The first time I ever saw a 3-D show was in the summer of 1983. The technology was new, and required special glasses which were offered as part of a collaborative promotion between Universal Studios, Pepsi, and 7-11. 7-11, if you don’t know, is a mostly American chain of gas stations. They were trying to sell mildly addictive stimulants to children (Soda) and bundled a free pair of 3-D glasses with every Mega Gulp Ultra Quencher… or whatever they called their big plastic gallon-sized commemorative cup of caffeine and corn syrup.
The movie was JAWS 3-D… a fankly terrible sequel to a popcorn classic. It follows the misadventures of the Brody children as they face death from yet another homicidal fish. Moby Dick it ain’t, but I will say that it does feature some nice scenes of kids sailing.
Anyway, I was not allowed to watch the movie in the theatre. I was only seven and back then parents had a much easier job managing their kids’ media diets. But I COULD watch a 3-D making-of-feature that was being shown on broadcast TV to promote the event.
I was looking forward to it for weeks, and I managed to be the first one excused from the dining room table which meant that I was able to prop myself down on the best seat on the couch--the very throne of the living room. You know the spot, the one coveted by all the children. A spot that we used to fight over and therefore was controlled with its own elaborate set of family rules. The first person to sit in got to keep it, but could leave for a bathroom break if they properly reserved the seat with the incantation of a magic, ritual formula: “I hereby reserve this seat.” And even then your trip would be timed, with older sisters eager to enforce the absolute letter of the law laid down by our parents and ratified by the kids committee for family justice.
Anyway, on that day in July 1983 I had my spot and had my commemorative glass of orange juice (we were not allowed soda at home) and I had my glasses. But when I put the glasses on I realized an immediate problem. The glasses were sized for teenagers and adults, not for seven year old heads, and so the blue and red lenses did not cover both eyes--just one at a time. I tried shifting the glasses quickly from one side to the other--but I still couldn’t get the effect to work. So I tried watching the feature without the glasses, and therein ran into another problem.
When you watch a 3-D show without the special glasses you see a double image. Your brain tries to bring them together, to resolve the image into a single, multi-dimensional whole, but our brains can’t do it. Getting a headache and frustrated I think I eventually gave up and went outside with my BB-gun to patrol the property or play with the chickens or whatever my seven year old self did the wheat fields of Kansas.
Today’s lessons provide us a similar challenge. The jarring juxtaposition of Kingship and Execution are impossible to reconcile with eyes that are seven, 43, or 100 years old. The compilers of the lectionary, the order of lessons appointed for each Sunday of the calendar, could have picked something more appropriate for Christ the King Sunday. Perhaps the magnificent Transfiguration on the Mountain Top--a moment of glory that was a foretaste for the select Disciples, of the true glory of Jesus. Or they could have picked the post-resurrection appearances, when the reality of resurrection was made clear to His followers, and to us who believe.
But instead, the committee, in their wisdom, gives us this… the account of his crucifixion and death. And we are supposed to see that image intercut with another--the Kingship of the one we call “Lord.” You will be forgiven if it gives you a headache.
Developing either frame to full opacity just makes matters worse. To start, our images of kingship. What images populate our imagination of what this might mean? Consider a show like “The Crown.” Like all Anglican Clergy I am required by my oath of ordination to dutifully watch this show about Queen Elizabeth. And I have to say that it’s a lot of fun. I particularly like the way the show takes the life of faith seriously and provides some convincing portraits of how faith in Jesus has enriched the lives of the characters. But of course the show takes a fair number of liberties with history: compressing and simplifying complex events and imagining conversations that would have never happened in real life in order to make things fit neatly into one hour blocks.
This season, especially, the Crown is attempting to make an argument that the Monarch has two natures or realities. There is the person of the Queen and her family with all their problems and quirks, and there is the office of the Queen, which is supposed to maintain a kind of mystic distance that allows it to hold the hopes and dreams of the English people. This is accomplished by the Queen maintaining a delicate balance that looks like aloof empathy, if such a thing could exist. If she is too well known then people will recognize and despise her weaknesses (and that of her family). To far away and denies people the very comfort and support and hope that she is supposed to embody. The show explores how she succeeds and fails at doing this.
Episode 3 of the current season is particularly poignant as it explores the events of the Aberfan mining disaster that killed 116 children and 28 adults. It’s a stunning episode, and historical quibbles aside the picture of a community grieving such a loss with faith and music is not to be missed. The critical conflict driving the plot is the question of whether, or when, the Queen should visit the town of Aberfan. But it also includes the character’s own analysis of the role of the monarchy itself. I won’t say anymore to avoid spoilers, but I will say the essential philosophical conflict is, in my opinion, unreasonable. It reveals the limits of Constitutional Monachy’s ability to cope with tragedy.
Kingship, as we have it on earth, has its limits. And those limits would apply to Jesus as secular king, too. Which is why Christianity fails in Theocracies. Look at the history of the Vatican if you disagree. Jesus would make a terrible earthly king.
The frame of martyrdom is similarly problematic. To see Jesus as a misunderstood moral philosopher who was killed for standing up against the status quo has similar limitations. Even if you discount the importance of a physical, bodily resurrection promised and demonstrated, it leaves us with a faith that is vulnerable to all the problems of humanism. It’s weak tea. Better than no tea… but it discards the most important and radical part of what an orthodox faith can offer.
Further, even the saints don’t appear saintly when put under a modern microscope. Every son of Adam is found to be just mud destined to be reincarnated into ashes by the crucible of life. We need a saviour who is more than just a perfect, enlightened human being.
So I’ve set up the thesis and antithesis. How do we go all Hegel on this problem and come up with a third option so familiar to us Anglicans? I’d suggest that we need a new pair of glasses--coloured with the filter of a biblical faith. Listen again to to the words of Colossians…
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
This dual nature of Christ as King and as Criminal, and powerful and vulnerable, goes beyond anything that earthly kIngship or moral perfection of some sanctified ubermensch can offer. It transcends into something more awesome as it reveals the image of a Cosmic Christ who exists both out there in the metaphyical beyond and simultaneously in the right here right now.
King Jesus didn’t have to visit Aberfan, because he was already there!
Consider this poem by Malcolm Guite
Our King is calling from the hungry furrows
Whilst we are cruising through the aisles of plenty,
Our hoardings screen us from the man of sorrows,
Our soundtracks drown his murmur: ‘I am thirsty’.
He stands in line to sign in as a stranger
And seek a welcome from the world he made,
We see him only as a threat, a danger,
He asks for clothes, we strip-search him instead.
And if he should fall sick then we take care
That he does not infect our private health,
We lock him in the prisons of our fear
Lest he unlock the prison of our wealth.
But still on Sunday we shall stand and sing
The praises of our hidden Lord and King.(source)
The glasses that we need are these… the ones already on our faces. If we can just clean the dust of cynicism and fear we can see that the king and criminal are already here and also out there in a promise breaking on the horizon of our imaginations of what is good and loving--the very fullness of God. Do we have the eyes to see, in the line at the food bank, on the throne of England, or in own hearts the Christ who dwells among us and beyond us. Beloved, my hope for you this week is that would be given such eyes of faith to see the living God.
