We Don’t Like Kings

          So there is a line that we walk as people of faith when it comes to considering Jesus as King.  On the one hand, it is the Bible that lays down this language for us.  On the other, this language has been abused by human hands.

          Anti-kingship is built into the American culture.  The colonists rebelled against mad King George and founded a nation built on freedom.  George Washington navigated our first Presidency so deliberately to prevent the trappings of ‘royalty’ from creeping in.  That is one of the best moments for me in the musical “Hamilton”; the king expresses that he did not know giving up power was even an option when Washington chose not to seek reelection.  This defied the medieval theology of the ‘divine right of kings’ that tied such authority to the authority of the Almighty.

          And we continue to work to divide the assumption that men have such power “granted” to them by God.  The expression “a man’s home is his castle” has come to epitomize that for me.  On the plus side, it is an expression that the individual has freedom against the state invading their privacy.  On the negative side, it has become the cover for misogynist abuse down to our own time.

          We may not have a king anymore, but that kind of authority is still interpreted as being in the hands of the male, that ‘divine right’ still justifies abuse and domination.

          This does not even begin to address the king-like power of wealth concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  There is this idea that the wealthy are above the law, that they buy the lawmakers to bend the law to their own wills, that they control things to their own advantage.  I think back to a story in 2018 during the California wildfires where it was reported that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired private fire fighters to protect their $60 million mansion.

          The word for such abuse is ‘privilege’. 

          So it can be hard to divide out the perfect love of Jesus who would be the perfectly just, perfectly merciful-the one who would use the kingly privilege only to the advantage of those He rules-as a faith-based ideal in the face of how such authority has become sinful exploitation that the exploiters will use religious language and misguided biblical interpretation to justify.

          It is then a very hard thing that when something wonderful in Jesus is then exploited and appropriated for human, sinful gain, when such exploitation is brought into the light of day, to go back and redeem that language once more.

          But maybe Jesus is the King precisely so that such exploitation and appropriation can be exposed, can be confessed, and redeemed in the grace of our King’s death and resurrection.

Peter Hofstra