What Kind of King? - Christ the King Sunday

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on November 26, 2023; the Last Sunday after Pentecost and Christ the King Sunday.

The essential question for this feast of Christ the King is: what kind of king are we talking about, anyway? Kings as such have gone out of style, but in the halls of power, there’s still a man at the top. It’s easy to image God as the biggest and baddest among the big and bad. Choose your fighter, Jesus Vs. The Rest of the Rulers, in a King Kong Vs. Godzilla showdown, or yet another superhero crossover blockbuster movie. Is that what we mean when we call Jesus “king of kings and lord of lords,” that he is the strongest of the strong men? More powerful than the rest, a great king above all Gods? Modern political theorists define the state as the ones with a monopoly on legitimate use of force, a monopoly on violence, those who make the law and enforce it at swordpoint or gunpoint or missilepoint. Among our belligerent array of powers and principalities like that, is Jesus the biggest king of them all? No, that inflation of worldly kings simply scribes our human violence onto the heavens and attributes to Jesus sharper swords, bigger guns, and faster missiles in a technological perversion of divine power. Almighty alone won’t cut it. Some depictions of God leave much to be desired. What’s commendable about bowing down before the biggest bully in the schoolyard of the universe, say? Does might make right? So clarifying what we mean by this title of King is of urgent importance. God never fits neatly in the confines of language—the infinite cannot be defined—and so we have to let God show us what our words mean rather than the other way around.

What kind of king do we worship in Christ the King? Ezekiel pulls out an old standard, the shepherd king, particularly memorable in King David, who almost missed being anointed king because he was tending to his flock. Ezekiel gives us a classic image of the God of Israel tending to his people as a shepherd cares for the flock. Here God is the protector and caretaker, one who rescues and seeks out and searches for the people, one who gathers the scattered and brings back the strayed, one who judges with equity between the lean sheep who have been shoved aside, and the fat sheep who have butted at all the weak animals, scattering them with horn and flank. The divine shepherd will protect the weak and pursue justice and fair treatment, nourish and fill them with the good things they need, and the divine shepherd will also feed the fat sheep with the justice they need. What kind of king is Jesus? The son of David is a shepherd king, too, a shepherd king who protects the flock from violence and meets their needs and is willing even to lay down his life for them. Self-giving, rather than self-serving.

Looking to the Letter to the Ephesians, what kind of king do we worship in Christ the King? We follow a crucified Lord, Paul tells. “The immeasurable greatness of God’s power for us” is put on display in Christ, whom God “raised from the dead and seated at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” This king comes riding on a donkey, not a warhorse. He doesn’t demand others kneel before him in fear but he stoops down to wash feet. When all have betrayed him, he remains constant in love and forgives even those who are executing him. His power is displayed in his arms-flung-wide self-offering in love to all creation. “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” His power consists in the trust that his Father will never abandon him. Jesus shows us trust in God at the end of all things, in the depths of pain and betrayal and suffering and abandonment. The immeasurable greatness of God’s power—the greatness of God’s power that cannot be measured by human standards—is most clearly shown in God’s raising Jesus from the dead. “God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead.” Vindicated! God has showed the strength of God’s holy arm, and that strength, that power, is a condemned man dying on a cross for our salvation and the salvation of the whole world: Christ, the wisdom of God and the power of God. Jesus is a crucified king who reigns from the cross.

And what can we learn from the parable of the sheep and the goats about what it means to call Christ King? This is a sobering one, honestly, Jesus’s final parable before he is killed, and unique to the Gospel of Matthew. It brings to our attention God’s solidarity with the least of these, the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. “When you have done it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Christ the King claims kinship with the down and out, the least and last and little. He is present yet hidden in everyone the world writes off. Let’s be careful not to turn this parable into a morality tale about earning salvation through good works! As Robert Capon says, “Jesus came to raise the dead, not to reform the reformable!” Note that at the final judgement the sheep are just as confused as the goats: “When, Lord, did we see you in need?” Neither group recognized Christ in the stranger, in the other, in the least of these. This is not the might-makes-right king we were expecting. But in this final parable before the Passion, Jesus affirms that he is reliably present in leastness; that he meets us in every place of death. And in his passion, Jesus lives out his identification with the least and the last and the lost ones. He descends below all things that he might fill all things—even leastness and death. It is our part to trust in his presence there. We are not even going to see him with clarity among the underdogs of the world—“And when did we see you, again?” the bewildered sheep ask Jesus. Those who trust Jesus are not self-justifying, not counting up righteous deeds, but saved by grace through faith on his name, and letting that grace naturally overflow into love of the neighbor we didn’t know was Christ.

So what kind of king do we worship today? Christ is the shepherd king, protective, tender, seeking us out, and gathering the scattered. Christ is our crucified Lord, who reigns from the cross still offering himself in love and forgiveness until his last breath. Christ is the prince who plays the pauper, who comes to us over and over in the face of the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned, God identified in solidarity with the poor and the suffering. Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!

To say Christ is King is to proclaim God’s triumph over the powers of the world. To say Christ as King is also to say— that Caesar is not. And Herod is not, and Pharaoh is not. The military industrial complex is not, performed consumer identity is not, white supremacist patriarchy is not. None of these tyrants need to own us. The gentle Jesus who comes in weakness and doesn’t take up the sword and goes to his death promising paradise to the thief dying at his side, simply because he asks, because he trusts him—that’s our king. That’s what divine power looks like. Forget the monopoly on violence(—and hell understood not as the painful effect of self-enforced self-enclosure but as some kind of eternal torture certainly qualifies as violence.) The sovereignty of God can only be finally heard as the good news it is when we come to know God as loving, patient, kind, merciful, long-suffering, full of compassion, quick to forgive. When we come to know God as allied to the least of these in solidarity with human suffering, in solidarity with those we cast out, then the kingship of God might bring us to trust God. No, Christ our King is humble in heart. In Jesus God comes down to us to love and serve, there is not a trace of domination to be found. “For freedom Christ has set us free.” Jesus came and still comes, visits us daily, to free us by his love freely given to trust him and to begin to love others freely in return. He meets us in our places of death and despair, with a love that will not let us go, a love that comes back again and again.

This Feast of Christ the King is always the final Sunday of the church year, the last Sunday after Pentecost. So a happy New Year’s Eve, as it were. The church year is about to turn, and next week with a service of Lessons & Carols we will enter into Advent, the strange, dark and quiet time for getting ready to enter into the mystery of the Incarnation at Christmas. The beautiful season of Advent forms a necessary counterweight to the frenzy and overstimulation of this time of year according to that other liturgical calendar pushed onto us by consumer capitalism. Advent darkness allows the Mystery to dawn on us; Advent stillness equips the heart with ears to hear the new song God is singing in Christ Jesus.

At Christmas we recognize our King come among us in weakness, in a squalling baby. He is king of kings: the wise men bring their gifts at Epiphany and kneel before the child. This is how God sees fit to work God’s immeasurable, incalculable, great power out into the world, through a baby in a manger, utterly vulnerable, dependent on others, in need, fully entering into our human predicament, taking on and sharing our human nature so that he might share his divine nature with us. As we wait and watch this Advent, let us stay with our longing to see God’s peaceable kingdom worked out into the world. Let’s trust in God’s shepherding care and in God’s solidarity with the least of these, living in the hopeful expectation that all things will be brought to completion in Christ our King whose fullness fills all in all.

Thy kingdom come.
Amen.