Our King in Action
And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.” –Mark 15:2
Jesus is our King, and he proves it by his actions. As we read this passage we have a tendency focus on the idea of the Jews killing their king; and while the heinous crime of regicide is a part of the story, there is something greater going on.
Even as he is answering Pilate’s question he is fulfilling the duty of a monarch and protecting his people. A king was required to be a soldier. This meant that he had to at times put his life in danger in order to defend his people. No monarch did this like Jesus. There is an attraction, beauty, to the idea of a king riding off to battle. This beauty exists because of its semblance to the divine, to Jesus great confrontation with our antagonists during his passion.As he stood before Pilate Jesus was fighting our battle. The blood shed in our defense would be his. But while he was attacked in the conventional sense, with soldiers, and government, and spears, and taunts, he fought much differently. He fought by dying. Because he was sinless, the weapons of this world had no effect on him. They would have destroyed us, and ushered us into unimaginable suffering; but he stood before us, protecting us, as our king, and delivered us in his victory.
As great and wonderful as this news is, it does not mean our lives are without suffering. We have trials we are facing even now. But, what he did means we will not suffer our natural fate, and what our enemies sought to inflict on us. The victory has been won. The enemy has been irreversibly routed, and is now being driven to his eternal destination — hell. Our king has given us the great honor of participating in his victory. But just as he won the war, the remaining mopping-up actions must be carried out passively. These actions, the trials of the circumstances of our lives, can be hard, but it is when they seem hardest that we must look back to the victory at Calvary, and comfort ourselves that the conclusion is not in doubt. Indeed, even as we sometimes perceive that we now do the fighting, we can never forget that our King once doing his duty, always does his duty, even now doing it in our lives.