Today we celebrate the festival of Christ the King; we reflect on the rule of Christ and what it means for us to be servants of his kingdom. I have the pleasure this Sunday of addressing the people not just of St Ursula's, Bern but also of Christ Church, Lausanne. And from Bern we send warm greetings to our sisters and brothers in Christ in Lausanne as you celebrate this, your patronal festival. Like all of us, you are struggling during this difficult time with the challenges of maintaining the community-life, the worship and witness of your congregation; but you are also doing so without the presence of your Chaplain, Christine. We join you in praying for Christine's return to full health and strength. Despite all the frustrations, may this be a time of deepening faith and the strengthening of your vocation to be Christ's Church, people who know and serve Christ as King.
Last time I preached on Christ the King I was in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, here I am in the capital city of Switzerland. Both occasions have made me aware that, in contrast to citizens of the USA and Switzerland, I as an Englishman am a subject of one of the few surviving kingdoms of the modern world, the United Kingdom. We may think and feel differently about kings and kingship, depending especially on our different national histories, but the question today is what we mean by calling Christ our king, and what that means for us and for our world.
To get some handle on this idea we should consider what kingship meant to Christ's contemporaries. Faithful Jews believed that the king above all kings was the God of Israel, the creator, ruling over the world with wisdom, mercy and justice. But they had also had their human kings, such as Saul, David and Solomon. They had looked to these kings to bring God's blessing to them; the king was to rule with justice and show God's compassion for the weak; in the king they expected to see something of the goodness and the power of God himself.
But the history of their kings was mainly a disappointing catalogue of tyranny, idolatry, and moral failure. Nevertheless, despite this depressing reality, the people of Israel kept hoping that one day God would send the true king, who would bring in a kingdom of peace, justice and freedom.
The centuries passed. The people of Israel were dominated by foreign powers. Their line of kings came to an end. So when Jesus was born his people were under Roman rule and Caesar was the only real king they knew. But still they longed for Israel's true king.
Now Jesus appears and the crowds flock to him; he speaks with authority and God's power and goodness pour through him. So people begin to ask: 'Is Jesus the king we've been waiting for?' This explosive question is never far from the surface of the gospels. And the answer, as so often with Jesus, is 'Yes...but...'
Yes, Jesus is the king, the Messiah, the Son of David. Jesus demonstrates the compassion, justice, holiness and healing power of God himself, because God himself is present in Jesus. Jesus is Israel's long-awaited king.
Yes... But Jesus is not exactly the king that was expected. After the feeding of the five thousand, when the crowd wants to make him king, he resists this. He refuses to be the kind of king others expect. 'My way is different', he repeatedly tries to teach his disciples, but they struggle to understand him. What kind of king is Jesus?
We get an important clue in today's Gospel, where Jesus speaks of himself as both 'Son of Man' and 'King'. This king says he will be present where he is not expected, among the poor and hungry, the sick, naked and imprisoned. If that's where Christ the King is present in our world, it's no surprise if not many people notice him. There's something hidden, reticent, about this king. Maybe he needs to do some training in assertiveness.
But Jesus is a king who is also a servant; a king who lays aside power and chooses to suffer, because his kingdom is not driven by the love of power but by the power of love. We see this above all in his suffering and death. On trial before Pilate, Jesus refuses to act like any human king; he doesn't call his followers to take up arms. But neither is he a weak victim. He has a calm authority, and he chooses willingly to suffer and die.
The death of Jesus on the Cross is the supreme moment in his kingly rule. It's above all in the Cross that the loving power of God is channelled through Jesus to bring new life and hope to all. If we ask 'What does it mean to speak of Christ the King?', at least part of the answer is to point to the Cross and say 'This is our king and this is his most royal moment.' As an early Christian saying puts it, 'The king reigns from the tree' – the 'tree' here meaning the Cross. Christ rules over a kingdom driven by the power of love, not the love of power; so he reigns not from a golden throne, but from the tree, the Cross, the place of shame and death, because that is the form that divine love takes in our crucifying world.
