The last Sunday after Pentecost!  We made it!  On this final Sunday before Advent, here’s what the lectionary sets us up with:

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
 Psalm 93
 Revelation 1:4b-8
 John 18:33-37
 

I’m at a bit of an advantage knowing that this is also known as “Christ the King Sunday.”  It helps put the reading from Daniel in perspective.  Daniel’s vision of God sitting on the throne and then Jesus taking his rightful place is simply incredible with this vision or prophesy coming some 600 years before Christ’s birth.  I cannot help but think of Daniel’s situation and apply it to what we talked about this past Sunday.  The Kingdom of God is like none we have known.  One of the commentaries last week speaking on the how temporary anything on earth is even mentioned Babylon, where Daniel has and writes down this vision.   King Nebuchadnezzar was so proud of what he had built in Babylon, what would he think touring the ruins today?  Same could be said for Herod the Great who was rebuilding the temple at the time of Sunday’s Gospel text.  He does have a legacy, but could he imagine that of all his magnificent buildings, only pieces and foundations would remain?

I think we’re going to see the theme pretty easily in our Scripture for this week...the kingship of God.  I was struck by the verses four and five.  Again, thinking about the recent hurricane and its devastating impact on North Carolina, Tennessee and other places, we are more in-tune with the power of water.  Watching any video of flooding comes with that roaring sound of water and how easily that water is able to pick up and move whatever is in its way.  Verse five says God is even mightier.  I trust just like his Kingdom, his power is more than anything we can imagine in this world.  We serve and awesome God!

I admit that I don’t spend a whole lot of time in Revelation, but here we go.  After reading this I wonder if last week wasn’t just setting us up for this.  John starts out Revelation laying a foundation that must be understood and that is God is not like others who come and go, like nations that rise to great power just to collapse.  God is eternal.  As the text says, God is, was and is still yet to come.  Sunday, Jesus warned in the Gospel about false prophets and those who might lead people astray claiming to be Him.  John’s words here have provided me with a bit of comfort or confidence that it will be tremendously obvious and not at all up to opinion or interpretation if someone is in fact the Messiah.  I pray that we all know it is the Lord and that we have that impulse within us, as did the first disciples, to follow Him immediately.

A rare opportunity to be in the Gospel of John.  The three-year cycle of the lectionary spends nearly all of its time in the three synoptic Gospel’s, so we only get a sprinkling of John’s account.  There’s a strangeness to getting this text just before Advent.  As we are about to kick off four weeks of anticipating Jesus’ birth, we first get an account of Jesus in some of his final hours.  As I look over this text, I see something I have never noticed before or at least did not put together previously.  There’s a strong current of Jesus being the King of all and not just one group.  We start the back and forth with Pilate about being the King of the Jews and Pilate continues the conversation stating the fact that he himself is not a Jew.  In that I hear him say that because he is not Jewish, he would not be subject to any type of kingship that Jesus might claim.   However, when we get to the final words of this passage, Jesus says, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”   This is not a closed group.  Jesus came for a purpose and that purpose was to be the savior for “everyone.”