For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
The King is Here!
When we think of kings, we often think of power and corruption. We don't think about service, justice, and love. But that is the King that Jesus is to us!
In this episode, Melissa and Bishop Wright have a conversation about John 18:33-37 - the passage where Pontius Pilate asks Jesus, "Are you a King?". They discuss Jesus' response, and how His kingdom transcends world problems and challenges the status quo of authority. Listen in for the full conversation.
Read For Faith, the companion devotional.
That is the essence of the good news of God in Christ right. It is the enfleshment of some new news, some good news that has penetrated us as individuals, and then, out of the overflow of that, it flows into other people by the way that we care for other people, by the way that we listen, by the way that we go to great lengths to provide for people that we really don't even know, by the way that we decide to live our lives. And so that is evangelism in its best sense.
Melissa:Welcome to For People with Bishop Rob Wright. I'm Melissa Rau and this is a conversation inspired by For Faith, a weekly devotion sent out every Friday. You can find a link to this week's devotion and a link to subscribe in the episode's description. Hey, hey, bishop.
Bishop Wright:Hey Melissa.
Melissa:Your devotion this week is called the King is here.
Bishop Wright:The King is here.
Melissa:It's based off of John, chapter 18, verses 33 through 37, which I believe is the part of scripture where Jesus has been arrested and is before Pilate. And Pilate asks so you're the king of the Jews.
Bishop Wright:Yeah. Well, the first thing he says are you the king of the Jews?
Melissa:Right. So what matters? What's really hitting you? I mean, I know you have a, really really. This is the part where Jesus is saying, well, king of this world no, and yet I don't know that. He actually says I'm king of anything, and yet we call him our king period, full stop. So what's your take on all this?
Bishop Wright:Well, I mean, it's a great exchange that I would invite people to take a look at for their own selves, right? So the 18th chapter, john, you get the backstage pass to the arrest and the inquisition, you know, and ultimately to the crucifixion and all that sort of dialogue. It's far better than Netflix or Hulu. I mean fiction and all that sort of dialogue it's far better than Netflix or Hulu. I mean, it's an amazing story. But you get this conversation about.
Bishop Wright:You know, what does it mean to be a king? You know Pilate is trying to understand. You know what people have said about Jesus from a worldly standpoint. He understands power, he understands political power, and Jesus doesn't quite fit neatly into boxes. Jesus asked him well, you know, did you come up with this idea about me being king or did somebody tell you right? And so you know, pilate says well, am I a Jew? In other words, you know I'm trying to figure out you folks culturally. I mean, we're the colonizers, we're the oppressors here and you guys are having a sort of an intercultural conversation, and so I'm just trying to, I'm trying to use the jargon and figure this thing out. But you know, he notices Jesus does that?
Bishop Wright:Jesus' own people ethnically people, religious. His own people handed him over to Pilate, a non-Jew. So it's curious, I imagine, for Pilate. I want to give him a little room here as he asks a good question and series of questions, but then Jesus, in the 36th verse, does say well, he doesn't say I'm king, but he does say my kingdom is not of this world, right, my environment, my locale, right, is not of this world. And then he makes this interesting comment about if I had servants in this world, in other words, if I did power the way that y'all do it, you know, then I'd have armies trying to rescue me right now. So it's a fascinating conversation about this world and the next world, about what power looks, looks like and then what is ultimate power and what is real kingship. And so the church is is made the Sunday before Thanksgiving, christ the King Sunday, and we talk about what it means to have Jesus Christ as our King.
Melissa:Yeah, which is kind of like the culmination of our church season or church calendar. That's right. We begin again church calendar, that's right.
Bishop Wright:We begin again right, that's right At the very last Sunday of November is where we start all over again with Advent, and so we close the year liturgically, close the year, proclaiming that Jesus is King.
Melissa:Yeah, so I guess for the skeptics, in the room or in their own room there are folks who will really dive deep and go okay, yeah, this is a story between two people in a room, I guess, with just two people. How do we know that this is accurate? Now I'm getting into the weeds here because I actually don't know that it matters. I'm just curious how you respond to folks who really try to dig deep and go into the literal interpretation.
Bishop Wright:Well, you know, in our church we welcome questions and I feel like being a little bit skeptical is not the enemy of faith, right? I mean, if faith is brittle and faith is fragile as a thing and can't stand serious questions, then of what great worth is it really? I mean, god has given us brains right Memory, reason and skill. It's God who gave us gray matter capacity, right, and I don't think that God is scared of us probing and pulling and pushing. I mean, that is what makes faith in fact. So I would say, yeah, bring all your questions, you know, and let's just go on a journey. But to answer your question narrowly, we don't know.
