SERMON 21 November 2004 (Christ the King)

 Readings:    Deuteronomy 17: 14-20         Song of Zechariah        Colossians 1: 11-20
                      Luke 23: 33-43

May our ears, our minds and our hearts be open to the living God. Amen.  

By the time the book of Deuteronomy was written, probably in the seventh century BCE, the Israelites had become disenchanted with kings. Indeed, as the Deuteronomic authors drew on ancient traditions and pondered the chequered history of their nation, they came to the conclusion that much of the ills which had befallen God’s chosen people could be sheeted solidly home to the kings and to their failure to lead godly lives.  

The basic thesis of the Deuteronomic literature in the Old Testament is that things went wrong for the Jewish people because they turned away from following God’s rule. If only our ancestors had followed God’s holy ways, goes the argument, then none of the terrible things that have happened to us would have happened. We have suffered because we have turned away from God and, moreover, it is our kings who have led us merrily down this path of unfaithfulness. 

Certainly the biblical record suggests that the Jewish kings had followed worldly ways. Their strategies for consolidating their own position and that of Israel seemed to owe at least as much to cold political calculation as to God. Under the leadership first of Saul and then of David, the 12 tribes which had formed a confederacy were crafted, by cajolery and by force, into a unified nation. Indeed David can quite reasonably be called the architect of the Jewish nation. His military successes and his administrative and religious reforms centralised power around his court in Jerusalem.  

Solomon built on his father’s legacy with yet more military success, and with further centralisation of the administration and the building of the temple in Jerusalem.  Both David and Solomon cemented alliances through multiple foreign marriages and allowed their wives to continue to practise their own religions.  

Their descendants, however, were not able to maintain the imperialist momentum and the nation split, precipitating generations of warfare and turmoil. 

As later leaders reflected on their history they sought to find a theory to explain the rise and fall of their nation. The explanation they found was a theological explanantion: God blessed them when they were following God’s leading and punished them when they went astray. There is a more sophisticated version of the same explanation: things go smoothly when you are going in the same direction as God, but once you step away from living righteous lives, you reap the consequences. In other words, God does not punish; indeed, God does not need to punish for the consequences of your ungodly actions wreak quite enough havoc by themselves.  

It was true that the kings had quite manifestly failed to do God’s bidding: instead of protecting the worship of God, the monarchy had introduced foreign forms of worship. Instead of providing justice for all classes of society, the kings had piled up riches. Instead of bringing peace and prosperity to the land, they had entangled Israel in repeated wars and brought the danger of Assyrian conquest ever closer. The Deuteronomic interpretation had much fuel for its analysis. 

And so, from early in the history of the Jewish people there was a strong tradition that critiques worldly power and saw it as inimical to right relationship with God. The human dynamic lying behind Lord Acton’s famous maxim that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ was well understood by the Israelites.  

Despite their chequered history with kings, or maybe even because of it, the Jewish people continued to long for a supreme ruler, but one who was truly of God. They were convinced that God would send them someone who, anointed by God, would rescue them from all their troubles and lead them into God’s own kingdom. By the time of Jesus, this passionate conviction of the coming of a Messiah took many forms. There were those who believed that the Messiah would be a military leader who would overthrow the Roman forces occupying Palestine. There were others who saw the Messiah as a great spiritual leader and still others who believed there would be two Messiahs: a military leader and a spiritual leader. 

No one was looking for a baby; a baby who grew into a subversive itinerant preacher from the wrong part of the country.  

Against this background, today’s two New Testament readings make two things very clear: 

1)     that Jesus is the Messiah, the one in whom all hope is realised, not just for the Jews but for the whole of creation; and

2)     that our human understanding of kingship is utterly wrong. 

The Christian claims about Jesus are outrageously counterintuitive, straining credibility at every point. The thought that God would choose to be manifest to us at a particular time and place in human history is just ridiculous. Add to that the idea that he was an itinerant preacher, whose public ministry was very short, and whose death was ignominious, to say the least, and you enter the realms of lunacy. And yet these claims were being made very early. 

The Letter to the Colossians is of an early date, probably only a decade or two after Jesus’ death, and scholars tell us that it contains within it older material – the text of a hymn to Jesus, the ‘Christ’ hymn, in which he is identified as the Messiah.  

It really didn’t take very long at all for Jesus’ followers to see that in him we have a radical breakthrough of knowledge and understanding about God. There are glimpses throughout the Old Testament texts – hints of what godliness is all about. But while the awesomeness, the majesty, the transcendence of God seems to have been understood, it is only in Jesus that we see the fullness of love incarnate. Mocked, sentenced to a shameful death on a cross, surrounded by common criminals, love offers itself with utter vulnerability. In that complete self-offering of God, made despite our failings, we are somehow brought to wholeness. 

It is fitting that we should celebrate the end of the church’s year with the feast of Christ the King. Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one of God, in the light of whose life, death and resurrection each moment of our own lives should be lived out. But the framing of this celebration in the terms of kingship should also be a challenge to us. It would be only too easy to take a triumphalist approach and bask in notions of honour, of glory and of power. For of such things are human kingdoms made.  

But through his life, his actions, his teaching and his death, Jesus shows us that godly rule, godly kingship, is not about these things, it is not about assertion of self over and above others nor about one person or group prevailing over another. A salutary question to put to yourself as you reflect on the past year is, ‘Have I succeeded in living as though Christ truly is the ruler of my life? Has selfless, compassionate love come first? Or have I sought to have my will prevail?’  

This is a question which we need to ask about the way in which we conduct our relationships as individuals, and also about our lives as a community of faith and as a nation.  

May your end of year celebration be a happy one – may it also be a challenging one as we seek each day to walk more closely with the God who loves us and calls us closer.  Amen. 

Sarah Macneil

November 2004