The King and the Maiden

John 19

Palm/Passion Sunday

The season of Lent is seven weeks long.  Any period lasting two months stretches our attention spans of course.  It’s hard to pay attention to anything for that long.  But now we come into the final week.  We have been with Jesus as he announces God’s kingdom and invites us into it.  We have watched and listened as he engages with Nicodemus, the Samaritan Woman, the Blind Man, and stinky Lazarus.  We’ve walked alongside him in the gospel stories.  But today we take our leave of him.  He is going where we cannot go.  Only he can do what he is about to do.  And so he leaves us in the garden of Gethsemane on Thursday evening, telling the soldiers, “let them go, it’s me you want.”

Soren Kierkegaard tells a story about a King who loved a humble maiden (Philosophical Fragments chapter 2).

The great and powerful king falls in love with the maiden.  You would think it would be easy for this king to realize his purpose.  Surely for a great and powerful King it would be no problem to claim this maiden as the object of his love.  After all, every statesman feared his wrath and dared not breathe a word of displeasure; every foreign state trembled before his power, and sent ambassadors with congratulations on any occasion of good news.

But there awoke in the King’s heart an anxious thought . . . Would she really be happy in this life at his side?  In spite of the King’s power, he knew how love works.  And he knew that he could not coerce or trick the humble maiden into loving him back.  In order for love to be love, he could only invite her to love him back, allowing her the room to love him back freely if she loves him back at all.  But this is difficult to do if you’re a King and you love a humble maiden.

The King briefly considered whether loving this maiden might be simply too hard, too much trouble, too costly for him.  Perhaps it would be best never to approach her at all.  Yet his love for the maiden was so great that the King could not endure the painful possibility of never expressing his love.  What a tragedy if such great love is buried and never offered.  So the King considered how best to express his love for the maiden.

A.

He could love her by overwhelming her with his power.  The king might have shown himself to the humble maiden in all the pomp of his power, causing the sun of his presence to rise over her cottage, shedding a glory over the scene, and making her forget herself in worshipful admiration. And this might have satisfied the maiden.  She might have been willing to completely forget herself in a relationship of awe appropriate to servants.  But this would not satisfy the king, who desired a relationship of love -- and not simply obedience and reverence.

B.

He could love her by elevating her to his status.  He could alter her life.  He could make the humble maiden into royalty.  He could make the unknown commoner into a celebrated queen who lives in the palace and is treated by all in accord with her royal status.  YET, she would only be truly happy as long as she never brought to mind who she used to be.  She would only be happy if she could live in a kind of deception - never to recall that she was born and raised in humility.  She would share in the king’s joy only by a continual misunderstanding.

What if the humility of her former status crept into her consciousness in the middle of the night?  What if she were to remember that he was king and she, a humble maiden, was not his equal?  If this memory were to waken in her soul, the glory of their love would be ruined.  The king had to admit -- in that case she would have been happier had she remained in her obscurity, loved by someone who was her equal, content in her humble cottage.  At least then she would have been confident in her love, and cheerful all day long.

C.

It seemed to the King that neither overwhelming her nor elevating her would bring about the kind of love he desired.  The only way forward was the path of descent.  The King must descend and become an equal to the maiden.  He must appear in the likeness of her humility.  He must come to her on her terms.  But this move into humility could not be partial or temporary.  This would involve an irreversible course of action for the king.  It wouldn’t work for the King simply to put on the coat of a poor working man.  If he were to keep his Kingly appearance and merely cover it with a coat, no doubt the wind would cause a flutter so that his royal garments are seen beneath.  It cannot be a mere trick, where the King deceives the maiden by changing only his outward form for a short period.  If the deception is revealed, the possibility of love would be lost.  

A humble life must become his true form and figure. For this is the unfathomable nature of love, that it desires equality with the beloved, not in jest merely, but in earnest and truth.  Only in this way will the maiden be confident in the King’s love.

Kierkegaard’s story is, of course, a story of God’s love for us -- his poor, sinful creatures.  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son.”

God takes the servant-form not as a mere outer garment, but as the real figure of his new life with us.  And in the lowly form of Jesus, God must suffer all things, endure all things, have experience of all things. He must suffer hunger in the desert, he must thirst in the time of his agony, he must be forsaken in death, absolutely like the humblest of the creatures God loves.

Here at the far end of God’s amazing love, there are no more silly questions.  Couldn’t God have just commanded our love?  No.  Couldn’t God have just designed us so that loving God back was unavoidable?  No.  Not if what God desires with us is love.  Freely given, freely risked, love.  For that, there must be the descent of God into our humility and suffering and death.  Not as a costume, but as a way of being with us in love.  So no, the King couldn’t have loved the maiden in any other way than this.