Jeremiah 23.1-6; Psalm 46; Colossians 1.11-20; Luke 23.33-43
TO REFLECT on Christ the King, I’m taking a single verse from Luke’s Gospel (23.38), along with the opposite Gospel records of the inscription on the cross. But, first, an interesting proven fact that the Bible commentator Joseph Fitzmyer points out in his commentary on Luke: “The inscription on the cross is the one thing we all know of which was written about Jesus during his lifetime.” If that will not be a reason to pay scrupulous attention to all 4 versions of the inscription, I have no idea what’s; for this notice, which could look like nothing greater than an administrative label, is the very first proclamation of the Good News.
For the Jewish people, having a king had begun as an ambition, subsequently transformed into historical reality. After that, through battle and division, disaster and exile, it faded from history, and morphed as a substitute right into a dream of fulfilment within the unknowable future. There was never an issue, for God’s ancient people, of separating powers into something like “Church” and “State”. In Jewish history, the king was a present granted by God to his people. Kingly power was God’s power, delegated to an earthly mortal — like a bishop’s power to have a good time the eucharist being delegated to a priest.
All 4 canonical Gospels record the existence of the notice. Each version differs intimately from the others, but all of them agree on the important thing point, the Good-News-in-a-sentence: a public proclamation that Jesus is “the king of the Jews”:
Matthew: “Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, ‘This is Jesus, the King of the Jews’” (27.37).
Mark: “The inscription of the charge against him read, ‘The King of the Jews’” (15.26).
Luke: “There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews’” (23.38).
John: “Pilate also had an inscription written and placed on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews’ . . . ‘What I even have written I even have written’” (19.19-22)
Matthew adds Jesus’s name to the notice. He and Luke say that it recorded Jesus’s identity by drawing the reader’s attention in an emphatic way: “This is the king of the Jews”. Mark’s version is easier. No name, no drawing of attention, just “The king of the Jews”.
John’s account of the notice is greater than 4 times the length of the opposite versions (75 words, as a substitute of a maximum of 17 in Greek) — too long to cite in full here. He pictures a complete scene, vivid with dialogue like a stage-drama, including facets that the opposite Evangelists don’t record. In place of an easy factual record of the fixing of the notice, he records a to-and-fro tussle between Pontius Pilate (who embodies Roman authority) and the chief priests (who embody the Jewish religious authorities).
Committees are probably the worst environment possible through which to draft and edit a bit of text right into a final form. Ask any member of the General Synod. The chief priests want Pilate’s wording altered, to mark a separation between what Jesus claimed about himself, and what’s, for them, the reality about him. But Pilate refuses. His reply to those grumblers is one which I sometimes recall if I have a look at some piece of writing which I did years ago. “What I even have written, I even have written” is a way of acknowledging that the act of writing is prior to now, and the writing itself is now an atom in the material of history, a mere witness of a sliver of time, not — unlike the Bible — a text forever.
Pilate means something different. He will not be just baiting the chief priests. He is reminding them that, although they’ve driven him into condemning Jesus, he retains the ability and the moral freedom to say his reading of the event. They leave him (as he sees it) with no alternative but to crucify. But he has seen through them, and the notice proves the actual fact. As one other commentator puts it, “Even as they force Pilate to heed their calls to crucify Jesus, Pilate certifies Jesus’s sovereignty over them.”
In the Synoptic versions, the notice looks like a spiteful joke. But once we add in John’s version, its true nature is revealed. “The king of the Jews” is a written record, revealing the identity of God’s own Son to humankind: truly the First Gospel.
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