Christ the King

A sermon preached at All Hallows by Annie Heppenstall on 25 November 2007
(Christ the King)

• Audio (listen to this sermon online)

Readings:

Jeremiah 23:1—6, Psalm 46, Luke 23:33—43

I feel a bit like I’ve got the Clive Anderson or the Jonathan Ross job at New Year’s Eve (or whoever it is these days), talking through the highlights of the year while everyone waits for Big Ben to strike twelve. Because with Christ the King we come to the close of the church year. It’s a day that gives a sort of summing-up to the whole story that has unfolded since last Advent, through Lent and Easter, through All Hallows/All Saints day, to Christ the King again. It’s a summing up of the story of what the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ says to us about God.

I asked a class of 8-year-olds recently what they thought of kings. They said that kings are brave in battle; everyone looks up to them, they have big castles to keep their loyal people safe, and kings make rules and act as judges. Children, it has to be said, tend to like the idea of kings, they have an air of safe authority about them: when the king comes on the scene you know everything is going to be OK, truth and justice will prevail, in fairytales at least. The people in the early days of Israel’s history had a similar idea it seems, and persuaded the old prophet Samuel to find them a king who would lead them and protect them. In time they found that kingship was not all it was cracked up to be: the kings were often self-serving tyrants who oppressed not only neighbouring people, but their own as well. So there is a lot of ambivalence in the Bible about kingship. What there is no argument about, is that despite how bad some of the human kings were, God was the supreme example of right kingship: nobody should be putting all their loyalty and devotion to a mere mortal anyway: God is King. Muslims make the same assertion: the fourth of the 99 beautiful names of God revealed in the Qur’an is Al Malik, the King.

But today, the last Sunday of the Christian year, is not called God the King, but Christ the King: it has been said [by David Jenkins] that God is as he is in Jesus, and as Christians we need to try all the time to get our take on God by looking at Jesus, or through Jesus. The transcendent is beyond us, but God incarnate in Jesus allows a glimpse of the real nature of Divinity in a way human beings can begin to comprehend. Jesus is a kind of filter or lens through which we read the scriptures and try to make sense of everything. So to understand what God the King really means, if we want to be Christian about this rather than Jewish or Muslim, we have to look at what Jesus Christ shows us about kingship.

So let’s go back to some of those ideas the children had about what a king is, and see how Jesus matches up.

1. The first idea the children came up with is that kings are brave and bold and fight in battles.

Several times the people try to make Jesus king; they are raging for a revolution. Each time he slips quietly away. He doesn’t want to be king, he wants to tell people to repent and follow God, and look for His kingdom. In Matthew, Mark and Luke at least, he’s pointing away from himself all the time: look to God, look to God’s kingdom. He doesn’t want people to elevate him, he doesn’t want them even to call him Messiah, which is the Hebrew equivalent of Christ — you couldn’t get much more self-effacing. But the people don’t give up. So one day he acts out a passage in Zechariah: if they want him to be king he will do it his way: they want a war horse; he rides a donkey. They want an armoured tank, he rides his bike.

And the battle...

Battles usually involve well-armed leaders calling for the death of many, particularly the inadequately protected poor — ‘cannon fodder’, as Shakespeare put it. It is the poor that love Jesus, they would have fought for him, but he does not put them in that position: there will be no ‘collateral damage.’ He asks nobody to give their lives for his cause; rather, he gives his own life for theirs. Conflict comes to a head when they come to arrest him: his disciples draw swords — all two of them — but Jesus tells them to put them away. He faces his captors unarmed. He asks nobody to go with him, in fact he tells the guards to let his followers go free. They have followed him all this time, but now he frees them from having to defend him: there is no battle. He puts up no defence, he calls no witnesses, he denies nothing, defends nothing and objects to nothing. He just takes everything on his own shoulders and dies. This is how God loves. Jesus is a very solitary figure, hanging on that cross between a pair of thieves. A warrior king? Well, not in the conventional sense, but yes, still a warrior king — a different sort of courage, a different way of upholding the truth, a different way of engaging with the aggressor. If we are Christians, this lonely, broken man, just hanging there surrendering his will, his body, his life and his spirit simply out of complete love, is our king. And if we take him to be our king, we take also the mysterious truth, that through this surrender to death, comes life.

2. The second idea is connected to the first: kings make you feel safe

The children were keen to describe kingly castles: the king will let you into the castle when enemies come. He can defend you, protect you, and provide for you.

And Jesus? What sort of security does he offer? Well, I don’t think he does, in a material sense. What does he say to people? To different people at different times he said, ‘Leave your home. Leave your family. Leave your job. Leave your community. Leave everything that makes you feel safe and defines your identity. Give away the wealth you have amassed. Take nothing with you, have no spare clothes, have no staff to protect you and make your walking easier, take no money. Sleep rough, wander from village to village letting people welcome you or reject you as they see fit, let people insult you, make demands of you, take from you … be a lamb among wolves.’

