (Psalm 2:7, II Samuel 7:14). After the Babylonian captivity, hope emerged for the rise of a new Messiah -- a king who would restore the kingdom. This hope became more and more apocalyptic in nature by the time of Jesus.
In the New Testament, Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of this hope for a Messiah. The title "Christ" is the Greek translation of Messiah, meaning "anointed one". But Jesus' ideas about the kingdom that he came to establish differ greatly from the popular model. Jesus the king comes in humility, demonstrating his identification with our reading from Zechariah by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey instead of a war horse. Unlike human kingdoms, the kingdom of heaven is not about conquest and domination. As Jesus says in his parables, this kingdom is about the power of God to transform us from within. It is like a seed that grows into a plant, or like yeast that starts small but eventually leavens the whole lump of dough (Matthew 13:31-43). It's like a wedding banquet to which you are invited (Matthew 22:1-14). It's a kingdom of undeserved generosity (Matthew 20:1-16). And the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21).
Jesus' kingdom is not about domination, nor is it about achievement or doing the right things (Luke 18:9-14). But neither is it an anarchy of fulfilling selfish desires. The divinity of Christ makes Christ's kingdom align with God's kingdom: a kingdom that lifts up those who are bowed down -- a kingdom of love. This is an easy yoke, a light burden, but paradoxically a difficult one -- for we are called to this kingdom in order to live in that same love towards each other.
It may seem unfortunate that the Bible uses the metaphor of kingdom to describe God's relationship to us. But let us be wary lest in avoiding words that offend us we also lose the lesson of how God transforms what those words denote. As with anything else we can say of God, God transcends our categorizations and transforms our concepts, redeeming and releasing them from the narrow meanings that we apply to our human experience. It is yet another aspect of incarnation, that in addition to entering our embodied experience, God also enters into our limited language, lifting our words out of dead denotation to become lights on a path to truths that cannot be expressed. Just so, God also lifts us up and transforms us into something far exceeding our small ideas of ourselves. God wants to form us into the likeness of Christ. Then the kingdom will truly be within us. May it be so.