Consider the crown and who wears it

The Feast of Christ the King prompts Jamie Mulvaney to ask what sort of strong leader we should seek.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

King Charles in a black dinner suit talks and gestures to President Macron who is similarly dressed.

King Charles and President Macron at a September 2023 state visit.

Remember singing 'God Save the King' for the first time and it took a little more effort? Instinctively, we were so used the Queen, and unless you're well into your eighties the concept of a King will still be something a novelty. Slowly the stamps have changed, and new passports are finally being printed. After King Charles' first year on the throne, and having celebrated his 75th birthday this month, we can reflect with a little more perspective about what it means to have a king.

A new king gives us an opportunity to look forward and back. The crown cradles continuity, bringing the past into the present. And whether you've been indulging in the latest series of Netflix's The Crown or venturing further back into royal history, we can also indulge in a little time travel. Maybe not a regal DeLorean, but if you hop inside the state coach there’s quite the ride to be taken. The historian Dominic Sandbrook recently detailed in The Times how in Britain that 'it is remarkable how often monarchs’ opening 12 months have set the tone for the rest of their reign.'

We find ourselves in a liminal space - not quite an airport terminal - but one where we are on our way although not there yet. We see glimpses of this still-coming kingdom, but not yet fully realised.

What if we went back to the future even further, considering Jesus Christ as king? We might be unable to argue with the enduring legacy of this historical figure, but most of us are unfamiliar with Jesus as King. We tend to think of baby Jesus, Jesus feeding the five thousand or Jesus on the cross, but what about Jesus as King? Today the church celebrates the Feast of Christ the King, an interestingly fairly recent tradition. A bit like the John Lewis Christmas ad encouraging us to 'let your traditions grow'. But there is nothing new about Jesus' kingship. The church has always thought of Christ as King. According to the accounts of Jesus' life in the Bible, the topic Jesus taught on more than anything else was 'the Kingdom of God'. And King Charles’ coronation was itself a portal to the life of this king. The service began with the Chapel Royal chorister greeting the new monarch, ‘Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings.’ His reply? ‘In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served, but to serve.’ It was a useful reminder that the form of servant leadership we have assumed and expected from the Queen and now the King is not a modern invention or interpretation of how monarchs should be.

Much like the arrival of a new king, Christ the King Sunday also enables us to both look back and look forward. We find ourselves in a liminal space - not quite an airport terminal - but one where we are on our way although not there yet. We see glimpses of this still-coming kingdom, but not yet fully realised. The word 'Gospel' was well-known in the ancient world, describing the good news of the rightful king who has returned home to take this throne.

But this king is quite the contrast to the strong leader we're used to. As we look to world leaders today, we see many elder statesmen (you decide whether 'elder' or 'statesmen' should be emphasised!). There are different understandings and projections of what strong leadership looks like.

The historical reality of Jesus, his fingerprints on the world today, and the professed experience of millions of people worldwide continue to subvert.

Jesus is a king who comes in humility. There was speculation of a slimmed-down coronation for King Charles proportionate to the cost-of-living crisis. But in Jesus’ mind must have been more the cost of dying, as he rode on a donkey into Jerusalem, surrounded by a fickle crowd cheering his own coronation before condemnation only a week later. At his execution there was mockery with the sign on his cross ‘King of the Jews’, and of course wearing a crown of thorns. If you travel back to his birth, the magi bring royal gifts, so his life is bookended with rumours of kingship.

What might this mean for us in the twenty-first century? On the one hand, there’s the personal, individual connection to the king. Pope Francis heralds ‘Christ the King who conquers us’. We’re happy for his rule and reign out there, but what about extending into our own lives? For the past few years on the eve of Christ the King I've been to baptism services at Southwark Cathedral. One of the symbols of the water in baptism is that we overwhelm our lives with Christ's life, and ultimately his reign over who we are, how we are, and what we do. Then there’s the broader reality: a king who does not neatly or easily fit into our political paradigms, whose priorities in one way or another will catch us off guard.

Jesus is the king who turns things upside-down. His kingdom is not marked by borders but is still whispered of and spoken about two thousand years later. That is what we sing about at Christmas. The king arriving in vulnerability as a baby and one day - who knows when - Christians believe he returns in power as king. On that day, Christians believe justice, goodness and all that we long for will be ushered in. But until then, the historical reality of Jesus, his fingerprints on the world today, and the professed experience of millions of people worldwide continue to subvert.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian famous for plotting to kill Hitler said, ‘A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom.’ The mystery amidst the majesty. Keep looking back. Keep looking forward.