Bishop Wright:This is a recollection and a recreation of a dialogue that has been handed down. You know, again and again and again, and so that's what we know. You know there was no. You know again and again and again, and so that's what we know. You know there was no. You know there were no iPhones in the room. There was no, there was nothing recorded, and so it gets passed down, and so we look through this to try to understand.
Bishop Wright:You know, that relationship, pilate and Jesus, and that dialogue, and we have some sense of the dialogue and that's, you know for me where I am at in my faith, which I realize that everybody is at different places. It's fine that this is what we have. Human recollection is imperfect, right? I mean this is why I mean look at the court system, look at testimony, look at all kinds of things, right. And so the imperfection of an account is not a deal breaker for me. And this is why I would say to people read the whole story, then Read the whole story, sit with it, sort it through and let the things rise that rise to your consciousness, and then go, you know, on a research journey. But yeah, we don't know exactly, but this is the recollection of a conversation.
Melissa:Yeah, I really like it because to me this is really about whether, again, literal King or we've made, we've made Jesus King. The fact is, is that Jesus was all about being different, going going, you know, against the, against what the world stood for. Right, really is what holiness is.
Bishop Wright:Well, this is what I love about it. So, if we use the word and I realized that the word kingdom for some people might be sort of a stretch, because we don't think in those terms, but I mean here the Roman empire, so you got an empire and you got kingdom in this story, right, and one is all about dominance and one is all about military might and one is all about weaponry, right, and one is about domination and colonization of people, right, it's about the policies of extraction, extracting labor and taxes from peasantry that are conquered under the Pax Romana, right. And then you have Jesus, who has this other version of kingdom, where the throne that he wants is not an opulent chair, as I've said in the meditation, but the human heart. Right, the treasure is not the stuff that ultimately all rots, the treasure is a compassionate interaction for everybody.
Bishop Wright:What's cool about Jesus being king in the way that we call him king, is that Jesus doesn't demand deference the way that earthly monarchs do. I mean, we set up all these elaborate protocols when monarchs are in our presence so that they understand and we say that they are entitled to a certain degree of deference. Jesus doesn't want deference from other people, right? I mean, he wants to be alongside, he wants to invite people to actually be partners with him, he wants to send us out as participants in the work that he has begun, and so it's just interesting to see how Jesus does power relative to the way that we do power in empire.
Melissa:So what does that mean then for us Bishop, if Christ is indeed our King? What does that mean for how we then relate or live out our faith?
Bishop Wright:Right, that's a great question. So the first thing I would say is that when we say if Jesus is our King, I mean everybody's, on lots of different kinds of belief spectrums, and so I would say for those people who would say that they are faithful people, I think that that, if goes away, I think what we say is that Jesus is the king of my life, jesus is my Lord and Savior. Jesus is my center, not my border. Jesus is my center. And so then we can say we can answer Pilate's question yeah, jesus is our king.
Bishop Wright:You know, it's not speculative for us and we get to say that after having lived with Jesus a while and trying on his words and his ways in our real life situations that's how we crown him king is that we try his words, we try his ways, we try his conflict, how he handles conflict strategy. We try his forgiveness approach. We try his conflict, how he handles conflict strategy. We try his forgiveness approach, we try his sharing approach, we try his other-centeredness approach. And then what we discern, once having tried that and wrestling with that and maybe even arguing with Jesus about all of that, is that then we realize somewhere in our mind, body and soul that Jesus' way is the best way, and we realize, as a part of that recognition, that Jesus' way is not the world's way.
Bishop Wright:And so to say that Jesus is my king is an invitation for all of us to think about. Well, who's the king of your life, then? Because we are servants of lots of things. Right, we are servants of market, we are servants of entertainment, we are servants of bitterness and malice and fear and grievance. We're servants of a lot of things. And so what I like about this is that here's an invitation implicit in this meditation is that is Jesus the king of your life? It doesn't mean you're a perfect citizen in his kingdom that's another podcast. It is, but are you willing? Are you willing to center him as the center of your life and then to live within his words and ways, or attempt to live within his words and ways with his love and support? So it's not an if for us. That's our goal and we try to get there.
Melissa:fact is that Jesus didn't king himself, right?
Bishop Wright:No.
Melissa:We made Jesus our king, the people. And yet you know, through empire, make people bow in fealty to Jesus, despite Jesus not doing that himself.
Bishop Wright:Right, right, well, yeah, I mean yeah. So what you have to realize about us in that regard is so what you have to realize about us in that regard is that sin can make us mess up even the most beautiful thing, and it's not that we're terrible, it's just that we're limited, right, we're limited. And so thinking about Jesus as King is really, I think, an important idea, because we recognize, if we're wise, that we are limited. We recognize that there are things going on with us that help us from seeing clearly, from seeing each other clearly, for valuing life for what it really is, for valuing human relationship for what it needs to be, for valuing, you know, sharing, and so on and so forth. So there's that, and so we replaced that with falsehood, and so the church said we want real power, and so they started to dress themselves up like empire, right, which Jesus didn't right?
