Last week, Doug and I went to see the new movie
"Lincoln." Daniel Day-Lewis was superb as the president who guided
the nation through the bloody Civil War and forced through - by hook or by
crook - the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, forever banning the institution
of slavery in these United States. Some
of his closest aides and cabinet members told him that this task of passing the
amendment was foolhardy - he had emancipated the slaves as part of his war
powers. Why risk the political capital it would cost to make this a part of the
constitution? Lincoln had just won re-election, and had sufficient coattails in
the election to cause the defeat of a number of members of congress who were of
the opposition party, but his own party had varying views on the subject of
slavery, and it was unclear whether he would have the votes to pass it.
And there Lincoln sat, wearied by the four years of war, in a room
filled with the latest invention - gas lamps lighting the room! - and lavish
furniture and fabrics, and men dressed in fine suits with silk cravats aroudn
their necks. In a nearby room, his wife Mary, still grieving the loss of their
child Willie, sat, in satins and lace and bows and jet beads, a portrait of
luxury in the midst of pain.
His advisors told him the political task ahead was too difficult.
And this tired, aching man, always one to lighten the mood and turn a heart by
a funny story or a gentle quip, suddenly was enraged, and cried out that it
must be done, slammming his fist on the table. The end of the war was at hand,
and if the amendment was not passed prior to that event, it would never be
passed, and the deaths of so many young men and boys would be in vain. If what
he had made the rule by war powers - the emancipation of the slaves - was not
made the rule for peacetime, people of color would once again be sucked into
the mire of servitude.
And those around him, shocked by that sudden change in demeanor in
the president who never seemed to be out of control of his emotions, shifted
gears and found ways to make it so. They were not always noble ways - the
promise of patronage jobs to lame-duck congressmen who had nothing politically
to lose, gentle persuasion, a wee bit of coercion - but the end result was what
Lincoln had insisted upon, and what those who were victims of slavery had
prayed for: a 13th amendment that said slavery was abolished.
In the midst of this political battle in Washington, Lincoln
visited other battlegrounds. Terrible places, with the dead still sprawled
without dignity on the grass and muck. The lines in Lincoln's face deepened,
and the sadness was evident, as he sat with General Ulysses Grant and said
"We have allowed each other to do horrific things, have we not?" And
then Lincoln returned to Washington on a finer horse than he would have ridden
as a country lawyer in Springfield Illinois, to a finer house that he might
have imagined as a country boy growing up in a log cabin, to the difficult work
of making a recalcitrant group of politicians give him what he insisted upon.
It's not easy to be president. If you look at before and after
photos of the past several presidents, you see the toll it takes. They get
wrinkles and gray hair. Eisenhower had no hair to turn gray, but he had a heart
attack. President Obama's hair is rapidly turning from black to gray. Ulysses
Grant told Lincoln that he had aged ten years in the final year of his
life. It is miserably hard, unrelenting
work. Whatever party you are, whether your party controls the Congress or not,
whether it is peacetime or wartime, it is hard work. You may get to live in an
extraordinarily gorgeous house. You may have all sorts of wonderful people
working for you. You may be someone who is viewed as important and powerful,
but no one will know all that is required of you as a leader, as the leader of
the free world. No one can know, because so much is necessarily kept secret.
When
we think of presidents or kings, we think of the privileges that go with the
position. A phrase from a Mel Brooks movie came into the lexicon three decades
ago, and we still believe it: "It's good to be king!" Those words
were spoken in the movie by Louis XVI, who presided over a ridiculously
extravagant court. For him it was good to be king, until, of course, he was
beheaded.
Over the past several months, we have been listening to the Gospel
of Mark, and one of the key themes in Mark is that being a disciple of Jesus
Christ is hard work - there is a cost to discipleship. Jesus continually warns
the twelve that this is a path full of hard work and danger.
The
disciples keep focusing on how Jesus is to be King, and that certainly is on
the mind of Pilate in today's gospel passage, as he questions Jesus about his
kingship. Jesus' words - "my kingdom is not of this world" - allays
the suspicions of Pilate and the fears of the Roman empire that this man is a
political rabble-rouser. It does little, though, to calm the religious
leadership, who recognize that Jesus is something else entirely. Not a
political king, but theological King. Not one looking to overturn the Roman
Empire, but one who wants to overturn the traditional understandings of who is
in charge when it comes to relationship with the One God. Jesus tells Pilate
that he is the King of Truth. Pilate might have looked at this Jesus, standing
beaten and ragged before the might of the Roman Empire, and said dismissively,
"This is a king? No, not really." But the religious leaders see
exactly what is going on, and want to make Jesus pay the price for threatening
their ordered world. The cost has been
great, and will be greater, in the days to come in Jesus' story.
Suddenly
we are not looking at the cost of discipleship. We are looking at the cost of
kingship. It isn't about the glory. It is about the responsibility and the pain
and the challenge of doing what must be done for the people, no matter what.
The disciples may think that it is good to be King, and that Jesus should be
King, but they don't really understand what being a King is.
And
that is why, even though it seems an odd thing for us to do, on the brink of
Advent, of the season of waiting for the infant Christ, we are talking about
Christ the King.
It
is like the story of Lincoln in the movie. We know how it ends. We know that
the 13th amendment passed. We know that it was a great moral and
political victory. We also know that Lincoln was assassinated. But the arc of
history, as Dr. Martin Luther King, said, is long. To know about Lincoln, the
story only makes sense because we know how it ends. But to understand the larger
story, why a Lincoln was so important to the nation, we need to know what
happened to him in the whole arc of his life, indeed in the whole arc of the
life of this nation.
It
is the same with this King who leads at great personal cost. To understand the
beginning of the story, which we will recall in the next few weeks, we must
remember the end of the story, at least the end of Jesus’ human existence on
earth. Then we can look at the whole arc of the story of Jesus’ life and death
and have it be a complete picture.
Perhaps
it is the best possible preparation for the beginning of the story, to see the
end first. We wait in hope for the newborn King, the one who will change
everything. We watch for the star, the marker of a new day. But from that very
moment, from the moment when Gabriel told Mary what was to come, the end of the
story, the cost of that life, of that Kingship, is both the shadow and the
light. To be born into the promise of Kingship is not all about power and
strength – it is about the pain that is an inevitable and necessary part of the
story. We can't appreciate the bitter irony beneath the sweetness of Advent and
Christmas – and we MUST acknowledge it - unless we know where it is all going to end
up, in a tapestry of joy and pain and power and death and resurrection.
Disciples?
If we are his disciples, there will be a cost. But it is worth it, because the
cost of Kingship was so very high, but so gracefully accepted, by Christ our
King.
Amen.
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