The all-powerful powerless?

     Do a search for 'kingdom of God' in your favorite image search engine.  Seriously.  Do it.  What do you find?  When I did the search, I came up with many images of pretty clouds, a mix of both beautiful and cartoonish gates, the colors are warm, with strong looking hands coming out of the sleeve of a white robe, and crosses splash brilliantly across a rainbowed sky.  With this Sunday we celebrate Christ the King, and these are the images we read from scripture:

        A stream of fire issued
and flowed out from his presence.
   A thousand thousands served him,
and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.

To him was given dominion                     
and glory and kingship,                 
that all peoples, nations, and languages               

should serve him.           
His dominion is an everlasting dominion        
that shall not pass away,      
and his kingship is one   
that shall never be destroyed.

 

 Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him; and on his account 

all the tribes of the earth will wail.
So it is to be.

 Amen.
I am the 

Alpha and the Omega, 

says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

 

     These are indeed mighty and marvelous images.  The final judgment with the 'clouds rolled back as a scroll' as the old hymn* says.  It is an awesome image, the Christ who was crucified, the Word of God who has been since the beginning, the savior of the nations coming to reign on earth.

     And yet with all this might and power our gospel reading comes from John 18, where Jesus is standing before Pilate: a prisoner, a king who is mocked, beaten, and bruised, powerless.  These images stand in stark contrast with one another - the king and almighty, standing in power over all peoples, nations, and languages - and Jesus the insurrectionist, criminal, and powerless Jewish leader. 

     What are we to do with these two images?  Christ the all-powerful with all things subjected and Christ the all-powerless with the weight of the world on his shoulders?  They are so simultaneously incongruent it seems that they cannot both be true.  And yet, our faith, our tradition, Scriptures tell us it is so.  That the creator of the cosmos, the God who was, who is, and who is to come, the Almighty is also the God who became.  In our time and place, bound by laws of physics and thermodynamics, a human being who was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

    And we know this to be true, for it is the life of Christ that is the testimony.  His life which testifies to the good, all-powerful God who became human and suffered the same as us.  The powerful hidden in the powerless, God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

     So as we approach the end of our Christian year, looking ahead to the new year of Advent, I am pondering what God's kingdom looks like.  On earth God's kingdom is imperfect, not yet come to fruition.  Yet we know God's kingdom has come.  Partially, in glimpses, we see the all-powerful among us.  Often I am surprised by where I see God's kingdom.  More often than not, I find God's kingdom in the powerless, poor, and downtrodden.  I find God in the face of the child, the voice of the stranger, and the life of the victim.  For that is where Jesus was.  

     The one who was, who is, and who is to come has made himself known to us and has sent the Spirit to give us eyes to see.  As we gather this week to celebrate Christ the King, let us remember that he is an extraordinary king, not in the way we think of it, but in God's upside down kingdom sense of it.