Bishop Wright:And so the question always is is that, in the way that we are church, is Jesus actually the king of the organization that bears his name? Right? And the answer has to be asked. The answer has to be given by every organization, by every individual. Is this the way that the boss would do the business? And then we have to live with the fact that the way that the boss would do the business may not be prudent relative to the way that the world wants to do business. And so now we are stuck, we're in a conundrum, at an intersection in our real life.
Bishop Wright:You know the real life, wisdom and the real life. Words are power. You know might is right. And you know, do unto others before they can do it to you. You know, as someone has said, wisely, or do unto others and then run like hell, as another person has said, right, so Jesus just messes up that whole thing. But let me say also you know, when they ultimately crucify Jesus, you know they nail, you know the scroll, the script above his head. You know, king of the Jews, right, and so this is what you got to love about God, right? This is great irony. So they did it as a jeer. You know, they did it as a diminishment, right. And lo and behold, even the people who hated him or were indifferent to him, or thought he was nothing, actually crowned him. And they had no idea, with that sneer or that diminished diminishment, that they were actually giving voice to something that we now proclaim and that we would argue.
Melissa:Scripture says that the whole universe proclaims Last question, I think then, bishop, is you know, one of the things that the church is really passionate about is evangelism. What does a friend making campaign for Jesus look like?
Bishop Wright:Yeah, friend-making campaign for Jesus look like yeah. So I think if Jesus is king of our life, I think that we begin to see the world through his eyes and see each other through his eyes, and if we have a relationship with Jesus and Jesus is at the center of our life, this is what softens us in ways that are defining, in ways that are compelling and enigmatic to others. And people want to know what good news we know. When we find that we are kind, we find that we are generous, when we find that we are forgiving, when we find out all these things about us that are really the overflow out of our relationship with Jesus. We have good news and that is palpable, and people meet us and know something about that and even if we don't lead with a Bible verse or come to church with me, they know that something qualitatively different is happening with us. That is the essence of the good news of God in Christ. Right, it is the enfleshment of some new news, some good news that has penetrated us as individuals and then, out of the overflow of that, it flows into other people, by the way that we care for other people, by the way that we listen, by the way that we go to great lengths to provide for people that we really don't even know, by the way that we decide to live our lives.
Bishop Wright:And so that is evangelism in its best sense, and it doesn't necessarily. I mean, you know, the church likes to think that it was there, you know, leading the abuse that comes with colonialism, and so it's interesting that Jesus is just not that, he's just not that dude. He doesn't talk that way, he doesn't organize himself that way. And so again, christ the King, sunday, really presents us with a choice Do you want to bet on the way that he does kingdom, or do you want to bet on the way that he does kingdom, or do you want to bet on the way that we do empire?
Melissa:Bishop, that was a big, bold statement right there and you just let it sit.
Bishop Wright:I mean because, look, and just because I can frame the question doesn't mean I've got it sorted out. I mean I'm struggling, just like everybody and anybody who's listening, and as soon as I got it, I think I have it sorted out. I mean, I'm struggling just like everybody and anybody who's listening, and you know, as soon as I got it, I think I have it sorted. I end up at another intersection where I'm invited to choose, you know Jesus's way or other ways, you know, and oftentimes it's not as stark as that. Oftentimes it's a Venn diagram. We're trying to sort of figure it out. We're trying to live in two worlds, but the way we sort of make our way is to use his coordinates, and his coordinates are his example and his coordinates are his teaching. And, yeah, jesus does not live in the 21st century, so Jesus doesn't have a comment necessarily about our screen time or AI, and Jesus didn't refer to abortion and all these sorts of things.
Bishop Wright:But what we're supposed to do is we're supposed to saturate ourselves with his word in ways and then begin to use the mind that God gave us to figure out what that means for us now, over issues that are emerging for us at this time, but there are words and ideas that stand the test of time, and so kindness is always going to be kindness. There's no sell by date or shelf life to kindness. Generosity is going to be an eternal virtue and value, and so on and so on. And so this is what Jesus teaches us, but he also teaches us to look piercingly at our now through his eyes. And you know, again, the Lord's Prayer helps us to figure out what the deliverables are. Right On earth, as it is in heaven, jesus says my kingdom is not of this earth. But later on he teaches us that, hey, right now the work is to make this hell, which sometimes looks like hell, our home now, as much heaven as you can, and the way we do that, I believe, is to situate Jesus as the king of our life.
Melissa:Amen, bishop, thank you, and thank you, listeners, for listening to For People. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Bishop Rob Wright. Please subscribe, leave a review and we'll be back with you next week.