Column

Creed

Easter

28 March 2024

4 min read

Pilate: a lord of misrule

Agents of chaos still inhabit our world today.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A balcony scene viewed behind shows a Roman ruler leaning over a balcony to the crowd while gesturing to a semi-naked Christ.

Ecce homo – behold the man.

Antonio Ciseri, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve had a lot of Pontius Pilate in my life lately. And this week he’s set to play arguably the second-biggest role in human history, as the Passion of the Christ reaches its climax on Good Friday.

The reason I’ve been spending a lot of time with Pilate is that I’ve done a podcast about him for Things Unseen, which sounds like a sister operation for this platform, but isn’t. Its title was Pontius Pilate: A man like us and addressed the question “Was the man who sent Jesus to the cross evil or merely weak?”

I’m accustomed to Pilate being a paradigm for flawed human leadership – vain, indecisive, distracted, cowardly. A former archdeacon of London, the Ven. Lyle Dennen, had a very good stock sermon entitled “Pontius Pilate’s Brother”, in which he recalled that his elder sibling had played Pilate in a school play.

Consequently, the headmaster had made a habit of greeting little Lyle in the corridor with the words: “Ah, if it isn’t Pontius Pilate’s brother.” It was an engaging way to develop the thought that we’re all Pilate’s brothers and sisters, collectively executing the Christ on a daily basis.

My fellow podcast panellist, the novelist and musician Chibundu Onuzo, was having none of this “Pilate inside us” stuff, making the case for his particular circumstantial weakness. It’s a good listen. But it’s set me thinking, since we recorded it a fortnight ago, a whole lot more about the local Roman procurator, the man who has history’s worst morning at the office.

I’ve come to consider that there is a third way, a via media, between this being a verbatim transcript and a metaphor for his judgment by worldly authorities.

The veracity of Pilate’s gospel role is hotly disputed. He’s undoubtedly a real historical figure, as is Jesus of Nazareth, and his jurisdiction presided over the crucifixion of the latter. Beyond that, the interpretation of his scriptural role varies.

Perhaps it was written back, particularly in John’s gospel, as a means of exculpating the repressive Romans of Jesus’s death and putting the blame firmly on the Jews (with very terrible historical consequences).

If that is even partly so, we’re invited to view Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus in his palace allegorically; especially around Pilate’s rhetorical question of Jesus, “What is truth?”, when the answer is literally standing right in front of him and from which he doesn’t even bother to await an answer.

So if this gospel section contains the kind of truth that the Nazarene’s parables held, what is it meant to tell us? I’ve come to consider that there is a third way, a via media, between this being a verbatim transcript and a metaphor for his judgment by worldly authorities.

Pilate, as he faces the mob bent of insurrection and baying for blood outside the praetorium, is an agent of worldly chaos too, a lord of misrule

Before I left for a holiday in the Balkans early this month, I decided on a book to take with me. Should I re-read Ann Wroe’s excellent Pilate: The biography of an invented man, in preparation for the podcast? No, I thought, there’s plenty of time for that. So I took a novel I’ve been meaning to read for decades, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

Alarmingly, it turns out that Bulgakov’s novel has a recurrent deconstructive sub-plot of the fate of Pilate running throughout it. This was the sort of coincidence of which we’re taught to be suspicious at theological college. So I paid attention.

The book’s main narrative is a satire of Stalin’s post-revolutionary Russia. Satan, in the character of Woland, visits Moscow to see how things are going. Death and destruction ensue, as Woland and his weird retinue cause havoc. Yet, along the way (spoiler alert), he reconciles a crazed and failed author (the Master) to the love of his life (Margarita), which is not a bad thing to do.

A lot of it is in the rather annoying style of magic realism. But annoyance is a point. The work of a devil in human affairs is annoying, but it doesn’t have the last word, just as Pilate doesn’t.

What I took from this novel was the darkness of chaos before the divine order that is brought in the act of creation, from which humanity constantly falls back into chaos.

Woland isn’t really evil (he’s quite kind to Margarita and may even be in love with her), he’s just the agent of chaos, like Pilate. A lord of misrule, if you will.

We have many such agents of chaos in the world, from US and European politics, to Russia (again) and Ukraine, from Israel and Gaza to the famine of Sudan and the global technological interference of China.

Pilate, as he faces the mob bent of insurrection and baying for blood outside the praetorium, is an agent of worldly chaos too, a lord of misrule. But as Bulgakov’s novel tells us, he can be redeemed.

The difference between him and us is that we have the benefit of hindsight. When we ask despairingly, like him, on all the Good Fridays that afflict the world, “What is truth?”, we may not (also like him) recognise it.

But, unlike him, we have the chance finally to recognise that truth, as it stands right in front of us on Easter morning.