Thomas J Parlette
“To Conquer the World”
1 John 5: 1-6
5/5/24
“He came from nothing. He conquered everything.” That’s the tagline for Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon, that recently started streaming on Apple TV. Most reviewers gave it pretty good marks, including Joaqin Phoenix’s understated performance as the French general who terrorized Europe in the early part of the 19th century, after literally crowning himself emperor of France.
Napoleon really did come from nothing, or pretty close to it. Born on the remote Mediterranean island of Corsica, he faced discrimination as a young army officer. He had an Italian name: Buonaparte (he later changed it to the French sounding Bonaparte.) Because he’d spent the early part of his career on the fringes of respectability, he found himself one of the few military officers still standing after the carnage of the French Revolution.
Napoleon never saw a power vacuum he didn’t want to fill – and there was a huge power vacuum in France after so many leaders had gone to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. When the few remaining royalists seized the moment to push back against the Revolution and restore themselves to power, Napoleon ordered his men to load their canons with grapeshot and turn them on the mob of aristocrats. The cobblestones of Paris literally ran red with blood. After the smoke cleared, this fierce Corsican military officer was the most powerful man in France.
Napoleon seized the moment. In the coming years, his army would overrun nearly all of continental Europe. By 1812, his empire stretched from Spain in the West to Poland and Austria in the East.
But the juggernaut of conquest, once set in motion, was too hard to stop. Rather than quitting while he was ahead, Napoleon boldly sent his army into Russia in late summer, expecting a swift victory. Who could defeat him – he was the great Napoleon.
The Russians like to say it was General Winter who defeated him. His overconfident soldiers outran their supply lines. Many of them, still wearing their summer uniforms, starved to death in the snowbanks. The elusive Russian soldiers, bundled in heavy fur coats, came out of their hiding places and made short work of the survivors. After a brief return to power and his legendary defeat at Waterloo by the British general Wellington, Napoleon lived out his days on a remote and rocky island in the South Atlantic, the world’s most notorious prisoner.
In Napoleon’s heyday, it looked like he was a man who could conquer the world. But in the end, he couldn’t do it. No one ever has.
The writer of 1 John might beg to differ. “Who is it that conquers the world,” he declares, “but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”
We are soon to enter the season of graduations – both high school and colleges. Noted speakers will soon be addressing eager graduates in their caps and gowns, delivering a message along the lines of – “If you believe in yourself, you, too, can conquer the world.” But apart from a few Christian colleges – commencement speeches rarely have anything to do with religion or believing in Jesus.
They’re much more likely to have something to do with achieving success, especially financial success. Maybe you’ve seen the 1967 classic movie, The Graduate. In one scene, the title character Ben Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is taken aside by an older man at a party. This businessman, Mr. McGuire, whispers to the promising young college graduate, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.”
“Yes sir,” says Ben.
“Are you listening?” asks McGuire.
“Yes, I am.”
McGuire looks around like someone might be eavesdropping, and then whispers, “Plastics.”
“Exactly what do you mean?”
“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” (1)
Plastics manufacturing was just taking off in 1967 – it looked like a promising field. They were making all sorts of things out of plastic, and hardly anybody had ever heard the word “recycling.” Graduate from a top school, get your foot in the door of the new plastics industry, and who knows how fast and how high you might climb. Who knows – you might even conquer the world.
Coincidently, the same year that Ben Braddock was hearing the whispered mantra, “Plastics,” a young teenager named Bill was learning how to play tic-tac-toe on a school computer. Back then, a game of computer tic-tac-toe demanded a whole lunch period to come clattering out of a dot-matrix printer – they didn’t have monitors back then, let alone smartphones. But Bill wasn’t giving up his lunch periods for nothing – he was enough of a visionary, even at that young age, to realize that computers wouldn’t be that slow forever.
When Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard eight years later and joined with his friend Paul Allen in starting a little company called Microsoft, no one ever dreamed he’d become the next Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller – but that’s exactly what happened. If you want to talk about someone conquering the world in our day, you’d have to put Bill Gates on the short-list. (2)
But that’s not the sort of conquest the author of 1st John has in mind. “Who is that conquers the world but the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God?” That statement’s not about accumulating vast wealth or enormous political power. The author of this letter knew perfectly well there was only one person in that day who could fit that description of “conquerer” – and that was the Emperor of Rome. It was the sort of role Napoleon sought for himself, but he couldn’t make it stick.
No, the sort of world conquest this ancient disciple is describing is very different. It’s more of a spiritual reality. Let’s consider what it means when we say “Jesus is the Son of God”, and seek to follow him.
