What Is a King? — Section 1 of 6

The Room Defines the King

There is something a great director understands that most people never consciously notice: the room a king enters tells you everything about the kind of king he is before he says a single word.

The room defines the king.

The throne room of a Pharaoh is built to make you feel small. High ceilings, long approaches, guards flanking every surface, the seated ruler elevated above eye level. Everything in the architecture says: you come to me, and you approach on my terms. The room is designed to produce submission through scale. Power here is communicated by distance and grandeur.

Now think about a different kind of room.

A stable. Animals. Hay. The smell of the place. A feeding trough serving as a crib. No guards. No elevated platform. No distance engineered between the occupant and the visitor. The first people to enter are not dignitaries — they are shepherds, people so low on the social ladder that their testimony was not considered reliable in a court of law.

The room defines the king. And the room Jesus enters at the beginning of his life is the precise opposite of every room that human power builds for itself.

This is not accidental. It is a theological statement made in architecture before a single sermon is preached.

My Love for Cinema

My love for cinema started with the old Japanese Godzilla-type movies — mechanical robots, larger-than-life creatures, completely fictional with no chance of ever being real. I could get lost in these worlds. It gave me an escape from boredom. Later I started appreciating the art of cinema: seeing what makes a good actor, what makes a bad actor, and what a director actually does.

A director can change a story without ever changing the story itself — just the way he shoots it, the way he frames it. Blocking, camera placement, elevation within the frame — these are not decorative choices. They are arguments. They communicate power, vulnerability, authority, submission, without a word of dialogue.

That caused me to develop a real appreciation for good movies — Kubrick, Scorsese, Nolan, Tarantino, Guy Ritchie. Directors who understand that what the camera sees and how it sees it is never neutral.

This appreciation also made me sensitive to films that are clearly assembled rather than made — stories built from formula instead of vision. And it made me appreciate unintentionally bad films in a different way: movies whose failures become strangely entertaining because every creative decision is exposed on the surface. Miami Connection, for example, does not even take place in Miami. There are ninjas, motorcycle gangs, and a completely campy band. I do not know how to explain it. It works.

But here is what cinema taught me about reading Scripture: the way a scene is staged is never accidental. A great director and a great biblical author are doing the same thing — using setting, positioning, and environmental detail to make a theological argument before anyone opens their mouth.

The Question With Cosmic Teeth

When you ask “what is a king?” you think you are asking a political question.

You are not.

You are asking a question about the nature of power, the nature of authority, and the nature of the relationship between the one who rules and the ones who are ruled. Those questions run all the way to the bottom of reality.

Every culture answers them. The ancient Near East had answers. Rome had answers. The divine council worldview embedded in the Hebrew Bible has dimensions most Western Christians were never taught to notice. And the life of Jesus is, among other things, a sustained and deliberate argument against the answers that human power has always given.

The series that follows is about that argument.

It starts with a stable. It ends with an empty tomb. And everything in between is a systematic dismantling of what we thought a king was supposed to look like.

Continues in Section 2 — Slave to Christ