We are to be awash in regal imagery on this Sunday next before Advent, as the diehard monarchist theologians trumpet the theme of "Christ as king." Crown him with many crowns. One isn't enough. The words "king," "kings," "kingdom" and "kingship" appear in all three readings and in the psalm.
 
Make a list of the really good and benevolent monarchs -- kings or queens -- you can remember from your study of history. America's last close-up experience with a king (George III of England) erupted in a revolution. Good thing, too, as it turns out.
 
Widen the idea of monarchy to dictator or despot, and you have power-sodden figures all the way from Napoleon Bonaparte to Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot to Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad and now Vladimir Putin.
 
Power as apportioned to or appropriated by kings and like characters has proven itself dangerous and undesirable. Furthermore, the Jesus who appears variously in the canonical gospels and in The Gospel According to Thomas, possibly representing a very early account of Jesus, is anything but a royal figure. The depictions of "Jesus" in the synoptic gospels are largely of a peasant of great natural intelligence/1 living out an asceticism common among itinerant public intellectuals of the era.
 
So it will be necessary for us to receive and deal with the king-speak of the readings in a metaphorical way, taking care not to impute to the Galilean peasant more or different than he apparently was, or to models on which his possibly composite character was founded were.

Where using "king" and "Jesus" in the same sentence is concerned, the reading from John assigned to this day may be the best choice because he skirted the issue of kingship. The word "king" is used just four times in According to John until today's reading begins: John 1: 49: attributed to Nathanael and his over-the-top surprise at being known by Jesus: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel;" 6:15: attributed to Jesus' inner musing after the feeding of the multitude: "When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king ... " 12:13, 15: the entry into Jerusalem scene, an allusion to Zechariah 9:9.
 
At no time does John's Jesus claim identity as the king of anything and, in fact, is shown at 6:15 trying to avoid having to reject it publicly.  Of course, why would John care? He had at 1:1-14 already "identified" Jesus as the deity in human form.
 
Supposing there had been a kind of populist surge to make Jesus "king," such a surge would have been made up of peasants with a few zealots mixed in. Anybody who knew anything would have realized such a movement could only end in disaster. The "Palm Sunday" scene is suspect in that it is derived directly from Zechariah and, as John and the synoptic writers used it, might have been a literary mocking of the processions of conquering Caesars.
 
In any event, the colloquy John creates between the proconsul Pilate and John's Jesus skirts the royalty issue. They spar:
 
Pilate: "Are you the King of the Jews?" (That must surely have been a curled-lip taunt.)

Jesus: "Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?" (Tell him what, we might wonder?)

Pilate: "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?"

Jesus: "My kingdom [the word can mean 'rule' or 'domain'] is not from (does not belong, is not of) this world. If my kingdom were from (of) this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But, as it is, my kingdom is not from here."

Pilate: "So you are a king?"

Jesus: "You say that I am a king. For this [not being a king] I was born, and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth  ..."

Pilate: "What is truth?"
 
John is more interested in "truth" (αλήθεια) -- unveiling or disclosure. Kings live behind veils of one kind and another to keep secret their various schemes and doings. Kings are not required to disclose or unveil anything. As a type, they are not interested in truth at least in the New Testament sense of the word. As an official in the hapless administration of George W. Bush once said, "The truth is what we say it is."

In a parting shot to Pilate, John's Jesus says: "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Just as Jesus' rule is not of, or does not belong to, this world (κόσμος -- originally "ornament" or "adornment," later "the visible world"), so only those who do not "belong" to this world, but rather to the truth, can hear (άκούει) or understand his voice, i.e., get the meaning of what he is saying.
 
What is that meaning? An attempt to make an honest answer to that question will be the purpose of any individual or group study of this passage and of any homily or of any sermon based on it prepared by and for rational people in this second decade of the 21st century ... taking note of such statements as: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (2:19b); "I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above/again: (3:3); "I am he [the messiah]" (4:25); "I am the bread of life" (6:35); "Before Abraham was, I am" (8:59; "I am the gate for the sheep" (10:7); "I am the resurrection and the life: (11:25); "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me" (14:6); "I am the true vine, and my father is the vinegrower" (15:1); "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (15:12); "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now" (16:12).
 
How does one "hear" such fantastical things? And how can reason process them so they become useful?
 
Of course, it is the fourth evangelist speaking, not Jesus -- or not any of the Jesuses we have met in the synoptic gospels and in Thomas. The "voice" is the voice of the one we call "John" whose identity is pretty much lost to history, though an emerging consensus is that the author was a Gentile convert to Judaism, or had been an outlier in Judaism until attracted to the emerging Jesus movement and knew that, to survive, it had to be fashioned along the lines of Greek philosophical terms (e.g., "logos") and partake in the kind mythological language and concept that Paul had used in speaking of the one he called "Christ Jesus":
 
"Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself ... being born in human likeness ..." (Philippians 2: 5b-7a -- thought by some to be a quotation from an early liturgical text).

My esteemed colleague in online publication, John S. Spong, recently wrote in his series on the New Testament: "Assume that the life of Jesus was lived between 4 BCE and 30 CE. We face the fact that from the years 30 CE to about 50 CE, there is not a single word preserved of anything Jesus said or did. A tunnel of total silence exists, into which only speculation is possible."

With all due respect, I disagree with Bishop Spong. The collection of sayings attributed to Jesus -- which sayings are found mostly in According to Thomas, According Matthew and According to Luke -- have been identified as a major source (called in the trade "Q" for the German term Quelle, meaning "source") of some of the earliest utterances credited to a Jesus. My working hypothesis for many years of research has been that it was those sayings that formed the working texts for the people I call "Jesus Jews" in the years between 30 CE and the appearance of According to Mark some time after 70 CE.

I am backed up to some degree by Burton L. Mack in his The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins and by Elaine Pagels in her Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Mack's research led him to think that the actual Jesus was considered a "Cynic sage," not a prophet and that perhaps already in Jesus' lifetime (even before +/- 30 CE) a movement had formed around him. Furthermore, Mack said, "The people of Q did not think of Jesus as a messiah, did not recognize a special group of trained disciples as their leaders, did not imagine that Jesus had marched to Jerusalem in order to cleanse the temple or reform Jewish religion, did not regard his death as an unusual divine event, and did not follow his teachings to be 'saved' or transformed people."/2

Pagels came to see that According to John was written at least in part to blunt what must have been the considerable effect of According to Thomas./3 She notes the out-sized role Thomas plays in the Johannine narrative, the kvetcher, the doubter at critical stages -- 14:5 (after Jesus says "You know the way to the place I am going") "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" whine, whine, whine. And again at 20:24-29 as the disciples are depicted as rejoicing that their resurrected Lord walked through a locked door and showed them proof of his abuse. Told of that, Thomas is made to say, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."