But Christ the crucified king does not stay dead. As we heard in Ephesians, God raised Christ from the dead and 'seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion'. God has put all things under Christ's feet and has made him the head over all things. The Cross shows us the depth of the love of God in Christ the King, and the resurrection of Christ assures us that he is not a heroic failure. The love revealed in him is not a spent force, but the ultimate power in the world. This power already reigns and in the end will triumph over all things. God's love will win. The crucified and risen Christ is King.
So what does this mean for us and what does it mean for our world?
One thing it does not mean is Christendom. Christendom means the uniting of Christian faith and political authority in this world, the use of power to impose a political order in which the authority of Christ (and so also of the Church) is enforced by the state. For most of history, most Christians have assumed that this was how to honour Christ the King. But eventually, most – maybe not quite all – Christians have come to recognize that where Christianity becomes Christendom, where the rule of Christ is imposed by political power, this brings intolerance, hypocrisy, persecution and bloodshed. With Christendom, the Church gets so caught up in the corrupting influence of political power that its credibility as the bearer of the story of Christ the crucified king is seriously compromised.
OK: so there is no going back to Christendom. But a challenging question remains. We may no longer seek to impose Christ's rule by political power. But we are right to yearn for the day when Christ will be all in all and his rule will heal all things. In a beautiful collect that we said two weeks ago, we pray that God will 'bring the families of the nations, divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin, to be subject to [Christ's] just and gentle rule'. We may not be seeking Christendom, but we still pray for Christ's rule in this world.
Hope in Christ the King keeps alive in us the vision in the scriptures of the time when the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of God and of his Christ. Whatever our political views, that vision transforms our imagination and stirs up in us a holy longing, a godly impatience with this world as it is, that deeply affects how we think and how we live.
Few writers have related the Christian faith to our imagination as effectively as C. S. Lewis. In his much-loved tale The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis offers a wonderful imaginative account of our faith that is especially relevant to this festival of Christ the King and its hope for the healing of the world. In this story the land of Narnia has come under the domination of evil powers and the land has become literally frozen. This is a world where it is always winter but never Christmas, and many of the creatures of the land have been turned to stone. But in this frozen, oppressive world there are some who believe in a king, Aslan the lion, who is the world's true lord and will rescue it. Two characters who cling to this hope are the beavers. Mr Beaver quotes an old rhyme:
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
As the story unfolds, Aslan does indeed return and works with those who serve him to defeat the powers of evil, unfreeze Narnia, liberate all its creatures and make everything right again.
Lewis knew well the chaos and pain of the world. He had seen the hell of the First World War and the world was just emerging from the Second World War when he wrote this story. But between the two wars his imagination was captured by the Christian faith with its hope that Christ is the true king and that through the power of his suffering love (despite all the apparent evidence to the contrary) this world will in the end be healed. Lewis's story also expresses beautifully the truth that Christ the King does not impose his rule by zapping the world into shape with coercive displays of divine power. For one thing, Aslan, like Christ, has to suffer and die before the power of evil can be broken. And Aslan doesn't do everything directly himself, but enlists others to work with him. The children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, are called to serve the coming of Aslan's rule. They experience failures and setbacks along the way, but they do genuinely work with Aslan for the coming of his kingdom.
Here is a take-home message on this festival of Christ the King. When we sing hymns or join in prayers to Christ our King, we are not just making a statement about him. We are also involving ourselves in his story, presenting ourselves to serve Christ the servant-king, who teaches us not to be driven by the love of power but to be shaped by the power of love and to be inspired by the hope of his coming kingdom. The ways we might live out this faith and this hope are as varied as we are, in all the different contexts in which we live and work – in Lausanne, in Bern, or wherever we may be. This is already happening in the ministries of Christ Church and St Ursula's and in the lives and daily witness of you, the people of these churches. We might feel our lives are quiet and uneventful, or we might be deeply involved in the complex struggles of the wider world; possibly we are involved in making difficult decisions that affect the welfare of many people. But the essential call is the same for us all. We all encounter the needs of individuals; we all encounter the pain, disorder and injustice of this beautiful but broken world; and we are all called to make real in this world the coming of Christ's kingdom. As Christ's servants, we are called to use our gifts and opportunities to help unfreeze some part of God's world, some part that is laid on our hearts. As we do so, we will be motivated by the warmth of Aslan, the love of Christ the crucified and risen servant-king; and we will be sustained by the hope of his coming kingdom.
Revd David Marshall