For many years, the church has rolled out three great words to describe the person and work of Jesus Christ – prophet, priest and king.
First, Jesus was a prophet. Now that may sound strange to say when so many of us think of prophets as people who predict the future, but there’s a lot more to being a prophet than that. Prophets foretell the future, but they also speak powerfully to the present. Prophets are those rare individuals who defy convention, challenge injustice and raise a cry of protest when every other voice in the land is silent.
Prophets have vision – not so much of future events, although that may be part of it, but of the world as God created it to be. If Jesus is our prophet, it means he’s continually calling us to share his vision of things as they could be – always pulling us out of complacency and cynicism, so we can make our little corner of the world a better place.
Second, Christ is our priest. In the days of Hebrews, priests were those who made public sacrifices. Killing a prized sheep or goat, then roasting it upon an altar, that was how you kept God happy – or so the people thought. The high priest of Israel had an especially important role. On the Day of Atonement, only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies and perform the sacrifice for the sins of an entire people.
The letter to the Hebrews famously identifies Jesus as a “high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” In going to the cross for us, Jesus has entered the Holy of Holies, that inner sanctum of the temple. There he made a sacrifice for the sins of the world, not with a sacrificial animal, but with his own body and blood. Unlike the high priest of Israel – who had to make the sacrifice every year – Jesus’ high priestly sacrifice is once and for all.
The biblical accounts of the crucifixion tell how, as Jesus breathed his last, the veil of the Temple was torn in two. The temple veil was a huge, floor-to-ceiling curtain that served as a gateway to the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest was permitted to venture through it, no one else.
When the gospel-writers describe the rending of the temple veil after Jesus’ death on the cross, the symbolism is powerful. No longer do we need the offices of a priest to make sacrifices for us. Christ, the great high priest, has already done that. Whenever we turn to God and confess our sin – in worship or in private – we can assure ourselves of God’s forgiveness, knowing that Christ has paid the price.
To live our lives with Christ as our priest means that when life deals us low blows and we sink into suffering, Jesus is right there for us. Jesus knows what it means to suffer pain, to endure indignity and heartache. And even more than that, in his resurrection, Jesus has triumphed over every human limitation – even death itself.
Finally, Christ is our king. Now, this is no easy concept to take in – especially since we don’t have that many real kings in the world today. We don’t really have a modern example to point to. What our tradition means to say, in talking about kingship, is that Jesus, in being raised from the dead, has been exalted and rules the world from God’s right hand.
Of course, this vision of kingship is not only unfamiliar. It seems at odds with the ways we usually see Jesus. Most people would like to see Jesus as a wise teacher, an extremely spiritual person who was closer to God than anyone else. Such people enjoy the lively vision of his parables and profess to follow his ethic of loving neighbor as self – but there is no room in their worldview for one who is Lord and Master. They prefer a spiritual sage, whose teachings they can take or leave, as it suits them.
In his classic book Mere Christianity, CS Lewis has this to say about the impossibility of separating Jesus’ teaching from his kingly rule: “A man who was merely a man and said the things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (3)
Christ, then, is the Son of God. He is our prophet, priest and king – born in a manger, died on a cross and rose to defeat death itself.
“He came from nothing. He conquered everything.”
But what does it mean, in this ancient disciple’s understanding, to conquer the world? Most of our Lord’s victory is yet to be realized. It won’t be revealed until he returns one day or we find ourselves face-to-face with God. But in the meantime, we can take assurance in the promise that, if Christ is on our side, the world will never conquer us.
Sometimes it may appear that, in the great struggle of life, the world is winning. But those struggles are only temporary. As Paul famously writes in the second letter to the Corinthians:
“We are afflicted in every way – but not crushed.
Perplexed – but not driven to despair.
Persecuted – but not forsaken.
Struck down – but not destroyed.
Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus – so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.”
To conquer the world, in Christ, doesn’t mean we get everything we’ve ever desired. It doesn’t mean we can crown ourselves anything. It doesn’t mean we’ll all become software barons, Wall Street tycoons or even emperor of France.
It does mean that in the daily struggles we undergo and persistent challenges we face, the world has no power to master us. How could it? For we are not our own masters. We belong not to ourselves, but to Jesus Christ. And he has already conquered everything.
Mother Teresa used to say:
“People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered; forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives – be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies – succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you – be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight – build anyway.
If you find eternity and happiness, they may be jealous – be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow – do good anyway. Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough – give the world your best anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God – it was never between you and them anyway.” (4)
That’s what it means to conquer the world.
May God be praised. Amen.
Homileticsonline, retrieved 4/1/24
2. Ibid…
3. Ibid…
4. Ibid…
