Of course, we have abundant answers. At His baptism John identified Him as the Lamb of God, come to take away the sins of the world; and the Father’s voice declared Him to be His favoured Son. Jesus Himself announced that He was the Good Shepherd, the Light of the World, the Door, the Bread of Life, the Servant. But the point is that few could fully grasp how the One Who described the Kingdom refused to call Himself its King. Who can He be? Where can He have come from? What kind of a man is this?
On the mountain of Transfiguration, Peter and James and John
at last perceive Him in a new light - uncreated, a light that casts no shadows
but illuminates the soul to see Him as He truly is. They hear for themselves
that the Lord is the choice of His Father to restore all things. But the great
revelation, which they will need all their perception and imagination to come
to terms with, is that the great restoration for which they hope comes only when
their Lord is raised from the dead: first, he must die as Son of Man. (Cf.
Matthew 17.1-12)
Still the questioning continues. The apostles argue: “Why
can You heal the afflicted and we cannot?” (Matthew 17.19) “Who shall be
greatest in this Kingdom of yours?” (Matthew 18.1) “How many times do I have to
forgive to be able to join in it?” (Matthew 18.21) “We have given up everything
to follow you – where does it lead, what is there for us?” (Matthew 19.27) Amid
all these demands from the disciples, it is no small wonder that a last healing
that Jesus performs is when He comes upon two blind men calling for His mercy: “Lord,
we want our sight,” they cry out (Matthew 20.33), as the crowd try to shut them
up. The contrast with the disciples cannot be starker: those who have been
given the vision of light cannot grasp its meaning; the two blind outcasts
recognise it immediately and want to see it for themselves.
It is in this new light that Jesus, then, goes on to His
controversies with the Temple authorities, and in which the people, who for a moment
acclaim Him as king, turn into a jury that convicts Him of treason and clamours
for His crucifixion. It is left, then, to Pontius Pilate to answer the
questions that have circled for years - Who can He be? Where can He have come
from? What kind of a man is this? The one who asks Him, “Are you the King of
the Jews?”, places him at his own Seat of Judgement, vests Him in purple and
crowns Him with thorns and says, “Behold: The Man.” Jesus has all the way through
said that there is no meaning to everything He is that cannot be found in Who
He is as the Son of Man - a human being, the summary of everything that a human
is, a person in the world of creation, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief,
one among many appointed to serve. People say that in this Jesus is mocked, or even
that He is hated. It is true, of course; but it is even truer to say that, in
this moment now, He is shown to be Who He is.
In other word what a King in His Kingdom in another world
looks like in this one. In today’s Kontakion, we sang, “Mounted on a throne in
heaven, You are mounted on a colt here on earth.” We can add, “Sitting on the Father’s
right in glory, in this world you are fixed to a Cross beside a thief.” Or, to
put it another way, what is transfigured by heaven with brightness, the world
disfigures before it will look at it. What God brings into the light – whether it
is the beauty of Christ truly God and truly The Man, or the secrets of every heart
– we in the world disguise by means of darkness, or we spoil it out of revulsion
at the divine glory that could be ours.
On Thursday at Westminster Abbey, there was a service of
hope, to commemorate those who had suffered and died in the recent attempted
attack on Parliament. Ahead of the service, one of the mourners was bitter that
the attacker had died at the scene: “Pity he got shot. He should have lived to
suffer the same way we are suffering.” Another person, an injured survivor now mourning
her husband said, “I don’t feel I could heal … as a person if I had hate in my
heart. Kurt wouldn’t want that either, so there is no hate.” Both are raw and honest
expressions of loss and grief; and both are reflected for all eternity in the
presentation of The Man by Pontius Pilate – a King degraded, His Kingdom
rubbished; a man made to suffer because
of the threat He poses; an innocent victim refusing to be provoked from love to
hate; lives torn apart by those to whom they mean nothing; nothingness where
there had been so much; scars for ever in place of happy goodness; even frustration
of the human chance for shortcoming and unbelief to find fulfilment by means of
love divine. No wonder there is honest bitterness for lost love; but there is forbearance
and hope, too: the best of us. There it
is in refusal to hate and in the face of Christ forgiving that will not go away.
Forgiveness is the unavoidable reality that He brings from above and beyond us,
that we must deal with, just as He has dealt with the reality of our suffering
and our Passion, by making it His own.
Today’s readings – Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians to
find the God of peace in whatever is true, just, pure, and good (Philippians 4.4-9), followed by
the gospel story of the Lord’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem (John 12.1-18) – are appointed in
the old English Latin rite to be read in Advent, the time that leads up to
Christmas. As we read them in the Byzantine Church as we approach His Passion, thus
they imply our expectation at the coming of The Man born to die and rise again,
about Whom we ask, “Who can His Father be; where can He have come from? What
kind of a man is this? What has He come for? Who is He?” As the story unfolds,
He tells us to see Him as the One Who will restore all things, but as One Who can
only raise them up if He enters into their lowest point, and lifts them from
beneath their very depths. So, the only way to envisage Jesus on clouds of
glory is to behold Him on His Cross. The only way for His Light to reach and
shine on us, is if we peer into the gloom and let it pierce us there. The only
way to know we are loved is to let it dissolve our hate. The only way to cry “Hosanna”
truthfully is to accept that we have also shouted, “Crucify.” The only way to be
forgiven is to accept a way to forgive. The only way to satisfy justice is not
to seek revenge. The only way to be blessed is not to curse. The only way to
bear the suffering and the painstaking healing is not to inflict more wounds. The
only way to find peace is, for sure, in what is true and just; but this is only
halfway. We press on to what is pure and good and worthy of praise from the God
of peace. This is so hard for us to bear, for it is more palatable – as discovered
by Christ betrayed – to shut down, close off, break, hit, destroy.
Yet, as always, our life in Christ and the way the liturgy,
and its readings and chants are deployed for us to meet Him turn everything round
to stop our thinking in its tracks. For what we see at Pilate’s Seat, on the
Cross, is not just Jesus, Truly God and truly The Man: it is God’s presentation
to us of how we are to be and what we are summed up in Him. If The Man is
throned in heaven as an innocent condemned on earth, how much is it the case that
we with all our sins and shortcomings look divine to God in His realm of
heaven? Here our resentment at Christ’s beauty finds it unbearable to behold,
as we take what we please for ourselves, and disfigure the gift that is truly good;
there we look transfigured in the light of Christ as God reveals the unbearable
secret bad in every heart, and takes it out of the gaze of His love. Here we are
mortal like Lazarus, but already like Lazarus we are also risen from the dead?
The Lord answered Pilate that His kingdom was not of this
world (John 18.36). Well, neither is our kingdom of this world. “Here we have
no abiding city” (Hebrews 13.14): “Our homeland is in heaven2 (Philippians 3.20).
This is actually where we are living now; this is how we live, this is how we
act. And as Pilate clothes God incarnate in purple robing and a crown of thorns,
saying, “Behold: The Man”, the Father is holding the fellow-humans of the Son
of Man at His own judgment seat and says, “Behold: this will become divine.”
