Today, the last Sunday after
Pentecost, also goes by another name, the “Feast of Christ the King”. This
Sunday takes its title from today’s collect, which names Jesus as God’s “well-beloved Son, the King of kings and
Lord of lords”. To tell the truth, I have never much liked this Sunday or its
title. In the twenty-first century, the idea of a king is either a nightmare or
a joke. Comparing Jesus to one does not seem to be doing him any particular
kind of favor.
A new production of the play King Charles III recently opened at the
Pasadena Playhouse. I haven’t seen it, but a family friend of ours composed the
music for it, so I have been following the reviews. The play develops the idea
that, after a lifetime of waiting, Prince Charles finally succeeds to the
throne. The conflict develops when, to everyone’s chagrin, the new king refuses
to act like a puppet but actually asserts himself as a thoughtful, principled
monarch. Who, they wonder, does this man think he is? In the present era, kings
are something of a joke, a sentimental holdover from a former age. Why would I
want to compare Jesus to someone like that?
If we turn to history, things get
even worse. Real, historical kings were a mixed bag. When they had something
like real power, kings couldn’t help themselves from abusing it. Just think of
all the nasty things our Declaration of Independence says about George III.
Calling Christ the king implies either that he is a fool or a tyrant. That’s
what happens when we project social analogies onto the cosmos.
We humans cannot help talking about
God in social analogies. Because God is ultimately mysterious and indescribable,
we attempt to explain God by using figurative language. Doing so is natural but
inherently dangerous. Here is how my late friend, the priest and theologian
Marilyn McCord Adams, describes it:
Theology trades in social analogies.
God and the people of God form a society. When we try to express who we are to
God and who God is to us, we naturally take our own society as a model. . . [But] the human social systems that we project
onto the heavens are inevitably unjust. . . [Every] human society spawns systemic evils,
structures of cruelty that torment and degrade some while privileging others. Casting
God in various roles in such societies already represents God as complicit in
injustice and cruelty. But there is worse to come. Societies make idols of
their own survival, because our lives depend on them. They justify existing
social arrangements by representing God as their author and enforcer. Because
Divine Wisdom would know what it was doing, the result is to picture God as
deliberately sponsoring whatever inequality and cruelty the social system
spawns.--Marilyn McCord Adams, “Arguments from Tradition”, Christian Holiness and Human Sexuality.
We think we’re doing Jesus a favor
by calling him “Christ the King”, a term he never uses about himself. We want
to say that real authority lies not with earthly rulers but with Jesus. We want
to say that we follow Jesus but not Caesar. But calling Jesus the King can’t
help but turn him into a kind of Caesar. What can we do?
Luckily Jesus gives us an image and
some language in today’s gospel [Matthew
25: 31-46], the familiar passage from the 25th chapter of
Matthew. The ones included are those who
fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, visited those imprisoned or sick. Those
excluded are the ones who failed to do so. This gospel passage suggests two
things: that real authority lies not in power but in service, and that God is
actually most recognizably present in those who are up against it.
A contemporary thinker I like very
much, Terry Eagleton, wrote a small book several years ago with the gigantic
title, The Meaning of Life. And you might be surprised that Eagleton—a
British literary theorist and highly secular philosopher and cultural
critic—ends his meditation on life’s meaning with a discussion of just this
chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. For
Eagleton, the genius of Matthew’s 25th chapter lies in the way it
takes the “meaning-of-life question” out of the hands of philosophers and
“returns it to the routine business of everyday existence.” As he elaborates, “The key to the universe
turns out to be not some shattering revelation, but something which a lot of
decent people do anyway, with scarcely a thought.” Eagleton muses, “Eternity
lies not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick.” [The Meaning of Life, pp. 164-165]
There is a lot to be said for the
way Terry Eagleton and many of the secular people with whom I find common cause
would read this chapter: whether or not we agree about the big questions,
certainly we can all find common cause by alleviating human need. Jesus himself seems to turn us from a
consideration of the big questions to an extended parable about meeting him in
the service of those who are up against it.
This is a truism that even Al Franken and Roy Moore, when they’re not
otherwise occupied with their own problems, could probably agree on.
And yet, as a follower of Jesus
there is something beyond this truism that nags at me. Sentimentality aside, I
want to give a glass of water or a piece of bread to a person in need not
because it’s a nice thing to do but because I believe that in doing so I serve
and meet Jesus. I don’t totally part company with Terry Eagleton and my liberal
friends on any of this, because frankly I believe as they do that serving the
suffering is the meaning of life. We Christians don’t feed the hungry or visit
the sick only because it’s a nice thing to do.
We feed and visit them because we believe they represent God to us.
As we try to make meaning of the
universe, we can’t seem to help ourselves. We persist in making Jesus into
something like a heavenly version of an earthly monarch. We keep on rationalizing
our justice work as some kind of benevolence or charity or, that awful phrase, “giving
back”. There is both less and more to it than that.
The Romans persecuted the early
Christians for two reasons. First, Christians were martyred because they
refused to worship the image of the emperor and in so doing insisted that someone
other than Caesar had the primary claim on their allegiance. Second, Christians
were suppressed because in the ministry of the early deacons, they set up
something like the world’s first social service network. Rome was a laissez faire society. It didn’t like
the idea of do-gooders doing what Jesus tells us in today’s gospel to do:
feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned. The
early Christians violated Roman religion by insisting that real authority lay
not in power but in powerlessness. They violated Roman values by finding
something valuable in the very people Roman elites wanted to throw away. For
early Christians, real patriotism was less about militarism and more about
social justice. The poor, the sick, the imprisoned have a claim on our
attention because they have inherent human dignity. Following Jesus meant
honoring them and not some clownish thug pretending to power.
I will leave it to you to conclude
what Jesus would have us do in the present moment, a time when we are
confronted both by human need on a startling world-wide scale and an array of
clownish thugs claiming, in our own president’s words, “I’m the only one that
matters.” Whether it’s refugees from Syria, the Rohingya in Myanmar,
undocumented or falsely imprisoned people of color in the United States;
whether it’s children or working poor people without health insurance or those
at the mercy of unprecedented environmental disasters; whether it’s people we know
who suffer from loss or illness or addiction or discrimination or abuse. There
are plenty of suffering people all around us who need a hand and a voice. Real
Christian piety is as much about making solidarity with them out there as it is
about saying our prayers in here.
When we call Christ a king, we are
trying to do him honor but end up performing a disservice. As Jesus tells us
this morning, we meet God not in the powerful but in the powerless. And if
powerless people are holy, then that must tell us something about the nature of
God. God’s primary attribute is not power but powerlessness. The one we meet in
Jesus claims our allegiance not with a crown or a scepter, but on a cross.
Let us follow the one who says “No”
to power and stands with those who do not have it. Let us stand with the ones
he stands with, and make common cause with those who in their suffering show us
something of the depth and nature of God. Let us follow Jesus, and let us
refuse to call him king. On this Last Sunday after Pentecost, let us finally come
to know Jesus as our brother, not our monarch. Let us resolve not to kneel
before him but to walk with him as together we love and serve the world. Amen.
