Texts: Jeremiah 22: 1-6; Luke 23: 35-45

As a young teenager, I was permitted to go by myself on the streetcar to the National Gallery of Art in Washington on Saturday mornings because it was close to the Corcoran where my parents had sacrificed to have me take art lessons. Like the Met in New York, there are several galleries devoted to late medieval images of Christ Pantocrator, or Christ Enthroned. These images, mostly dating from the Romanesque period, around 800 to 1000 CE, present a stern Christ in judgment. To say the times were tough would be an understatement, nothing like we can even imagine now. The best comparison would be to a third world country, like the Congo, in conflict, only then people did not have automatic weapons. Death was always close.

By the flowering of medieval art, these images largely disappeared but reemerged when the Black Death, the plague, hit Europe. In Italy a new image of Christ emerged, one that was more human than divine, finding its culmination in images of the baby Jesus with his mother, usually drawn or painted from one of the artist’s mistresses. Most of the images from northern Europe and Spain, undergoing Inquisition, continued to be of a stern Christ returning in glory and judgment, reflecting the civil and religious strife those areas experienced. Our images of Christ seem to reflect our earthy situation.

In his book God and Empire, John Dominic Crossan, one of the most prolific and important New Testament scholars, writes that the Christian Bible forces us to look at what he calls the “normalcy” of civilization’s “program” of war, religion, victory, and peace against the radical call of God to an alternative program of religion, nonviolence, justice, and peace. Scripture itself reflects this ongoing struggle. As he states: “If the Bible were only about peace through victory, we would not need it. If it were only about peace through justice, we would not believe it.”

The Christian Bible, and I use that term to indicate all three parts: what we call the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament, forces us to witness the struggle of those two transcendental visions within its own pages and to decide as Christians which of those two visions should control our lives. In the end, we are being asked how we as Christians should live within the American Empire. It is important to recognize that our power, our influence, our image of ourselves are not much different from the power, influence, and image the Romans had of themselves in the time of Jesus.

If we look at Scripture, we see that it begins with God calling order out of chaos, out of the void, to create the heavens and the earth; the early church as it established the canon ends with the creation of a new heaven and a new earth to reflect its anticipated triumph over the earthly empire that constricted it. Reflecting its time, it chose images of military triumph which we see reflected in those images of Christ Pantokrator.

We as Christians living in today’s world, however, need to present a different image of the kingdom that Jesus came to offer us. We need to move beyond the pseudo-military images of Christ Triumphant, of the battle-station God who comes with a sword to wipe out evil by spreading war, death, famine, and plague. While recognizing its historical context, that first century image belongs there and not in our world today. The Left Behind series and the pseudo-dispensationalist world view that accompanies that frame of thinking pulls us out of what Jesus was really about.

The readings from both Jeremiah and Luke provide a different image than that of the American Empire. Jeremiah states clearly, “Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness…And do no wrong to the alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place…” Through Jeremiah God promises destruction when we do not do justice and righteousness and although, in Jeremiah’s time, one thought that God directly intervened when a society had gone wrong, we know that destruction comes of our own making when we do not practice justice and righteousness. And look at Jesus’ words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Those words are not just about crucifying an innocent man who preached the new kingdom of God as one of justice and mercy, but speaks to the wider sociopolitical situation we all face. For we re-crucify Jesus in our hearts when we do not live the kingdom as it is supposed to be.

When we first emerged out of the swamp of our nomadic wanderings and began to build civilizations, the persons who were foremost the creation of what became our way of life as a settled people created and codified systems of laws and rules to establish relationships, justice between various groups. Over the millennia our ideas of justice have developed; we no longer hang children for theft or in the more civilized countries stone women for presumed adulterous relationships. In New Jersey three years ago we even eliminated the death penalty as a form of punishment for even the most heinous of crimes because we have a system of justice not retribution.

Our ancestors thought in terms of kinship, families, and tribes; we are supposed to have moved beyond that primitive way of thinking. Indeed, as Christians we are called to look beyond such divisions. Ethnicity, alienage, even nationality, reflect little more than ancient divisions. This week we enter into what is normally called the Holiday Season. Beginning with Thanksgiving which celebrates not just God’s bounty but the welcome we, yes, we, received from a people who only saw that human beings were suffering and needed help. We did not repay them in kind but in blood because we did not see human beings but something we called “them.” This struggle we experienced as we established our Nation is the same struggle reflected in Scripture. It is the ancient struggle of a so-called peace through conquest or peace with justice. The question is what will rule in our hearts. That Second Coming traditionally celebrated today is indeed a coming of God’s kingdom but it is not one of Christ with lancet raised on a white horse as depicted in some of the old paintings but one of a Christ who judges us on how we live with others and how we welcome them into the realm of mercy and justice that we design here on earth. That is Christ Pantocrator and there can be no kingdom without the kingdom within our hearts.

Let us pray: Holy Creator who made us all in your image, help us to see you in all humanity. Help us to reflect the kingdom of justice and righteousness, of love and mercy Jesus came to share with us. Amen.