First reading: Daniel 7:13-14
Psalm: Ps 93:1-2,5
Epistle: Revelation 1:5-8
Gospel: John 18:33-37

So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?”

I got you:

I can relate to this line. Pilate had it all figured out. As judge, jury, and prosecutor he had that Perry Mason moment, the, —I got you— moment. Ah ha… then you are a king.

I’ve spent most of my working life in tax audit and enforcement. I can understand Pilate’s motivations here. I love these moments, when the person you’re auditing spills the beans and you discover the fraud. When the person you’re perusing for payment slips and let’s you know where the money’s hidden.

Pilate had Jesus. He found out that Jesus was a king and as such was the foe of Caesar. Of course, Jesus had to die now.

Pilate didn’t get it:

Pilate’s ah ha moment, the revelation that filled his head, was a complete mistake. He just didn’t get it at all.

Being a Roman, Pilate had no concept of the otherness of God. His idols were made of bronze, silver, gold, and stone. They had no reality other than in fables. His gods frolicked on Mount Olympus or some other locale. They had human qualities and human likeness. His fables told of gods who affected natural things, made the sun and moon rise, had fun in the sack, took care of the critters. None of their attributes were truly supernatural. The stories weren’t of spiritual beings, because if they were, their authors couldn’t relate them to Pilate’s reality.

Pilate’s reality was about power and he understood politics and the exercise of power, not the difference in Jesus, the otherness of God.

We try to explain:

Pilate was wrong and he didn’t get it. Seeing that, should we question the way we explain God?

King, ruler, majesty, all powerful, great, to be worshipped, Father, Lord. We use words, but those words fail to move us beyond the natural concepts they convey. We try to explain, but how do we connect our reality to God’s reality?

Look at our beautiful altar. The altar is God’s throne covered in linen cloths, flowers, candles. We perform postures and gestures before the throne, kneeling, bowing at God’s Holy Name. Yet, throne, light, movement — the natural things, things we can know, things we can do, things we relate to.

Picture a king. What do you see? Royal robes, a throne, people bowing, knights… It is human nature. We categorize things and paint pictures for ourselves.

Christian books, theologians, poets, the writers of prayers… They and we describe everything and attempt to describe God, but, like Pilate, we fall short in relating our reality to God’s reality.

We try so hard in categorizing and understanding God, in trying to relate to the God who is other; we sometimes go so far as to take everything and turn it into some sort of miracle. That baby, the sunset, flight, a field of flowers… Everything becomes miraculous. Certainly beautiful, certainly inspiring, but not miraculous, they are just natural. We are grasping to explain, to fit God to what we know, to fit His action in our lives to what we see, but He is so outside, beyond, and over anything we can possibly say, feel, write, or experience that we, like Pilate, fall far short.

How can we get this:

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, ” says the Lord God,
“the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty.”

How can we possibly get the otherness of God? A blogger recently wrote on the whole idea of God’s otherness and our inability to grasp that concept.

Think of everything you would consider portraying the supernatural and spiritual. Is it a movie character, a character in a book? Exactly how otherworldly are they, exactly how supernatural and beyond us? If we took any character we could, in a matter of seconds, show that they are little more than mortal beings with special, albeit not supernatural powers.

Consider Superman. By all accounts flesh and blood. Born on a different planet and endowed with tremendous powers, but still man. We could take any character: vampires, magicians, and find that they are no more than men and women who ply on some special physical reality. None are supernatural spiritual beings, because if they were, their authors couldn’t relate them to our reality.

In our failure to understand God’s reality we run from the supernatural, from God, and back to ourselves. We have done this for millennia, since the story of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:4-5):

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

We have continually tried to co-opt the supernatural, the spiritual. We have tried and tried to make what is other and beyond into something we know. We go so far as to make ourselves into the something other, into gods. We want to be the man with superpowers. In our effort at becoming gods unto ourselves, our physicalness, our reality as god, the reality of that other — the pure spirit, the soul, God, is becoming lost. We can’t quite get how something can be real, with a will and intellect, that exists outside, above and without time or space, and yet has the ability to relate to us. We cannot understand how this God who is other should have some say in the way we run our lives. How can this essence, this spiritual being be with us, guide us, teach us, instruct us, call us to account, yet be so far different than anything we know?

If we common sense, if we are smart, we realize that the spiritual being of God cannot be grasped in what we know alone.

We know, but we don’t:

All is not lost. All is not lost because God has acted, and we can know Him.

We need not create stories of gods or attempt to turn ourselves into gods. We are blessed because we have the absolute ability to know God by our own logic. Man is wonderfully endowed with a connectedness to our Creator. God has acted and has built in an automatic mechanism by which we are called back to Him. We know of Him because as Lord, Master, and Creator He has made it so.

What’s the difference between your GPS or map and the place you’re going? Like our built in mechanism the GPS and map can help us get there, but we cannot fully know the place we are going until we experience it. Our knowing about God is different from the full-on experience of God. That full on experience takes two things: revelation and faith.

Faith and revelation are not required to know that God exists, but are required to know who He is.

He came and taught us:

God came to tell us the real story, to fill in the blanks, to show us who He is. God has intervened and has permanently connected these two different realities, the supernatural and the natural. He has given us the descriptive words, the sacraments, the gestures, even the prayers. Heaven and earth have been joined in the God-man Jesus Christ. While mankind knows there is God, God had to come to relate these realities and to show who He really is.

Miraculously, supernaturally, the pure essence of God became man. God has tied it all together, His reality and ours. Not only that, God showed us that everything that is, everything we are, makes sense when it is in line with what He created it to be. God showed us His perfection and let us know that we too can reach perfection. The otherness of God is now obvious to us by both logic, faith, and revelation.

God took the necessary step, the loving action required for us to know the reality of what is supernatural. He knows that we need that. We need to know about grand movements of heaven as a bulwark against evil. We need to know that all makes sense and is part of something that is beyond description, beyond space, time, the cross and the throne.

What we now know we must proclaim:

Because of God’s action, because of His intervention in time and history, because He brings about the miraculous we now have the full story.

The otherness of God, His lordship, perfection, and reality is in our grasp. We know, by logic and faith that God has acted. We need to tell the world, from our next door neighbor to the village at the furthest point away from us, God has intervened. We have the facts, the symbols, the gestures and postures, the liturgy, the community revealed by God.

The way we live, week to week, and our connection with each other in this community of faith is witness. We are not witness to the merely real, the physical earthly reality of things. We are not just people helping people, do-gooders, fighters against poverty, wage theft, and the evils that surround us. As connectors our witness tells the story of how the supernatural and spiritual intervenes and lives —“ really lives among us.

Christ lives in Pete and Mike helping my family. Christ lives in my helping others. Christ lives when we visit each other, share a story, a glass of wine, a meal. Christ lives in our work for and within this neighborhood, in this community and the wider Church. Christ lives in the ark we will send to a far off village. Christ lives — the supernatural, eternal, otherness of God has intervened in our lives and lives here.

Today we celebrate our Lord and Savior’s kingship over us. He is certainly the king in splendor arrayed. More than that, He is the king who intervened to connect heaven and earth, to make eternity real for us and for all who follow Him. Amen.