A friend of mine told me a true
story about a seminary intern who had to do a
children’s sermon on Christ the
King Sunday. Unlike our wonderful
interns at St. Thomas, this intern was very new both to preaching and to children.
First, he nervously gathered all of the young kids up to the front of the
church and gave each of them a paper Burger King crown to wear. Everyone
watched in anticipation .
“Now,” he asked, full of enthusiasm,
as the newly crowned kings and queens wiggled on the chancel steps, “tell me,
what are kings like?” The kids didn’t have to think about this for long.
“Kings are mean!” one little boy blurted out.
“Yeah, they’re super bossy!” cried a
little girl.
“They put people in dungeons!” added
another with drama, as the poor intern grew paler and paler.
“Henry the Eighth was a king,” mused
an older girl, who must have caught a glimpse of The Tudors on TV, “and he had six wives, and he chopped off their
heads!”
The young intern stood there in the
midst of helpful children, with a growing deer-in-the-headlights look on his
face. He had obviously been hoping to tie the children’s sweet descriptions of
the magnanimous power and royal glory of kings to Christ’s role as our Heavenly
King, but these kids were not leading him where he had planned to go. They were
totally derailing his sermon! Cutting short their participation, he lamely said
something about Christ being a nice kind
of king and hurried the children back to their seats, crowns akimbo.
Out of the mouths of babes! Even
without the challenge of inviting the children forward today, I must admit that
I always struggle with my own Christ the King sermon. Christ the King Sunday is
inescapable. Every November, I watch it loom before me, the last Sunday of our
Church Year. It is supposed to be a celebration of the majestic Jesus who sits
at the right hand of God the Father, before we pour him back down to earth in
the frail flesh of a little baby shivering in an animal feed trough. I
understand the necessity of juxtaposing the divine and human natures of Christ.
I am still enough of a Calvinist to be all about the Almighty Power of God. But
divine majesty sure is a difficult thing to describe in language that means
anything to us 21st century Americans. Just listen to our reading
from Colossians and tell me honestly if you get anything out of “the image of
the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation?” And then to that invisible
vision, we add this ancient “king” metaphor, full of the kind of unpleasant overtones
that the children in my story brought out. On top of the ambiguous nature of
kings, we can even add problems with masculine language, as theologians and
liturgists these days move to the even more abstract, “Reign of Christ Sunday,”
substituting the gender-neutral “Ruler” for “King.” Oh my. What is a poor
preacher to do?
This year, I decided to go back to
the Hebrew Bible for some answers. After all, our metaphor of God as King comes
from the Hebrew Scriptures. And I found that our Old Testament holds the image of
God as King in the same kind of tension that we found between the seminarian and
the children. On the one hand, we have the language of the “royal psalms,”
describing God as “King of Glory,” a Lord mighty in battle and a strong
Protector of God’s people. These psalms glorify kingship, drifting easily from
the power of God as King to the power of the human king of Israel, whom God has
appointed to rule over God’s people. Some of these songs sound a bit too much
like political propaganda for the Davidic monarchy, if you ask me, especially
that one about how many gorgeous wives the king is being given. The little kids
would have had a field day with that one.
On the other hand, we have texts that
are suspicious of the power of kings, and we have language that describes both God and
the true king of Israel not as a warrior but as a shepherd, one who knows his sheep
and leads them beside still waters. The prophets often see the kings of Israel
in a negative light, as ineffective and malevolent shepherds. Today’s reading
from Jeremiah is just such a prophetic text, speaking God’s condemnation of the
shepherds. It describes the kings of Judah (the Southern Kingdom) who “destroy
and scatter” the people, defrauding and robbing them. Jeremiah rails against the
mean, bossy, and violent kings, against kings who build their own houses with
unfairness and their own upper chambers with injustice, while they force their fellow
men to work without pay. Right before today’s reading, Jeremiah goes on to
implore the kings to “do what is just and right; rescue from the defrauder him
who is robbed; do not wrong the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow; commit
no lawless act, and do not shed the blood of the innocent in this place” (Jer.