That is not security as the world knows security. He tells us to find security in God alone: This is where peace is. This is where people can find rest for their souls — not in luxury holidays and jacuzzis — rest for the soul, freedom from anxiety, comes from complete surrender to and trust in God, as Jesus models for us. God must be sufficient, in every way and in every case. ‘Don’t worry about your material needs, don’t worry about tomorrow — do you think God does not know your needs? Trust him to provide, and concentrate all your energy on the good news of his power breaking through.’ Let God be God in your life. Muslims say ‘la-illah illah, ilah —allah’ — there is no God but God. God is sufficient.

It depends who you are, as to how you hear all this, I think. If you have nothing anyway, if you are already one of the ‘little ones’, the oppressed, the exploited, the poor, in whatever sense of the word you take it, this can perhaps be a message of joy and liberation. If you are one of the establishment, someone who has arrived, someone who is wealthy, who has status, this can sound less like liberation — even though it is — and more like a foolish, even impossible, challenge. It is a challenge to be honest about where we find our security — is it in our home? Is it in our job? Is it in our friendship group? Jesus the king says, let go everything and let God be your security. If Christ is our king, we should not be surprised if our false securities crumble or get ripped from under us sometimes.

Something else that makes us hesitate sometimes, I think, is that we know Jesus’s complete surrender and trust in God leads to his futile prayer to be spared death, and his horrible crucifixion. Like his disciples, we might be tempted to back off. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ rings in our ears. It doesn’t seem at all safe if this is where it leads us. But we cannot run away from death for ever, little deaths and the big one — what he shows us by his love is that death is part of a process, a passage through to something else, a doorway to more profound life. But we have to trust about that, and only the love of God we learn from Jesus can give us the staying power, in our Gethsemane moments. This is where story hits reality: it’s not just about ‘I believe’, it’s about walking the talk. We only discover the life after the death, after we have been through the death. Until then, it is easy to put our energy into fearing degradation, humiliation, torture, abandonment and death, and let fear rule us. Fear prompts us to avoid the threat, or stand and fight. But Jesus in his love says ‘bring it on’, and we are challenged to let go and wait on the love of God.

If we are Christians, Jesus is our king. We can spiritualise the castle and say it’s in heaven waiting for us if it makes us feel better, but in the here and now, Christ the King calls his subjects to defencelessness. Non-retaliation. Vulnerability. It’s not a call to weakness and passivity, it’s a call to deliberate non-violence, because of love; because of not wanting to harm; because of wanting to forgive; because of wanting to demonstrate the reality of God. It is not something we can do out of weakness, it takes the courage and strength of Christ crucified, and is the path through death to life.

3. The third idea from the children is that kings get respect.

‘Blessed are those who don’t take offence at me,’ Jesus said. He knew he was outrageous. He knew he was offensive, challenging, unconventional, unpredictable, difficult to understand, shocking, to many people. He hung out with offensive people: disreputables. He touched lepers, corpses and menstruating women, socialised with extortionists and sex-trade workers, he received hospitality from the hated Samaritans, he ignored rules when they didn’t suit him, he wandered the countryside followed by a crowd of women — which was a lot more shocking then than it is now — he virtually disowned his family, put down people who invited him to dinner, criticised the establishment, said things that sounded like instructions to submit to the occupiers, and slept rough. He was most likely scruffy, smelly and dirty for most of the time: it’s difficult to wander round a country like Palestine and not be. He knew he offended people’s sensibilities, he did not conform to the standard ‘holy man’ pattern.

If we are Christians, we are constantly challenged not to find Jesus offensive. We are challenged, even further, to reflect on the things and the people we do find offensive and just make certain, for his sake, that we are not slipping into the role of modern-day Pharisees. In the offence we take, do we ever mistakenly despise Christ? Do we patronise him? Do we push him away?

And what does his willingness to go to the offensive ones in society tell us about God? Surely that God goes to people. We cannot physically see a transcendent God beaming down to the gutter to lift someone up. But we can see Jesus, and he shows us that God loves first. God is the lover, even of the unlovely, and so gradually it becomes possible for even the hardest of hearts to melt a little and begin to love a little too. He said he was like a physician coming to heal the sick. And he came to bring them — us — the good news of God’s merciful, healing grace, a grace that is freely available not through righteousness but through faith. He goes to us in anyone who is willing to love the offensive, embrace the unclean, value the rejected. God comes and loves, indiscriminately, and that is what Christ the King shows.

4. The last but not the least of the children’s ideas about kings, is that they make rules, and they make sure people stick to them.

