25.11.2024
Reflection for Christ the King Sunday
By Archbishop Michael Jackson.
Revelation 1.8: I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
Christ the King Sunday connects us directly with the Kingdom of God where Jesus Christ sits at the right hand of God the Father ‘on high.’ This is the same Jesus Christ who lived an earthly life among us in his day, who played football with his siblings, laughed with his teenage neighbours until he was nailed to a tree for our justification. This always is where his story connects with our story. The living Jesus, therefore, connects earth and heaven in the same way as does The Lord’s Prayer which he taught his disciples with its clause: on earth as it is in heaven ... In his own person, Jesus Christ carries out three works, those of prophet, priest and king. We hear specifically of this promise of kingship to the infant Jesus in what the angel Gabriel says to Mary: … the Lord God will give to your son the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. On this Sunday, the last in the Season of Trinity, we are invited to celebrate that Christ is the king of Heaven and Earth, in the past, the present and the future. Time and eternity are one in his person. This points us positively in the direction of sovereignty – that Christ is the voice of authority and rules over all creation; in the direction of protection – from the evils that face us daily; in the direction of glory – resurrection and ascension have happened in time and cast their long reach into our confused yet hopeful lives. As we prepare to begin our life of faith, hope and love all over again on Advent Sunday, we harvest to glory of Christ the Ascended King of glory, a glory bought through love and service, through teaching, healing and dying while living an earthly life: more nails than football. As Phil Hogan says: This is Senior Hurling.
The trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate forms our Gospel Reading for today. This is where two types of kingship come into focus and clash royally with one another. Caesar Augustus is not quite a king – that term would be anathema to any Roman citizen of the Republic or the early Empire; he is, however, nudging closer and closer to being a god and his successors as Emperors will be claiming that title for themselves in their own lifetime: god@me.com. Pilate, on his last posting before retirement and in a most cantankerous Province, asks the blunt question: Are you the King of the Jews? I imagine that not even he is expecting to get a Yes or No answer. This immediately, and rather interestingly, becomes a game of cat and cat.
Pilate performs very badly in this public debate where, like so much else in St John’s Gospel, time momentarily stands still, the video freezes. Jesus senses the note of desperation in the voice of Pilate when he says: What have you done? He cannot see what wrong Jesus has done. Jesus challenges kingships and lordships, dictators and tyrants, ever after by talking about two ideas which he has embodied throughout his earthly life and ministry: peace and truth. These concepts – particularly the second – have no place in the Governor’s Manual that Pilate has, of course, read but has never felt he needed to revisit; it now is too late. Christ the King, a king here in this particular passage on the say–so of Pilate himself, has taken kingship out of the realm of the everyday Empire. The pragmatism of rulership morphs into the mystery of belonging to the truth. And with this our Gospel ends.
Or does it? Just give it another few seconds, if you will please. Jesus as he goes to Calvary says that listening to his voice is what makes belonging to the truth possible. This throw–away comment is for the discerning and the prayerful. Throw your ears back to St John 10 where we are told that The Good Shepherd is the shepherd to whose voice the sheep listen because they recognize him as their shepherd. The shepherd stands in relation to a flock that knows him and that he knows. This enables him to discipline them for their own good and for the survival of the whole flock. They, of course, do not understand this, nor can they. To know Jesus, to know the voice of Jesus is not solely an individual exercise; it is a corporate exercise. The Good Shepherd in chapter 10 is willing and ready to lay down his life for the sheep. In chapter 18, this is what Jesus the King of peace and of truth is about to do. The Gospel for Christ the King makes the pivotal and the definitive connection between the Calvary we leave behind in the old year and the Bethlehem we approach in the new year. As Revelation tells us in The Epistle Reading, the Lord God is the Alpha and the Omega, the present, the past and the future.
For us, as 2024 reaches its conclusion, we as Christian people, followers of the King of peace and truth, by hacking through the undergrowth of cynicism and negativity, can really help our friends who may know nothing of the Christian tradition which is our motivation and our mainstay, because of our capacity to explain how good overcomes evil and how life overcomes death. This is a positive message. This is a good reason to be a Christian. This is our mission. This is why we are baptized. This is a good way to start a new Christian Year. Our understanding of evil, particularly of personal evil has changed, of course from Scriptural days. We do not use the same imagery. In many ways evil has become more, rather than less, frightening because we cannot laugh at it as once we could. And this is because it lives in and is carried out, not by fantastical monsters with tails and pitchforks, but by human beings rather like you and me. They usually are men in suits, with or without ties, but good suits and all the more alarming for their well written and tightly argued speeches of entitled destruction of others in their own version of their national interest. This is propaganda as policy. Sacrifice and self–sacrifice both go in the one direction. It is other people who are sacrificed. And the means by which they do this is a series of human inventions – weapons of war, mechanisms of precision, methods of transportation of devastating accuracy – the fruits of computerized genius, and perhaps the most frightening thing is that, in our own innocent yet well–provided–for domesticity, in our gadgets and gismos, in our cars and in our iPhones, we are beneficiaries at a different level of the same human skills and created objects that make relentless warfare possible.
It is this type of kingship, ancient and modern, that Jesus came to dismantle and to destroy. It is this type of kingship that is challenged by his answers from peace and truth that we hear in today’s Gospel and that we can bring with us into the week ahead as we celebrate Christ’s Kingship and begin our preparations to welcome Christ’s Birth. We will do so through the filter and perspective, the prism and the colour, of prophets and women, of cheerleaders on the way in the personalities of Zechariah, Elizabeth and John. We watch the High Way through the desert fend off erosion by evil and by earthly power. We watch the croci spring up in the same desert and we sense that there is new life, God–given life. But never ever are we to forget that The Child of Bethlehem to whom this High Way leads died for our sins and rose again for our justification and that he is the Alpha and the Omega, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. (Revelation 1.8)