Christ the King
Lectionary Readings for the Sunday of Christ the King
Daniel 7: 9–10, 13, 14
As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence. A thousand thousand served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him. The court sat in judgement, and the books were opened. As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.
Psalm 93
The Lord is king, he is robed in majesty;
the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength.
He has established the world; it shall never be moved;
your throne is established from of old;
you are from everlasting.
The floods have lifted up, O Lord,
the floods have lifted up their voice;
the floods lift up their roaring.
More majestic than the thunders of mighty waters,
more majestic than the waves of the sea,
majestic on high is the Lord!
Your decrees are very sure;
holiness befits your house,
O Lord, forevermore.
Revelation 1: 4b-8
John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
Look! He is coming with the clouds;
every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him;
and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.
So it is to be. Amen.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
John 18: 33–37
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
Sermon for the Sunday of Christ the King
Thank God this country has a Queen! Because a little tour through the history of the kings of the world shows us a generally grand panorama of misrule. Here are a few selected reigns:
Close to home, Richard II reigned from 1377-1399, as English schoolchildren still study, yes? While striving to exalt the notion of kingship and himself as king, Richard alienated the nobility by gathering a small group of favourites around himself. He exiled or killed those nobles who opposed him, leading to his deposition and death at the age of 33.
We go on to the rightly named Ivan the Terrible of Russia, who reigned from 1547-1584. He consolidated his own power at an immense cost to his own people. He crushed the nobles, confiscating their lands to give to his own followers, condemning millions to a permanent state of wretched serfdom. Among other acts, distrusting the city of Novgorod, he had it violently sacked and its inhabitants massacred. His paranoia, rage, and episodic outbreaks of mental instability increased with age. In one fit of anger, he murdered his eldest son and heir, causing the miscarriage of the latter's unborn child.
We come to King Leopold II of Belgium. He carved out the incongruously named Congo Free State and ran it as his own personal fiefdom from 1885 to 1908. It was a slave state in which he plundered the riches of the Congo’s copper, ivory and rubber, extracting a fortune. His administration was characterised by atrocities, including torture and murder, resulting from notorious systematic brutality: a reign of terror. The hands of men, women, and children were amputated when the quota of rubber was not met—-perhaps 10 million Congolese died.
These may be a few of the most outstanding examples of misrule by kings, but I’d like you to try to immediately call to mind as many examples of benevolent rulers? Who cared for their own people and whose principal aim was their greater welfare? Excluded have to be Elizabeth, Victoria, and Elizabeth!
What about kingship in the time of Jesus? Augustus had seized power after the assassination of Julius Caesar, ruthlessly consolidating that power in the years that followed. Tiberius then reigned, a dark and reclusive emperor who promoted the cult of the divinity of Augustus throughout the lands of the Empire. Tiberius was succeeded as Emperor by Caligula, whose brief four-year reign, from 37-41, was
marked by arbitrary arrest for treason, acts of incest with his sisters and other sexual debauchery. He worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, directing much of his attention to ambitious construction projects and luxurious dwellings for himself.
So much for kings! They have so often, through history, mis-used their power, enriching themselves and their families at the expense of the people with whose welfare they have been entrusted.
What kind of king were Jesus’s fellow citizens hoping for, with this kind of backdrop?
I imagine that their expectations were not particularly high. But they felt the oppression of Rome’s king, and they remembered their own king, David. It had been a thousand years since his reign, and he was a flawed king, but he had been chosen by God to be their king. It was their Golden Age.
The people were longing for another David, a military man, a ruler of might and power. Who would restore the glory in their land. So Jesus appears. And he lives his life, for the three short years of his public ministry, travelling dusty roads and preaching a very different kind of kingdom from the one the people knew, the rule of Rome. He called it the Kingdom of God.
How were they supposed to understand this kind of kingdom?
One clue was by the way Jesus lived it out: including the poor and the outcasts, healing those who were sick, teaching a gospel of kindness, compassion, and love. He tried to describe the Kingdom for them in parables. But even his own closest followers didn’t really understand what he meant by them. When he had been arrested, near the end of his short life, John narrates this curious exchange between Jesus and Pilate. It is a famous exchange: Pilate questions Jesus, but Jesus refuses to answer the questions that Pilate asks. Listen to what is asked and what is not answered.
Pilate asks, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’
Jesus answers, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’
Pilate replies, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’
Jesus answers, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’
Pilate asks, ‘So you are a king?’
Jesus answers, ‘You say that I am a king.
Pilate is left to draw his own conclusions.
This is an enigmatic confrontation. Pilate wants Jesus to answer in this way:
Yes, I set myself up to be a king in opposition to Rome’s Emperor—-I presume this.
You can put me in this category, yes.
If Jesus had replied with these words, Pilate could have cleared the whole mess up in a few minutes and gotten it off his conscience. But the unsatisfactory exchange continues:
Jesus says: For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
What our reading for today leaves off, deliberately, is the final verse, the final question of Pilate to Jesus, What is truth?
And Jesus does not answer.
Jesus’s life did not have a fairy-tale ending because it is not a fairy-tale world. The truth of the kind of king Jesus was and is cannot be described in a question and answer format, with Pilate or on a television talk show; it cannot be contained even in a Creed.
With Jesus, it was always about showing what the Kingdom of God is like.
It is like A loving father embracing a prodigal son, a good passerby who helps a wounded traveller, a good shepherd, a poor woman who gives all she has.
Maybe we can understand these likenesses, but we also have the life itself—-the truth that Jesus’s life, itself, embodied.
After the prayers we offer for ourselves and for others, we hear the words of the Eucharist.
Listen carefully to the kind of kingship these Eucharistic words describe:
Christ offered himself once for all upon the altar of the cross and redeemed the human race by this perfect sacrifice of peace. As king, he claims dominion over all your creatures, that he may bring before your infinite majesty a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.
An offering of Himself for the purpose of bringing to this fractured and damaged earth a kingdom of God’s own rule, a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.
What are the qualities of the kind of king we are asked to worship and adore?
Humility, mercy, devotion to the ones who are least and last. So that, through this offering of Himself, God’s vision for a redeemed humanity might be realised.
It is right to offer him our thanks and praise: may we lift up our voices in praise and honour to this kind of king.
Amen!
The Revd Dana English
The United Benefice of Holland Park
November 21, 2021