Of course, Jesus makes a very different kind of king, ultimately. When we track what he has in common with Saul and David, there is connection, being anointed, recognized, and going off to war for the people. But that is where Jesus differs from his predecessors.
They
spearhead armies and go into battle.
Jesus battles alone. They are
strengthened, Jesus is at his weakest, forty days without food. Theirs was the physical battlefield. For Jesus, it was something more. He is forty days without food. What is the first thing that Satan hits him
with? Make yourself food. Attack the weak point of his physical
being. When that doesn’t work? Attack the weak point of his emotional
being. Offer him the kingdoms of the
world, appeal to his power to make the world a better place. And Jesus resists that as well.
But then
there is the one that always baffled me.
Why would Satan tell Jesus to throw himself off the temple? To kill himself? Satan claims it won’t happen, that the angels
will catch Jesus before he hits the ground.
So what is the devil doing?
Well, the
prophecies are clear that the Messiah will die and return in three days. This is something the devil knows almost as
well as Jesus himself. So it seems there
is something going on here to exploit a weakness in Jesus’s spiritual
being. We know that Jesus died in agony
and alone. Here, Satan is trying to get
Him to do some kind of swan dive to glory.
Who is this
king that the Spirit drove out to meet the devil? He is hungry, he is not willing to take up
the mantle of control of the world, and, as we will see, he will accept death
as it comes upon him. These are the
signs of His true kingship.
Which runs
against every stereotype and expectation of what kingship is supposed to
be. I used to think that the most
prevailing sin that Jesus broke down in his ministry is the sin of hierarchy,
of control. But I see know that it is
more basic than that. Jesus is breaking
down the sin of power used to exploit.
For every king and every wielder of privilege in the ‘power’ they
believe comes to them from God, to truly use the example of Jesus is to
surrender all of that power, to serve and not rule.
There are two
extremely powerful figures who are examples of this kind of religious surrender
that carried with it tremendous political power, one for good and one, for the
United States, for evil. The first is
Mahatma Gandhi, massively popular at the time of Indian independence. His power came from his living as the people,
in homespun cloth, without the trappings of the privileged British and the
Indian leadership who’d sold out to these overlords.
The second is
the Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah
in Iran in the late 1970’s. His was a
cult of personality, whose legacy made Iran one of the Axis of Evil and one of
the continued enemies of the US and world peace to this very day. His lifestyle was very simple, simple meals,
no splendor in his living arrangements, nothing. Now, it was in pointed contrast to the
extravagance of the Shah who came before him.
What they
have in common is that they rejected the ‘rewards’, the material rewards of
power in wielding the power itself, as the material was a sign they were
corrupted by the power, that they were ‘in it for themselves’.
Peter Hofstra
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