22:3).
For
Jeremiah, to know God is to do justice, to take care of the poor and the needy.
The prophet pronounces a future in which God will appoint new shepherds over
God’s people, gathering the “remnant” of God’s flock back from exile and
raising up a “true branch of David’s line.” The name of this new king is “the
Lord is our Righteousness,” or “the Lord is our Vindicator.” This name in
Hebrew is actually a pun on the name of the bad and ineffective king Zedekiah
and expresses the hope that God will finally give the people a ruler who will
uphold God’s covenant and lead them in the exercise of social justice and right
relationship with God and our fellow human beings.
When we as Christians take Jeremiah’s
words and read them on Christ the King Sunday, we are often just using them to
lend prophetic support to the Christian claim that Jesus is God’s chosen
Messiah, the Davidic ruler to whom the Hebrew texts refer. When we do this, we
are reducing prophecy to mere “prediction,” and any meaning and context
concerning kingship and righteousness in Israel disappears beneath our Christian
meaning. Without realizing it, it is easy for us to become like the Roman
soldiers in today’s gospel, snipping the image of “King of the Jews” out of
context and pasting it above the Cross, not mocking our Lord, but disregarding
Jeremiah and his people.
What does it mean, then, for us Christians to use this text about justice
and righteousness to help us in our understanding of Jesus as our King? It
seems to me as if these words should mean more than just an evolution of kingship
from Israel’s “bad kings” to the eternal reign of Jesus Christ, a “good king.” It
should be more than praising Jesus as the king who finally gets it right, who
finally saves his people. I think this
text from Jeremiah asks us to turn our eyes from the king to us, his subjects.
For Jeremiah, the king sets the example by which the people as a whole are to
live. By appropriating the promise made to Israel for a just and righteous king, we
are also accepting the task laid on the people of God, the task to lead lives
of justice and righteousness ourselves. By calling Jesus our King, we are
calling ourselves his people, subject not to our own desires but subject to the
rule that he establishes: a rule of justice, a rule of love.
Such an understanding of our text turns
us away from the image of King to the image of Kingdom. I might have trouble
picturing an invisible King, somehow sitting on a Heavenly Throne, the Logos
through whom the Father speaks all things into being. But I don’t have trouble
picturing the place, the Kingdom that Jesus establishes in his living and his
dying, the Kingdom that Jesus asks us to enter. It is a Kingdom like we heard
about last week in which no one suffers, in which everyone has enough to eat,
in which death and pain are no more. I don’t have trouble picturing that place
at all. I see it in the little glimpses of that future Kingdom: the caring
nurse in the hospital; the helpers in Peoria, Illinois that Rob described to me
this week after his work there; the miracle of birth; the saving miracle of new
birth in baptism; God’s people gathered each week at this altar.
The criminal hanging beside Jesus on
the Cross, who understands him only as Israel’s Messiah, expects him to leap
off of the Cross and save him through violent earthly strength. The other
criminal, however, does not even address Jesus as King, or Lord, or Messiah.
“Jesus,” he says, calling his savior by his given name-- the only time anyone
ever addresses Jesus by his first name alone in the whole Bible. This criminal
does not try to name Jesus as King. He merely asks to be remembered into the
Kingdom. And Jesus welcomes him.
The great preacher William Sloane Coffin once
said: “It's a profound
Christian conviction that we all belong one to another, every one of us on the
face of the Earth -- from the pope to the loneliest wino, and that's the way
God made us.” The prophet Jeremiah would agree. And then Coffin adds, “Christ
died to keep us that way… For every serious believer the question arises: Who
is big enough to love the whole world?”[1]
For me, the answer to “Who is Christ
the King?” can never be a statement. The only statements that our human
imaginations allow us to make are about the Kingdom and our invitation into it.
For me, the answer to “Who is Christ the
King” must be another question, “Who is big enough to love the whole world?” I bet
that if that seminary intern had asked the children that question, he would have
gotten the answers that he was looking for.
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