November 25, Reign of Christ B (John 18:33-37; Revelation 1:4b-8)
The cross is both foundation and anti-foundation, a disturber of worlds.
I wanted to give our first apartment a cosmopolitan sheen, so shortly after my wife and I rented a little cubbyhole with sinking floors, I procured some framed poster art of famous paintings. Think Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. One piece stood out from the rest: Salvador Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross. I had no critical understanding of the painting. I didn’t know that Dalí claimed to have experienced a “cosmic dream” that led him to this jarring imitation of a Spanish mystic’s 16th-century sketch. I found the sharp darkness cast by Christ’s outstretched arm arresting. Christ crucified contemplates an abyss skeined over with clouds before (or maybe after) a storm. There is something antigravitational about the perspective, how Christ hangs from the cross and the cross hangs in the sky so very un-wood-beam-like. It drew me in.
At the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus hangs between heaven and earth. Yes, on the cross, lifted up as Moses’ saving bronze serpent of old. But Jesus also hangs between the power of God and the powers that be. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asks, thinking to work a threadbare revolutionary like a yo-yo. But Jesus knows something about questions. “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” he puts back to Pilate. Everything in the conversation—indeed, everything in the Gospel—has been pointing toward verse 36. “My kingdom is not from this world,” says Jesus. If it were, his followers would take the usual steps by the usual means to rescue their king.
Thus it is that we witness the sacrificial regency of Christ, the one who came not to be served but to serve, the one who “did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped” (Philippians 2:6). Christ’s glory comes by way of the cross. The polarities of his kingship are reversed. And we, the people drawn to him by his lifting up on the cross, have become a kingdom, “priests serving his God and Father,” says Revelation, whose vision of power is reversed as well. The cross of Christ calls power into question but also serves as the basis for a different sort of power.
