Sermons

Christ the King
Sunday 26 November at 10am

Simon Cowling
Readings: Revelation 1. 4-8; John 18. 33-37

It's been said that you need a taste for paradox to have the stomach for Christian truth. Today, the Feast of Christ the King, that remark has a particular aptness. Humanly speaking, if you'd invested in monarchy as a form of government in Europe a century ago, your rate of return would be pretty poor. There are just nine monarchies left in Europe today, compared with well over twice that number in 1914. Even where monarchies still exist in Europe, their powers are embedded in constitutional arrangements that allow them to be exercised by democratically elected politicians. Monarchy, kingship, is but a pale imitation of what it once was, an institution whose outward grandeur encases nothing of substance, like one of those disappointingly hollow Christmas tree decorations. Nor, I guess, would many of us want to return to a time when monarchs, mostly of the male variety, did exercise real power. From William the Conqueror's harrying of the north in the eleventh century, which left vast swathes of Yorkshire and County Durham depopulated for centuries, to Leopold II's barbaric treatment of Africans in the Belgian Congo little more than a hundred years ago, the record of kings exercising absolute power is distinctly patchy.

So back to the paradox - that today we celebrate the kingship of Christ. We embrace the use of a word and a concept that have distinctly anachronistic, if not problematic, associations. Let's explore this further, using this morning's Gospel reading from John as our starting point: the crucial encounter between Jesus and the power of the Roman state personified by the Governor of Judea.

It is early on a Spring Friday morning in Jerusalem. Jesus has been in the custody of the High Priest, Caiaphas, for several hours, being questioned about his teaching and about his disciples. From Caiaphas he is sent on to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. Pilate is clearly puzzled by the nature of the charges being brought against Jesus, and this is where our Gospel reading begins: 'Are you the King of the Jews?', Pilate asks Jesus. He cannot at first get a straight answer to this question and betrays his impatience with the whole situation: 'Do you think I am a Jew?' Jesus then begins to speak of his kingdom, seeming thereby to affirm his status as a king. But his opening words on the subject can only have added to Pilate's puzzlement: 'My kingdom is not of this world'. With this one sentence, Jesus drains his kingship of all pretensions to earthly power, of the threat that he might be a rival to Pilate or, worse, to the emperor himself. He makes it clear that he is not in the business of rebellion. His disciples could have fought to protect him from the Jewish authorities, as the army of a king might fight against enemies, but they did not. His kingdom does not belong here.

Pilate would have been puzzled, because his frame of reference for kingship would have been that common to all who lived in the Roman Empire of his day, especially in its eastern provinces of which Judea was one. Kingship was associated with power, with the capacity to effect change - by violent means if necessary. It was associated with that dangerous combination of ruthlessness and benevolence, that capriciousness, which made kings such dangerous people to be around; and kingship was associated with the conspicuous consumption, and occasional giving-away, of wealth that spoke of absolute command over the material resources of the state. Jesus' mysterious claims about his kingdom not being of this world would have shattered Pilate's frame of reference. What was the point of having a kingdom if it was not of this world?

At the very end of St. John's account of the feeding of the five thousand, a miracle which is recounted in all four Gospels, there is a verse which we find only in John: 'Jesus knew that the people were about to come and seize him in order to make him king by force; so he went off again to the hills by himself.' Back then the crowd really did think that Jesus was the solution to the problems of the Jewish nation, the one who could release them from the Roman yoke. But back then Jesus rejected this worldly kingship. Now, with his characteristic use of irony, John has described Jesus being seized by the crowd once again. Not with enthusiasm this time, but with anger. Not with a view to making him king but with the hope that he will be put to death. And so it happens. Pilate is unwilling to face down the crowd. Fearful of a riot during Passover, he condemns Jesus to death.

Jesus does finally reign as a King, but from a cross. Here he triumphs against the temptation to the power and the fame that were on offer when the crowd tried to make him king in Galilee. He defeated their wishes then. He fulfils them now, though not in a way they recognise. Yet a man who can say 'Father forgive them' to those who execute him, who can promise heaven to a thief who hangs next to him, this is surely a ruler, one who has authority. So Jesus is king, whether the crowd approves or not. The cross has become the throne of God, displaying the radical paradox that constitutes the very essence of Christian truth: power made perfect in weakness.

Inseparable from Jesus Christ the King is the Kingdom of God which he inaugurated, which he preached and which he embodies. In this kingdom, the paradox of power made perfect in weakness is to be lived out, is to be experienced as a reality. It is a kingdom described wonderfully by R.S. Thomas in a poem I've asked Andrew to print on the newssheet and with which I end my sermon. As a new year in the Christian calendar beckons, may we renew ourselves in the service of Jesus Christ, our King and our God, as we seek to build his kingdom.

It's a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed: mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It's a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay