Christ the King Sunday

Pentecost Last, Year B
November 26, 2006
Daniel 7:9-14 
Psalm 93 
Revelation 1:1-8 
John 18:33-37

The Church was understandably worried by this widespread loss of faith. There was, of course, concern for the state of people’s souls. And there was also the matter of empty pews and empty collection plates, the result of people finding other things to do with their time and money besides giving both to the church. Whatever the motivation, I find it interesting and a bit odd that the Roman Church, speaking through Pius XI, chose to combat the time’s prevailing cynicism about old ways of doing things by declaring a church-wide celebration portraying Christ as – of all things – a King, choosing for that feast day scriptural passages that are rife with imperial references. Go on line and Google Christ the King Sunday, and you’ll find picture after picture of Jesus enthroned, crowned, and looking – come to think of it -- remarkably pope-like. Maybe it’s my imagination, but, in all these images he looks like he’s wishing he was back in his carpenter shop in Nazareth. But, you may be saying, Jesus is Lord. The resurrected Christ is enthroned at the right hand of God, as would befit the heir-apparent in the court of a medieval king. His kingdom will have no end. It says so, right there in the creed we will say together right after this sermon. Why not devote a day to contemplating Christ’s universal dominion?

The problem for me here, as an existential emergent church post-Christian-Era deconstructionist pacifist feminist Christian (!), is not the underlying concept of Christ’s authority, but all that accrues to the traditional language and images used to convey it. What is it Marshall McLuan said? “The medium is the message.” The medium here is a failed system that exists in our present world only in vestigial form. Do we really want to represent the pioneer and perfecter of our faith in terms of our current impression of monarchy – say the British royal family, for example? We could insist that what we’re after here is the ideal king of the ideal kingdom, but I fear that we have so thoroughly failed to manifest on this earth in all the time we have been given anything even remotely approaching a monarchy that was just and compassionate, that we’re left without much in our collective experience on which to hang such an ideal.

So how, in this world where royalty is equated with self-indulgent out-of-control behavior, and crowns and thrones with either an earlier and no longer relevant age or a hierarchical church out of touch with its members, and dominion with exploitation of human and natural resources, do we redeem for ourselves this Feast Day of Christ the King? Given the seemingly suffocating weight of negative images and associations that adhere to it, should we even bother?

I say yes. And this is why. If we are going to walk the path of Christ, we each will need to come to terms with the authority of Christ in our own lives. And, framed in archaic language and imagery though they may be, this Sunday’s scriptures are all about authority.

As we learned last week, the visions of Daniel and of Revelation were set down by and for faith communities that were subjugated by conquering empires which believed differently than they. In other words, they were under the thumb of authority they perceived to be not only unjust and uncompassionate, but also dedicated to denying their central identifying characteristic, their faith.

Is it any wonder that they would envision a sacred hero, a Son of Man, who prophetically represented their harassed community as powerful, victorious and clothed in the very trappings of the empires they were struggling against? The authors of these texts were seeing and writing about spiritual authority in terms which were entirely appropriate to their age, a time when the only model of authority was dynastic and autocratic. So were the authors of the enthronement psalms, of which today’s psalm is a fine example. Scholars argue about the details, but there is general agreement that these psalms were part of a great yearly liturgy in Israel during which God’s universal authority was acknowledged and projected prophetically into the future to some final day when all the world would be transformed and placed entirely and forever under the God of Israel’s authority.

Our Old Testament reading, and our Psalm, and our Epistle are all descriptions of the reign of God which are eschatological, That is, they are about a reality yet to be realized, a reality not to be realized until the last days. Jesus’ statements about his kingdom in our gospel passage might also seem to be eschatological in their description of his realm being “not of this world”. But, looking more closely at the text, it becomes clear that something else is going on here.

There is a certain hedging of bets, if you will, that goes along with eschatology. Victory for the good guys, that is the adherents of your religion, is guaranteed, but the time when this triumph will be accomplished is, well, hazy. It can be argued that tomorrow or this afternoon or the minute after next might be the beginning of the end, but eschatological imagining can also be fertile ground for a sort of spiritual procrastination. No hurry. Don’t need to change just yet. I’ll clean up my act, become more devout or self-sacrificing or kind or just or compassionate or fill in the blank, first thing tomorrow, or after Christmas, or when I retire and have more time to devote to things spiritual.

