Christ the King
The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
FINDING CHRIST AS KING OF ALL OF LIFE
November 23, 2003, 29-B, Calvary
Church
Daniel 7:9-14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:1-8
John 18:33-37
Today
is one of those days when the Church's Liturgy cries out with its message, if
only one is open to hearing it, if only one is perceptive. You really don't need to look too far nor
too closely to see that "Christ the King" is today's message. It leaps out at us in Scripture and in
music.
This
last Sunday before Advent is always one to honor Christ as King. Today's
Collect begins with the words:
Almighty
and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your
well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords...
Then
in the First Reading from Daniel, which is one of those apocalyptic passages I
spoke about last week, passages that speak about the end of time, often in
fantastic imagery, we hear of an Ancient One (who is God, of course) bringing
into God's presence "one like a human being" (whom we Christians
understand to be Jesus, of course) and giving to him kingship.
Our
Psalm says, "The LORD is King...", a fitting Psalm for Christ the
King Sunday.
Our
Second Reading from the book of the Revelation, another apocalyptic book,
speaks of kings and kingship and tells of Christ as "ruler of the kings of
the earth," certainly implying that he himself, therefore, is a king.
And
our Gospel, seemingly misplaced from Holy Week, is Jesus appearing before
Pilate and Pilate's asking him if he is a king.
Because
we wanted to honor Thanksgiving Day this Sunday, as well as Christ the King,
our hymns at the beginning and close are familiar hymns of thanksgiving. But in the midst of the Liturgy there is
"Blest be the King whose coming is in the name of God!" which we just
sang, and the choir anthem at Communion, "Lift up your heads, O ye
gates...and the King of glory shall come in."
So
I think you would agree that the theme of Christ the King leaps out at us in
today's Liturgy. The Baby Jesus
worship, so prevalent and trite, and even dangerous, at this time of year, has
its corrective in the theme of this Last Sunday after Pentecost, the last
Sunday of the Church's year: Jesus is
King of kings and Lord of lords, a biblical phrase that is most familiar to us
from the "Hallelujah Chorus" in "Messiah."
There
are those persons who would say that the title "King" itself is
wrong, an outdated metaphor -- and not only outdated but also irrelevant to
people living in a democracy like ours.
Kings usually do not generate good feelings in people today because
kingship is really no longer a part of our world. We have the Queen in Britain, a nice lady who wears bad hats, but
she is largely irrelevant because she is seldom heard to utter one thought of
her own on any matter of consequence.
There
are the monarchs of Holland and Belgium and Scandinavia, largely anonymous and
equally powerless. And then there is
the king of Saudi Arabia, who wields enormous autocratic power still, and who,
if he did not sit on so much oil, we would view only with disdain. So kingship is hardly anything very
important in people's lives today. And
yet -- it does communicate something to us still; and the question is what this
"something" is.
I
think it is good that this observance of Christ the King is placed as it is,
just before we celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation of Christ,
Christmas. You see, it is a certain
kind of king whom we celebrate. Not
the despotic rulers, as the Tsars were.
Not the decadent sovereigns as Henry VIII and Louis XIV were. Not an almost meaningless cipher as most
ruling monarchs today are.
It
is a new concept of kingship. It is a
new concept of leadership, not one defined by power but one defined by humility
and service. It is by humility that
Christ became King. His crown
was a crown of thorns, not one of jewels; his throne was a cross, not a
regal chair. And the authority that he
has is the authority of integrity, as we see in him standing before Pontius
Pilate.
There
is a painting by Salvador Dali hanging in the National Gallery in Washington,
and some of you may be familiar with it.
It depicts Jesus at the table with his disciples at the Last Supper and
then, superimposed, shows him also with arms outstretched to embrace the world,
as if on a cross. Paul Tillich, the theologian, once told a
newspaper reporter many years ago that he thought this central figure to be
nothing more than the portrait of a sentimental, but very good, athlete on an
American baseball team. Needless to say, the Gallery was not happy about that
remark and said the next day something to the effect that Dr. Tillich was
certainly entitled to his own opinion, but the picture was much more than that.
I
never much liked that painting myself and so tended to agree with Dr. Tillich's
assessment of it. And I noticed, when I
was last at the National Gallery a few years ago, that the painting had been
moved from a gallery to the dimly lit wall on one of the stair landings, hardly
a place of prominence. So perhaps the
National Gallery's own perception of it has changed through the years.
But
how would you picture Jesus? He
has been represented in thousands of different ways through the centuries as
different artists, representing different cultures and different schools of
painting, have tried to express what they themselves were looking for. Think about some of the paintings that you
have seen of Jesus. Some representations
seemed extremely weak; others effeminate; many have seemed grotesque; some have
been very other-worldly; and still others have shown great strength,
appropriate to one who is called a king.
But
the point is this: behind each artist's
work is some concept of how the artist thinks the Christian Faith works and
what kind of person the artist thinks Jesus really to be. If the artist thinks of Jesus as a perpetual
Boy Scout, eager to help old ladies across the street, that's the way Jesus
will be portrayed. If the artist thinks
of this life as one long procession of tears, then the artist will portray
Christ as a pilgrim in this vale of sorrow.
If the artist thinks of him as a Peter Pan, then Jesus will be shown to
us as a nice young man who seemingly hasn't gotten it all together yet.
I'm
not sure that it much matters what your or my artistic taste happens to
be. Everyone is entitled to his or her
own taste, and we will always differ on that matter, and sometimes
surprisingly. But it is
important to ask what you think of Jesus because that is surely going to color
your whole image of him.
Christ
the King Sunday would have us recall that there needs to be something far, far
more serious in our Christian understanding of Jesus than the trivia about the
Christmas baby, with which we will soon be bombarded. Nor do we need a Christ who is nothing more than a first-century
hero. And a Christ who is a bland
spouter of aphorisms is hardly enough to capture our commitment.
We
need the kind of Savior whom we see in the whole Gospel account, a Jesus
who was so humble that he came to us in the most lowly of circumstances and
then lived a life of service and wisdom and devotion. A Jesus who teaches us how to live and how to continue to
live when we fail over and over and over again to live up to our calling. A Jesus who is always beckoning to us to
come out of ourselves for the sake of others.
A Jesus whose integrity at all times not only shames us with our
lack of integrity, but also bids us never to give up. A Jesus who asks us to come out of the smallness of national and racial and ethnic boundaries into the
larger world of which he is King.
In
Jesus we see most clearly the kind of God we know because we believe that the
fullness of God dwelt in him. I don't
have to believe every detail of the
beautiful Christmas story as a literal description in order to affirm my belief
that the fullness of God dwelt in Jesus and that in him we see the kind of God
we have. If sometimes referring to him
as King helps me to remember that I am not as important as I think I am, that I
am not in charge of the world, I certainly
have no problem with that.
At
the bottom of my own faith is something that I could not give up: God so loved the world that he gave his
only-begotten Son. In Jesus, proclaimed
as King today, we see what kind of God we have at the heart of this universe.
Richard
H. Humke