A sermon given by the Revd Tessa Stephens
'The true nature of Kingship'
Today we are celebrating the festival of Christ the King. This seems very appropriate in a week which has seen more than the usual amount of news about our own royal family. There’s a certain amount of giddy romance about the coverage and a degree of wishful thinking. After all, which little girl doesn’t dream of growing up to be a princess, and preferably a pink one? Of course, the reality of Kate’s life with William will be very different from a fairy tale fantasy. There’s no doubt that the reality of life in the royal family is very challenging. It’s a life of immense privilege but it also requires a commitment to public service and is lived under intense scrutiny.
The royal engagement has also brought back into focus memories of Diana, Princess of Wales. Her tragic death brought to a head some of the conflicts between the traditional ways of the royal family and a country which had changed and become far more emotional and willing (or insistent) on talking about feelings. The Royal Family have been touched by celebrity culture and a media which likes to build up and pull down. Sometimes it seems that, like the scattered sheep in the reading we’ve heard from the Prophet Jeremiah, we just don’t know what kind of leaders we want.
Our reading from Jeremiah contains the promise of a king who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. This passage can be seen as a Messianic prophecy in which Jeremiah is predicting the coming of Christ. But when Christ did come he didn’t come in the way that the Jewish people were expecting him to. They looked back to the triumphant reign of King David and expected something similar from their Messiah. The Messiah was to be a new king. They were certainly expecting a king who would rule in the normal way, with the normal trappings of military power and a splendid court.
For the Hebrew people then, and for us today, it can be hard to move beyond our earthly conceptions of what kingship means – beyond the power and the glory – to understand the true nature of the kingship of Jesus Christ.
But what kind of King is Christ? Well he does reign in glory and majesty as we see on the window. If we look at our own east window here at St John’s we see the triumphant risen Christ reigning over all. But he also reigns on the cross. The triumphant Christ is also the wounded Christ. In our Gospel reading today we are brought face to face with this most brutal of realities. Christ hangs on the cross, crucified for crimes that he has not committed and accompanied into death not by attentive courtiers but by criminals. This reading takes us into the depths of the passion and death of Jesus.
As Jesus hangs on the cross the sign over his head reads “King of the Jews”. This in itself is ironic since Jesus had never claimed to be king of a Jewish kingdom. The Kingdom of God about which Jesus has preached so extensively is not a kingdom in the normal human understanding of that term.
Instead, the reality of the kingdom makes itself known in the whispered exchange between two dying men: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” and the response “Truly I tell you, this day you will be with me in paradise.”
At the very moment that all seems to be lost, Jesus speaks with an authority that supercedes the powers and dominions of this world which think that they have overcome him. The subversive whisper of the kingdom is alive today in many situations in which the poor and oppressed are able to transcend their circumstances and show that the human spirit cannot be crushed by brute force or by systems and practices which dehumanise us.
Part of the role of the church and of all of us here is to keep the whisper of the kingdom and the rumour of God alive in our communities. Sometimes we feel that we’re irrelevant or unimportant. But in a world where everything has its price and needs to be weighed and measured the church has an important role to play as a community where the values of consumerism do not reign supreme.
The Prophet Jeremiah looks for a time when the people will be rescued and Luke’s account tells us that the rescuer is the most unlikely candidate of all; defeated and hanging on a cross. The Colossians, in the second reading that we heard today, are a community who already know that they have been rescued and who are rejoicing in their salvation. As Paul says, “God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption.” In a beautiful hymn of praise this reading explains how Christ is both before all things and in all things. The triumph of Christ the King is a triumph of reconciliation between God and this beautiful and broken world in which we live. His triumph is bought through the spilling of his most precious blood and as we rejoice in our salvation, so we too are caught up in the drama of reconciliation.
The drama of salvation is enacted week by week in the Eucharist. Let us always remember that as we receive our risen Lord in the bread and wine so we invite him to reign as King in our hearts and in our lives. Amen.