Grace Presbyterian Church
November 20, 2016, Reign of Christ C
Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43
The Paradoxical Reign of Christ
While for most
folks the main “holiday” of note this week is the one marked by massive feasts
on Thursday and massive shopping bills on Friday, the liturgical calendar does
offer up one more small-scale commemoration for today before the turning of a
new liturgical year next Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent. Today is the
festival day of the church known as Christ the King, or Reign of Christ Sunday.
This is, unlike
most of the dates that dot the church calendar, one which is both pretty new
and possible to date fairly precisely. It was first declared in 1925. Pius XI,
the pope at the time in the Roman Catholic Church, decreed the feast day in
reaction to the increasing rise of dictatorships and other governments he saw
as inimical to the authority of the church; Protestant church traditions
eventually adapted the feast day as well, pointing to the ultimate authority of
Christ as against any secular government or other pretender to the throne of
the human heart.
I wonder, though,
if such an occasion is itself fraught with potential for confusion or
distraction, not because of the theological premise behind it – being able to
acknowledge the sovereignty of Christ is a good thing for the church – but
perhaps because of our own human capacity for misunderstanding and
misapprehension of a term like “Christ the King.”
Put another way:
do we, in our modern minds and ways of thinking, get the “kingship” of Christ
wrong? Do we, because of our modern connotations of the word “king,” turn
Christ into something Christ is not?
Let’s face it; we
get a particular mental picture in our heads when we hear or say or think the
word “king.” Aside from the modern British monarchy – ceremonial but largely
without power – our concept of “king” is usually about absolute authority. The
king commands; you obey, or else. Though we might not think of them
immediately, the most apt synonyms for our image of “king” are words like
“tyrant,” or “autocrat,” or maybe “emperor” – words that evoke rulers who wield
absolute power, and who punish those who resist it. (To be clear, one does not
have to have the title “king” to be such a ruler, or to desire to be such a
ruler, as a cursory survey of world leaders, and would-be leaders, makes
clear.)
When applied to
Christ, some Christians take comfort in such an image. We can slip into the
desire for a really Old Testament-style deity who gets into smiting enemies and
unleashing judgment on those we don’t like. Christ is a pretty poor fit for
that title, though, as the gospels uncomfortably remind us. Much more than
smiting our enemies, Christ is apt to point out what might be called the
“gospel of Pogo.” Perhaps you might remember the most famous quote from that
old comic strip character: “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”
It isn’t just the
gospels who undo our image of kings, though. Even the prophet Jeremiah,
pronouncer of judgment and woe that he was, doesn’t necessarily look at kings
in the way we’d like. You will notice that in today’s reading from Jeremiah,
though it really is all about kings, it takes him quite a while to use the
actual word “king.” The image he calls up most clearly is instead “shepherd.”
You know, as in “The Lord is my shepherd.”
Jeremiah’s prophecy isn’t the only one to invoke this image; both Isaiah and
Ezekiel also include discourses on the mandate for kings to serve as shepherds
to their people.
Of course, it’s
not hard to make the connection between Jeremiah’s image of king-as-shepherd
and a Messiah who proclaimed “I am the
good shepherd” in John’s gospel. What is hard is to make a connection
between Jeremiah’s words and any king Israel had known up to his time. Not even
the great King David, who had literally been a shepherd in his youth, truly
lived up to this mandate. Human kings had not truly filled the role God had
meant for kings to fulfill, but this does not stop Jeremiah from pointing
forward to a time when God would bring forth “a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and he shall deal
wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”
In the reading
from the letter to the Christians at Colossae, we get a slightly different
image, directly of Christ, one which does point to the all-encompassing
authority of Christ (even speaking of God transferring us into “the kingdom of his beloved Son” in verse
13) without quite conforming to our human image of a king. Here, the “reign of
Christ” is one that is meant to pull us forward into full maturity in Christ,
growing in wisdom and trust as we come under the reign of the Christ who is
celebrated in the hymn that begins in verse 15. This is a “king” who is “before all things, and in him all things
hold together”; “the head of the
body, the church”; the one in whom “all
the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” But all this fulsome praise is
not merely for praise’s sake, but to encourage the Colossians to remain
steadfast in the gospel that had been proclaimed to them. Christ the King here
is both the source of our wisdom and maturity, but also our only hope of
attaining it. Again, not terribly characteristic of the human “kings” we
recall.
But if any of
today’s readings should undo all our human images of how kings work, the
portion of Luke’s crucifixion account we heard ought to do it. This is the
eye-twister, the one that makes our brains shut down and say “nope nope nope
nope nope.”
Crucifixion was no
mere means of execution in the Roman Empire. It was execution combined with
humiliation. You didn’t just die; you died pathetically. Even your clothing was
an object of a dice game. You were a public spectacle. You hung on that cross
for all the world to see and be reminded who the real ruler was – the emperor
in Rome, not some insignificant desert rabbi.
In this context,
the sign placed over Jesus’s cross – “This
is the King of the Jews” – was nothing less than a taunt directed towards a
broken, humiliated, dying man, and indeed all who had followed him. The mockery
of the soldiers pointed towards that humiliation – “you’re a king, huh? So hop on down from that cross and save yourself.”
Being mocked by another criminal at the same time just heaped scorn upon scorn.
And yet Jesus’s
response, hanging upon that cross? Forgiveness toward those who had done this
to him, and redemption to the second criminal, the one who somehow grasped what
he was seeing and cried out for mercy to Jesus.
Here is the
ultimate rebuke to our very earthly tendencies about kingship and power. In the
words of theologian Eberhard Busch, “The
majesty of this king is revealed, not when we look up, but when we look down.”
This is the kingship that Jesus has taught us, and this, if we are truly
devoted to the reign of Christ, is the kingship we celebrate – one of humility,
forgiveness, and utter and undying fidelity to Christ and no other. No human
claim on our allegiance can ever – ever
– come between or contend with our allegiance to Christ, the shepherd king, the
humiliated and broken and crucified Messiah.
The Reign of
Christ is not about pomp and power; its only glory is in the cross and the
empty tomb. Let our human fumbling with words never lead us astray from this
incomprehensible, paradoxical truth. Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to
God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):
#109 Blest
Be the God of Israel
#274 You,
Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd
#273 He
Is King of Kings
Was going to give agnusday.org a break, but in all honesty searching for images for Christ the King Sunday kinda proves the point of the sermon...
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