Jesus is not straightforward when it comes to rules, and we have him on record as asking, ‘who made me a judge over you?’ There’s the side that comes out when people go to him saying, ‘give us a recipe for salvation.’ And Jesus says, ‘well if you want to be perfect, then you need ultra-strict rules; more strict than anything so far.’ And we try to follow them, and we discover not all — we hope — are meant to be taken literally. ‘If your right hand offends you, chop it off. If you think your roving eye is getting you into trouble, poke it out.’ Are these actually rules? I don’t see many people here with missing limbs and organs. Or is it Jesus’s way of ridiculing the obsession with legalism and perfectionism as a path to pleasing God? Actually, believing we can achieve our own salvation through our own good works is a heresy called Pelagianism: it is not Christian. It’s not the Way.

So are there no rules? That’s not right either. There is a rule, and it is joyously simple: read everything through the lens of love. Love God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbour as yourself. Read every instruction as though this is its commentary, and you will be obeying God. See every person, every living thing through this lens, and you will be obeying God. Speak to people, listen to them, through this screen, and you will be obeying God. How does it work in real life?

I go to the King and I say, ‘someone is out to attack me!’ And he says, ‘put down your sword. Pray for your enemies and do good to them.’

I say, ‘my sister keeps doing wrong to me! How many times should I forgive her before I can get even?’ And he says, ‘seventy times seven: just don’t stop forgiving.’

I haul someone up for condemnation, because I see what I think are faults, and he says, ‘well, if you are without sin, punish her. Punish him.’ And I have to lay down my stone.

I say, ‘someone’s stolen from me! How dare they!’ And he says, ‘just let them keep it. Let it go.’

Christ the King shows us that God is Love. He loves first, so that people can learn to love. He unpacks what love is. It can be expressed lots of ways: don’t try to be master, try to be the servant. Put down your sword. Don’t be the aggressor. Don’t hit back. Don’t answer back. Don’t get drawn in. Don’t strive after material prestige and advancement, don’t try to protect your reputation, nor even your security. Let it go, don’t return hate with hate. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who injure you, give to those who take from you, look at yourself before you criticise others, and devote yourself to God and the service of others, in humble, loving devotion. But we should resist the urge to make these into a new list of rules, because then, again, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of just blindly following the instructions. I can avoid answering back and still be seething with outrage: if there is no love, it’s as false a gesture as someone telling you how much they care about you, while they are sticking a knife in your back.

We cloak obedience to the King in all sorts of rules and devotions, but the simplest and the hardest thing is simply to love as God first loved us, not just in the easy situations when we are with people who are nice to us, but in every situation.

So what kind of a crazy king have we got for ourselves? He doesn’t exactly help us advance in this world, this is not a path to success and prosperity. Wouldn’t we rather stick with the Old Testament sovereign, who knows how to protect his people and reward the righteous? Well it’s our choice; there are religions which worship God as an entirely transcendent and all-powerful judge. But to Christians, God is as he is in Jesus Christ. Christ shows us how to understand God, and he also shows us an entirely upside-down picture of kingship that challenges our own models of leadership, authority and power. He is the leader who takes a towel and kneels at his disciples’ feet.

To end, by way of preparing to commit to the new church year, I’m going to leave you with a question: when we proclaim Christ as King, are we doing so because we want him to fight our battles for us and judge our enemies, reward us, order our lives, bring us to heaven, protect us and provide for us, are we doing so maybe even because we are afraid of the consequences of not following him? Are we really hankering after the fairytale king that makes everything all right?

Or are we proclaiming him King because we know that we must let his love rule our hearts and minds and souls, and spill out ever more abundantly into our actions and words, because truly, for us, however hard it is, we know this is the path to the One True God of Love?

Amen.

Copyright © 2007 Annie Heppenstall

Audio

This sermon was recorded. If you wish, you can listen to the sermon online. Just click on the appropriate link below:

*Notes on the audio formats

• MP4 format
  MP4 format is a multimedia container format standard. Audio MP4 files can combine high compression with very high quality. Many media players can play MP4 files, including RealPlayer, QuickTime, iTunes, and recent versions of Windows Media Player (you may need to download a codec from www.free-codecs.com/download/3ivx.htm).
• Windows Media Player format
  Windows Media Player is installed as part of Windows. If you have an earlier version, you can download version 9 (for Windows 98SE, Millennium and 2000) or version 10 or later (for Windows XP and Vista) from www.microsoft.com/downloads/Browse.aspx?categoryid=4. These are quite large downloads [~ 10 MB or larger], so if you have a dial-up connection you may prefer to ask Phil for a copy of the installation program on CD.
• RealAudio format
  This requires RealPlayer (or the older RealOne Player) to be installed. A free version of RealPlayer can be downloaded from http://uk.real.com/player/ (choose the free player on the left of the page) — but again it’s a large download [~ 13 MB], so if you have a dial-up connection you may prefer to ask Phil for a copy of the installation program on CD.
  
  Alternatively, you can install Real Alternative, which will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer/RealOne Player. Real Alternative is free, and works well with all major browsers; it is also a much smaller download (5.7 MB). Get it from http://www.free-codecs.com/Real_Alternative_download.htm.

This page was last updated on Tuesday, 27 November 2007

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