But listen again to what Jesus says in answer to Pilate’s queries. “My kingdom is not from this world.” Classical Greek being what it is, it’s possible to translate the original language here several ways – “my kingdom is not from this world”, “my kingdom is not of this world”, “my kingdom does not belong to this world”. Ray Brown, the recognized authority on John’s gospel, prefers that last interpretation: “does not belong to”. And he goes on to say that the phrase “to belong to” indicates not only the origin of the object, where it comes from, but also the nature of that object, that is, what it’s made of, its essence, so to speak.

Jesus is saying three things then about his kingdom. First, he is saying that the realm which is under his authority does not originate in the world his inquisitor, Pilate, knows and understands. It comes from somewhere else. It is not the property of emperors. It is not established, maintained, or expanded by military might. (“If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over…”). Second, the essence, the substance, the very nature of Jesus’ kingdom is as unlike the geo-political world of Pilate, as his simple garment is unlike Pilate’s layers of leather and of iron. Pilate’s world is the product of flawed human beings acting out their imperfections over and over again, unable to get it right, always in the end falling prey to the corrupting influence of power, despite their best intentions. Jesus’ world is…well, we’ll get to that.

And third -- what Jesus isn’t saying is that his kingdom hasn’t happened yet. He doesn’t say “my kingdom will not be of this world.” He says, “My kingdom is…” He speaks in the present tense, not about an eschatological hope, but a present reality. I get the feeling, listening to him, that he can see it as he speaks, shining through the marble fabric of empire that surrounds him, revealing itself hidden even in the world-weary eyes of his interrogator who is, after all, made in the image and likeness of God, whether he knows it or not. Jesus can speak of this kingdom in the present tense because he and the kingdom are one and the same. The medium is the message. Jesus is the kingdom. And so, if we are to understand kingdom as he does, not as the world does, and thus refashion and renew this Feast of Christ the King, we must look to Jesus to testify to the truth, as he describes in our gospel is his purpose for incarnating. And then, we must affiliate ourselves with this truth, if we are to be part of his kingdom. (“Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”)

How, then, does Jesus’ life speak the substance of his kingdom? In the gospel witness, Jesus describes himself as king only once, in Matthew, at the time of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey…”. Every time he is given the opportunity to claim kingship, he rejects it. When he links himself to those Son of Man prophesies in Daniel, he turns them upside down, saying, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve…” No trappings of empire for him, he lives the simplest of lives, without even a roof over his head. He chooses to spend his time with the dregs of society – prostitutes, lepers, tax-collectors, outcasts of every kind. It would seem that his odd kingdom is one where everyone is welcome and no one is placed over anyone else. He asks no tribute from his followers except that they let go of whatever stands in the way of becoming like him. We could lobby, I suppose, for having Christ the King Sunday renamed “Christ the Healer” Sunday or “Christ the Servant” Sunday or “Christ the Equalizer” Sunday. But what really needs to be remade is our understanding of what it means to be a king as Jesus incarnates King-ship. This is because we must not lose sight of the fact that who we are and who we become are a matter of what we give authority over our lives. We need to acknowledge Jesus’ authority, for we are still very much in the process of becoming like him. We need him to be in charge as we are formed into the image and likeness of that which he, as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, is forerunner, pioneer and perfecter. Part of our spiritual practice is recognizing that, left to our own devices, we will run around in circles, digging ourselves more deeply into the dead end holes we’ve created. Part of our spiritual practice is allowing ourselves to be perfected by the perfecter. It’s not subservience that we’re about any more than it’s thrones and cloth-of-gold and jewel encrusted crowns that Jesus is about.

It’s more like letting the one who knows the way lead the way, allowing him to shape us into the very truth he came into human form to tell. The more we give this Servant-Ruler sovereignty in our lives, the more our lives will become a witness to his realm, become, in fact and substance, his kingdom, here and now in this present age, as well as in the age to come. AMEN.