http://christchurchlr.orgChrist Church Little Rock

Here’s a bit of a poem about lying. Or truth telling. Or about truths that can only be told by lying.

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

So begins “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens. The poem’s tension is all there in the first lines, or so it seems to me. The people want to be told the truth. And the man with the blue guitar just won’t tell it straight. A typical musician.

“You do not play things as they are.”

Maybe you’ve been there. “Just give me a straight answer!” you say, to that sarcastic uncle, or that shifty neighbor, or that skillful politician. “Tell us, for once, of things exactly as they are.”

This is all poor Pilate wanted to know. His questions to Jesus were simple: “Are you the King of the Jews?… What have you done?… So you are a king?” And then, in the very next line in the gospel of John, he asks, “What is truth?”

It’s a good question, “What is truth?”

There’s a sentimental, maybe particularly American image of Jesus as a plainspoken, clear-eyed truth teller. He’s the guy who said to let your yes be yes and your no be no, after all. And we like people who “tell it like it is”.

But we believe that the virtue of truthfulness is so important in our children that we make a point to tell them an apocryphal story about our first president coming clean about the cherry tree he chopped down. In other words, we lie to our children in order to make them more truthful. Which doesn’t quite sound like telling it like it is.

Lying our way to the truth doesn’t seem very Christian. Lying our way to the truth certainly doesn’t seem very Christ-like. But is it?

If we like to imagine Jesus as a forthright teller of truths, we also know that he confused almost everyone he encountered. He’s the guy that answered clear questions with cryptic parables, or by turning questions back in upon themselves.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” asks Pilate. “You say that I am a king,” Jesus responds. Now, let’s set aside the fact that it’s Jesus speaking here and admit that this would have been a pretty frustrating conversation for old Pilate. Have you ever had somebody talk to you like that?

“Would you pass the butter, please?” “Hmmm. You would like some butter, wouldn’t you?” Now how helpful is that? Your toast is still unbuttered, and you’d like to empty your coffee cup into the lap of the smart aleck across the breakfast table. Pilate actually comes off as pretty longsuffering in this scene, as Jesus’ responses must have been infuriating.

But if we’re followers of this Jesus, and if we believe that Jesus really did come into this world to testify to the truth somehow, we might do well to explore why he told the truth in such mystifying ways.

A liturgical scholar named Gordon Lathrop says that both the Bible and the traditional forms of Christian worship work by juxtaposition. They hold up one thing that we think we understand next to something very different or we hold it up in a context that makes it strange. We think a story is saying one thing, but there’s a twist. The youngest keep on getting the honor meant for the oldest. The simple confound the wise. The last end up first. The crown is, in fact, made of thorns.

For Lathrop, our liturgy and our scriptures tell the truth not by simply playing things exactly as they are. Something more subversive is going on. And we can see what Lathrop means in our gospel today.

Some traditions call this Sunday Christ the King Sunday. Calling Jesus our king seems obviously appropriate for Christians. We say that Jesus is the only one truly worthy of our glory, laud, and honor. But the story we read doesn’t seem to enthrone Jesus so much as it undermines the whole notion of kingship and power. And in doing so, it suggests that a plain description of things as they are might not be the same as testifying to the truth.

Jesus tells Pilate that his kingdom is not from this world. So he moves the conversation immediately out of the literal and into the world of metaphor or allegory or some way of understanding in which words don’t necessarily mean what they say.

And then Jesus says, “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over…” There’s the subversive juxtaposition. Jesus is a kind of king, but he doesn’t have an army. His throne, which he doesn’t have either, isn’t defended by or doesn’t depend upon any of the power that monarchies depend upon in this world. He is a king. But he’s not.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell of things exactly as they are.

Jesus isn’t being a king in this story. He’s mocking kings. His life is the strange thing every other form of worldly power is juxtaposed against, and shown to be a fraud. Jesus has no military power, and no economic power. He hasn’t got the right bloodline or lineage. He hasn’t even been given power from the authorities in his own marginalized religion. But you and I are hearing a story about Pontius Pilate today because of this Jesus.

And that’s how the Christian gospel works.

Look around this place. There’s Jesus sitting on a throne, wearing a crown on the big window behind me. A scene that never appears in the gospels, of course. His only crown was a ring of thorns pressed into his forehead, and he had to be provided with a purple robe by his tormentors so they could strip him of it. But he’s our king.

And what about all these crosses? Crosses of polished brass standing behind the altar and leading our processions. Crosses of gold and silver hanging around your necks or inscribed into a ring. They’re beautiful. And they’re first century electric chairs or hangman’s nooses.

Talk about strange juxtapositions of meaning. An instrument of execution becomes a sign of hope and forgiveness. Of grace.

But that’s how the Christian gospel works. We think we see things exactly as they are. Then it hits us, “My God, they used to kill people on those things.” Then it hits us again, “Redeeming love came into my life in spite of one of those things.”

What was happening, of course, was that Jesus was not playing things exactly as they were before Pilate. Jesus was changing things. Which means that wearing silver crosses makes a sort of strange sense. If we hold both halves of the paradox together, the beauty and the horror of the symbol, we realize that there’s nothing in this world that God can’t twist into a vehicle of redemption. If death can bring life, we’re never safe. Grace can break upon us anywhere, anytime, through absolutely anyone.

And maybe the last miraculous juxtaposition in this story is between Pilate and the disciples we think Jesus needs or wants. What if Pilate’s as good a guide as any for us? Pilate, the one who washed his hands of the matter and sent Jesus off to the cross. What if Pilate showed us something about what it means to be Christian?

Because Pilate kept asking his questions. And he kept letting Jesus undermine and disrupt the world Pilate thought he understood. A world in which everyone knows a king when they see one and everyone knows the truth when it’s told. A world in which wealth and violence are the guarantors of power. An obvious world then. And an obvious world now. It’s the world of things exactly as they are. And it’s a world Jesus didn’t accept or believe in at all.

Do you think we can follow him in our own day and in our own ways and refuse to accept that obvious world, dismissing all the false measures of power and authority and value just like Jesus did? Are we called to anything less?

Wallace Stevens probably had a very particular man with a blue guitar in mind when he wrote his poem: Pablo Picasso’s Old Guitarist. And Picasso once said that “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”

Sometimes the good news is that things are not exactly as they seem. And Jesus can still disrupt our understanding of a world in which everything seems inevitable. Because even in the simple act of reading this old story, Jesus still calls the world’s bluff, even if it takes an artful lie to do so. God can still twist reality around to show us that our true king has no wealth, and violence can neither defend nor threaten his realm.

In fact, when we think we’re certain of things exactly as they are, maybe we should take Pilate’s lead, turn to Jesus, and ask, “What is truth?” For perhaps, in that moment, things as they are can still change.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.” Amen.