Since it's proclamation by Pope Pius XI in 1925, liturgical churches like us have celebrated the final Sunday in the church year (this Sunday, Nov. 22) as Christ the King Sunday. Progressive churches like ours call it Reign of Christ Sunday.
As much as any time in the church year besides Holy Week, this Sunday provokes many of us with images of blood (as well as paternalism and triumphalism -- but those we'll reserve for another time). The Gospel text is Pilate's query of Jesus about his kingship before handing him over to be killed and the other text from the Christian testament is Revelation 1:4-8, which reads in part, "To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood" (Rev. 1:5; find the complete texts for this week at http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/november-22-2009.html).
How exactly does this work? What does the writer of Revelation mean? Are we really "washed in the blood of Jesus" as many have sung throughout the years?
Or in our context, people will ask me why we don't sing certain hymns and songs. My answer: I refuse to engage in blood imagery and, especially, in any blood imagery that conjures up Jesus of Nazareth as some necessary sacrifice for humanity to appease the anger, wrath, or justice of God.
But, they reply, isn't being "washed in the blood" or at least "freed...from our sins by his blood" what we're all about?
Thus we enter a thorny field of questions, interpretations, theology, theories, church history, secular history, contemporary sensibilities, and more.
One simple reason I avoid such imagery is that people who have no history in the church can find it quite gory. As we seek to welcome all people, this can be off-putting. So I do as one of my good clergy colleague friends suggests and substitute "love" for "blood," which works in almost all cases (i.e., "This cup is the new covenant poured out in my love..." in the eucharistic liturgy).
Of course, that doesn't get to the core of the issue. The core is this: violence never wins.
Jesus died on a cross because violence is the way of society. As Daniel M. Bell, Jr., puts it in the article "God Does Not Demand Blood," excerpted from a book titled God Does Not and reprinted in the Christian Century magazine on Feb. 10, 2009 (read the whole article at (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_3_126/ai_n31557608/):
Culturally, the message that violence saves is evident in movie theaters and on the television screen. The plot of countless shows and movies can be summed up as "People who use bad violence are pursued by people who use good violence, and in the end good violence saves the day."
God does not work that way. God does not require violence or bloodshed. Violence and bloodshed make up a large portion of the DNA of domination systems and empires, which John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg call "the normalcy of civilization." If God worked through violence and bloodshed, God would have come to fulfill the messianic desires (of at least some) for a Commando Christ, leading armies to victory.
Instead, God came in human form in the person of Jesus (within the traditional Christian story) to enact reconciliation and communion between the human and the Divine. To further quote Bell: Jesus is
the embodiment of God's faithfulness to the divine desire for communion and reconciliation. Jesus was obedient to this divine mission even when he faced human resistance and rejection in the form of the cross. This love of God expressed in Jesus saves us. It is the love that would rather die on the cross than give up on us. We reject God, so God sends Jesus with the offer of life again and we reject it again; Jesus could have abandoned us, or called down fire from heaven to destroy us. But he did not. He remained faithful to his mission, reaching out to us until the end: "Father, forgive them ..."
It was only in the 11th century, a thousand years after Jesus, that St. Anselm of Canterbury developed the substitutionary theory of atonement (why God became human) that predominates the American Christian landscape. Bell summarizes it well:
In the face of human sin, which is an offense against God's honor, God, as One who must uphold justice, cannot simply forgive sin but must enforce a strict rendering of what is due. Because sinful humanity cannot fulfill its debt, the God-man Christ steps forward and fulfills justice through his substitutionary death on the cross. Redemption is a result of the payment of a debt incurred through sin by means of a death that satisfies divine justice.
This is a reading of Scripture that factors in heavily both the medieval system of justice in Anselm's time and the Hebrew system of sacrifice. And one that thoroughly separates the death of Jesus from the life and teachings of Jesus. This rending of his life is violence itself.
As a people who seek to hold together and live by the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, we see all those aspects as speaking to how and why God became (and continually becomes again) human. Even if suffering and death were the predictable result, they were not the reason.
The reason was to show another way, a way of redemptive nonviolence, a way that was different from the violence and bloodshed of the Empire (then or now). Thus Jesus says to Pilate, looking at Pilate's world of Roman rule and domination, "My kingdom/reign is not of this world." In essence, my kingdom/reign is not of violence and extortion and oppression. My kingdom/reign is of peace and communal sharing and the dignity of every person.
I end with a portion of Bell's conclusion:
The point is that in Christ we are not just pardoned but are also healed of our sin and made a different kind of people, a new creation, who live by a different logic. We love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We forgive, as we have been forgiven. We renounce violence as a means of defending or securing or saving ourselves or those we love. To the extent that our savior is Christ, our defense, security and salvation depend on Christ and the love that overcomes enemies. We live out the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:17-20).
This way of life may entail enduring suffering--not because suffering is in some way good or redemptive, not because this is what God wants or because it is punishment for our sin. Rather, it is because suffering is the cost that humans in their sinful rebellion impose on other humans. Moreover, being prepared to suffer does not mean that we must seek out suffering or passively endure it.
In places where we can talk about what the words mean and how we hear them, I will still use the word "blood" in relation to our faith. For in this understanding, Jesus came to reconcile us with one another and with the Divine and with the Universe. In that sense, we are all of one blood; this same lifeblood courses through all creation. When this recognition takes its place at the center of our being, violence can never be tolerated -- even if attributed to God (or especially if attributed to God!). Nonviolence becomes the way and violent acts only further convict those who commit them.
What does this mean for us practically? How does it play out in our lives? What does the "reign of Christ" have to say to us and our world today?
Come Sunday and find out!
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As I prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, I am reminded of the autumnal harvest time's spiritual significance. As a time of connectedness, I pause to acknowledge what I have to be thankful for. But I also reflect on the holiday as a time of remembrance - historical and familial.
Historically, I am reminded that for many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause of celebration, but rather a National Day of Mourning, remembering the real significance of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution and genocide of Native Americans and the long history of bloodshed with European settlers....
Homophobia is not indigenous to Native American culture. Rather, it is one of the many devastating effects of colonization and Christian missionaries that today Two-Spirits may be respected within one tribe yet ostracized in another.
"Homophobia was taught to us as a component of Western education and religion," Navajo anthropologist Wesley Thomas has written. "We were presented with an entirely new set of taboos, which did not correspond to our own models and which focused on sexual behavior rather than the intricate roles Two-Spirit people played. As a result of this misrepresentation, our nations no longer accepted us as they once had."
Traditionally, Two-Spirits symbolized Native Americans' acceptance and celebration of diverse gender expressions and sexual identities. They were revered as inherently sacred because they possessed and manifested both feminine and masculine spiritual qualities that were believed to bestow upon them a "universal knowledge" and special spiritual connectedness with the "Great Spirit." Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, historically Two-Spirits depicted transgender Native Americans. Today, the term has come to also include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and intersex Native Americans.
The Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America from religious persecution in their homeland, were right in their dogged pursuit of religious liberty. But their actual practice of religious liberty came at the expense of the civil and sexual rights of Native Americans.
Read the rest at www.clgs.org/blog/commentary/remembering-two-spirits-thanksgiving