Saturday, Nov 20th 2021 - "Rich Wounds"

Yesterday at St. John's a guest organist was rehearsing the hymn "Crown Him With Many Crowns" in preparation for Christ The King Sunday. A song that we have sung throughout our lives, it has remained near to Diana and I. It's an exultant kind of song, but it also plays with the tension of how Christ is king. He's the King who dies vulnerably. He's the One who reigns with wounds. In the third verse we sing, "behold his hands and side, rich wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified." It is a wounded God, and only a wounded God, that the human heart can surrender to. Or, as the poet wrote,"The other gods were strong, but you were weak. They rode, but you stumbled to Your throne. To our wounds, only a wounded God can speak. And not a God has wounds but you alone."

The resurrection did not "fix" the cross. The cross does not need fixed. This is the message that Paul emphasizes in 1 Corinthians repeatedly. That the cross may be foolish to some, but to those who are being saved it is “the power of God”. This is why we do not preach “Christ resurrected”, but instead we proclaim “Christ crucified.” And, the wounds laid bare on the resurrected Christ, the wounds that remain post-resurrection, ensure this proclamation that the cross does not need fixed.

It is this wounded King that can speak to our wounds. Earthly kings, all of them, attempt to utilize their power to spare themselves and those they “reign” over from vulnerability. They believe they must utilize violence to protect from violence, that they must dominate in order to not be dominated, that they must eliminate all threats in order to not be threatened, that they must conquer in order not to be conquered. Pilot is perplexed at the kingship of Jesus precisely because he assumes that he rightly knows what kingship is and how it operates. Maybe this is why Jesus turns the conversation to “truth”. Is it to challenge that which is inherently false in Pilot’s assumption? Jesus is not a king in the ways that Caesar is. Which is to say, Caesar is no king. The real question is not, “Is Jesus a king?” The real question is, “is Caesar? Is Pilot?” Christ bears witness to the truth that one who must dominate, kill, and conquer in order to “reign" is no king at all. That king is a slave - who enslaves. Everything that king does will end in bondage. Simone Weil said, “To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.” Rowan Williams comes along side this and defines the sacred as “that which we can not own.” 


So often in our efforts to eliminate death we just create more of it. In our efforts to drive out violence we inflict it. In our efforts to drive out hatred we are often tempted to hate the hateful. In our efforts to avoid being wounded, we end up wounding. Only in Christ do we have hope. We cannot save ourselves. There has to be some thing, someone, outside of us that conquers these things in ways that do not conquer us and others. We are enslaved by so much of what we think makes us free. Enslaved kings who enslave. 1 Sam 8 speaks directly to this reality: Israel asks for a king - God’s warning to them is, “you shall be his slaves. 18 And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves.”

But if instead one is willing to become vulnerable, and indeed wounded, that King will truly reign - for it is only that king who has entered all realms of what it means to be human. The former Archbishop of Canterbury wrote, “To say that Jesus is Lord (ruler) means that in all human experience, even the most hellish, he is there.” In other words, there is no place he will not go. Jesus is king precisely because he “withdraws” from our bent vision of kingship that uses force to circumvent being forced upon and he enters into the very things the powerful shun. Jesus is King because he refuses to be “made king by force” (John 6). He will not conquer. He will only die…so that he may fill death, and all things deadly, with his reign. All of human experience becomes his realm. There is no place he will not go, even hell itself. This is what no other king does. Other kings create hell, or tolerate hell for others, falsely believing it to be the cost for their security, dominance, and liberty…a false paradise. Weil wrote, “We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.” Our false kings are repulsed by much of the human experience. Because of this, they only have a partial, fragmented realm. They have fragmented justice, justice for some but not for all (which is not justice), a fragmented security, security for some but not for all (which again, is not security). And this yeilds no peace, for peace means wholeness. “The idea that ‘my security must mean someone else’s insecurity’ is a pretty daft point of view. Our well being converges rather than diverges” (Williams). To say it differently, “Ain’t nobody free until everybody’s free” (F. Hamer).

Jesus, because he plumbs the depths of the human experience - all the way down - even to death, is the only one whose rule can bring true peace for his is the only realm that touches all and seeks not to avert it. Again, unlike every other king, there is no place he will not go, even to hell itself. This is why we preach Christ crucified. The cross is how our King reigns. Christ reigns by entering into that which earthly kings kill and conquer to remain exempt from. Conquerors abandon their humanity in order to expand and keep their power. Christ refuses to conquer anybody in order to remain human and that is why his wounds are rich, that is why his crown is made of thorns, and that is why his power is found in weakness. It is only this King that can be Lord of all, in grace, humility, and a death that leads to life. Christ does not conquer people, he only conquers that which destroys people, death and the ways of death, and he does so by giving his life and taking none. He does so only by giving, never taking. This is how he “draws all men” by being “lifted up” not on conqueror’s throne but a criminal’s cross. This is how he calls us into communion. It is his body broken, his blood shed, by which he is to be re-membered. It is the wounds upon the resurrected body that draws Thomas in. It is wounds that he offers us. “To our wounds, only a wounded God can speak. And not a God has wounds but you alone.”

Wounds speak in a way that mutes trophies and rings. We would do well to remember this in a christendom that has, to our shame, so often used conquering as technique. Words like “crusade” do not belong in the Kingdom, let alone actual crusades themselves. We can not be evangelical by winning anything, especially arguments. As the saying goes, “no one has surrendered to Christ by losing an argument.” To try to make people “surrender” to the faith by any kind of force, whether it be physical, verbal, rational, or ideological, not only violates the faith but forfeits it all together. Our King conquers only death, and he does so by giving his life. This is how the reign of Christ comes to and through us, by baptism.

As we stand near the water we proclaim that all who are baptized are “baptized into the death of Jesus Christ.” So we are not conquers, we are something “more” than conquerors in Christ. Could it be that we are wounded healers by grace? By grace, we are they who overcome, who triumph, over the evil one, not by a domination that makes others bleed but by the blood of the crucified lamb and our own blood, the word of our witness. In the book of Revelation the brothers and sisters who overcome “loved not their lives even unto death”. This is how they overcome.

In his prayer for peace, Saint Francis begins by asking “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace” and by the end he offers how this peace, this wholeness, and completion may come. He finishes by saying, “it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Our king entered into the fullness of the human experience, being “found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” Christ the King did not eliminate that which threatened him, he sank deep into it thus transfiguring it. This is how we too will overcome, not by conquering others and sacrificing our humanity, but by joining others and sacrificing for our shared humanity. This can happen by grace as we worship a wounded God.

In “Gravity and Grace”, published posthumously in 1947, Simone Weil wrote about justice calling it, “that fugitive from the camp of conquerors.” Christ is not the conquering camp, Christ is the refugee. I wonder how much this might challenge us in our imaginings of what Christ’s kingship is? Christ is not a king by any of our standards, which is why he is King. His kingship only conquers that which conquers us. Our participation in his kingdom, animated by the life of God, must be the same. Christ the King never dominates, never controls, never eliminates in order to avoid elimination. He instead enters into the full human experience, all the way down, so that his kingdom may indeed have no end.

To our wounds only a wounded king can speak. We have no king, but Christ.

Amen.

(Fr. Jon Paul Robles)