Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
John 18. 33-38; Revelation 1. 4-8
“My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight…”
I’m currently reading a book called Stalin’s War by an American historian called Sean McMeekin. It’s grippingly written, but also a fairly contrarian take on the Second World War, so it has been rather controversial. This week, I found myself engrossed in his account of the build-up to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hitler and Stalin were big men, with grandiose ambitions to impose their hellish visions of utopia on Earth. These icons of tyranny, and the terrible, grand-scale, war between them will, I suspect, continue to fascinate people for long centuries after the Second World War has otherwise been forgotten. But for all that these men casually disposed of the lives of millions, Hitler’s empire collapsed barely four years after that invasion, while it is now more than a generation ago since the Union that Stalin led collapsed. They were big men, and terrible men, but nothing now remains of what they tried to create.
Pontius Pilate was also a big man. He was the governor of a province of the Roman Empire – admittedly, not a very large or wealthy one, but he was a power in the land. He was a man who was used to pronouncing judgement, especially on those ranked well below him, such as the strange holy men from the fringes of the Jewish religion who occasionally stirred up emotions in Jerusalem.
As it turns out, when the particular wandering preacher in today’s Gospel claimed, in a very strange phrase, that He was the ruler of a kingdom that was not of this world, He was telling the truth. He was indeed a king, a far greater king than either Pilate or the Jewish authorities could have imagined. He was king of the universe, God Himself, made incarnate as a human being. In handing Himself over to be condemned, Jesus Christ, God made human, judges every nation and every era, including our own, and their pretentions to justice and truth.
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