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Sermon - The Festival of Christ the King (B) - 22nd November 2009
St Aidan's Anglican Church West Epping 8:30am
Readings:Revelation 1:4-8; John 18:33-37
"CHRIST THE KING"
My generation, those in their 50’s, are known as the baby boomers – that post-war population explosion of the 1950’s. We all grew up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Its now been 64 years since the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No doubt you have seen the photographs of the destruction; hideously beautiful images from the nuclear testing, the mushroom cloud, which was almost a commonplace when I was a boy and a teenager. And I now understand what a powerful effect that period had on me and my generation. I am not sure that we expected, consciously or unconsciously, to see middle age, and I am convinced that does much to explain the hedonism and license of the 1960's, and the decades which followed. And I'm sure that our fear of a nuclear holocaust has been a powerful factor in writing our post-war history.
As Christians we may feel we have something in common with that 17 th century pastor, Richard Baxter who wrote, “I preached as never sure to preach again ... as a dying man to dying men. 'Momento mori': remember that you - and each and every one of us - must die. The bell tolls for you and for me. The 20th century has been labelled 'The Age of Violence'. And it may be the 21st will be known as 'The Age of Terrorism'. Nowhere is immune: 9/11, the London bombings, destruction in Bali, Egypt and Jordan, all prove that.
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury once wrote:
There are moments for all of us when the liberal, rational, humane categories we normally operate with will suddenly collapse; sooner rather than later, we must all drive into Auschwitz, and confront without illusion the most unbearable truth about what it is to be human, the truth that benevolence and rationality are not at the heart of men's actions. There is a 'horror of great darkness' in men's dealings with men. Nor do we have to go to Auschwitz to learn this, though it is the most appalling sacrament of it that we have seen for centuries: the record in our own lives is likely to be bleak enough. And when we see how swiftly and easily the edge of gratuitous cruelty slips into our well-intentioned, even our loving, transactions, we may echo William Golding:
'People don't seem to be able to move without killing each other.' Faced with the destructive fruits of what we have done as individuals - or as a whole civilization - it is not surprising that the cry springs to our lips, 'An enemy hath done this.'
Today is the last Sunday of the Christian year, a day for taking stock. It is the feast of Christ the King.
In our gospel reading we have Jesus discussing the nature of Kingship with Pilate. Pilate knew of only one kind of king, one kind of political power and that was the sword. The Romans were proud of the peace they enforced on the world. But it came at a huge cost, and that cost was the most appalling state-sponsored, state-controlled violence the world had ever seen. With Rome there was no negotiation, no compromise. And no one could refuse them.
Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you a king?’ In other words, what sort of kingship is this? Jesus says, “May kingdom is not of this world.” Now we can make the mistake in thinking that Jesus is saying that his kingdom is somewhere else. That is, that Jesus is saying “My kingdom is not in the world, it is in heaven.” But that would make no sense. The Jews never thought of heaven and earth as being two separate places.” The Bible begins with, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The creation includes both. Jesus is not saying, “I am not king of this place, I am king of another place.” Rather he is saying his kingdom is not like the kingdoms of this world. Then he goes on to explain himself. If his kingdom were like the kingdoms of this world then his followers would fight. Worldly kingdoms equal violence. But his kingdom is from another place. The quality of Jesus kingdom is altogether different. As Jesus had said many times before, his kingship involves suffering and dying as well as the rising.
Yet his kingdom includes the echoes of the brokenness and pain of the world we see each day.
But as we meditate on this feast of Christ the King we are not helped by discovering that the Feast was inaugurated in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in an attempt to stress the rights of the Church over a society which appeared to want to live without the Church. It was a piece of ecclesiastical triumphalism which one theologian described as ‘political theology in the old style, with a barely-concealed nostalgia for the old ideology.’ It emerged, he argues, from ‘a reactionary church movement’ making ‘an obvious but suspicious transition from confessing ‘Christ the King’ to the … old idea of the authority of the church over the world.’
But there is better theology to be found in the Vatican. We see it in Michelangelo’s famous ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. There we have Michelangelo's depiction of the flood, and its very vivid: men and women with bleeding hands, scrabbling at the shut doors of the Ark; distraught people in despair as the flood reaches the tree tops; an old man carrying his son; a mother with her babies; a youth with his girlfriend and a house-proud housewife clinging to her goods and chattels. It is terrifying. It is also very real: we have seen similar scenes not only in today’s war-torn world, but also in the Indian Ocean tsunami and the recent earthquakes in Indonesia.
We have to face the terrifying reality of life with all its fragments of brokenness and pain if the Church is not to be a procession of the bland leading the bland. For in the face of all the violence and conflict in the world, ours is not a message of despair, but of hope. As Moses put it to the Israelites, Today I offer you the choice of life and good, or death and evil: therefore choose life. [Deut 30:11-20]. Or as St Peter writes in his second letter, Since the whole universe is to break up in this way, think what sort of people you ought to be, what devout and educated lives you should lead ... [for] we have his promise, and look forward to new heavens and new earth, the home of his justice. [3:11-13]. The Lord is King ... be the earth never so unquiet. [Ps. 99:1].
If you go to the Holy Land, you can visit a parable of all this. You can ascend Mount Sion, which the psalmist describes as the joy of the whole earth, the place in which the Lord has specially delighted. And there you can visit the tomb of King David, ancient, never forgotten, never lost. And there in the candlelight you can read names, thousands and thousands of names, under the words Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz. There is also a poignant little museum, a bar of soap made from human bones, a baby's waistcoat made from a page of the Talmud taken from the Warsaw ghetto. And here on Mount Sion, the joy of the whole earth, you can stand at the heart of our age of violence, and contemplate the tragic irony that the oppressed of sixty years ago have themselves become oppressors today, for truly, in the end, war begets only war.
It would be crushing except for another vision, given to another Jew. In another concentration camp, the island of Patmos, St John the Divine looked up at Mount Sion and saw upon it 'a lamb'. Of all the emblems of our Lord, and indeed of our faith, surely this is a symbol most to be remembered, most needed, in our time. The Lamb - the innocent one - the only human being who never added to the toll of malice and cruelty. The Lamb, the gentle one. I never used to think much of 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', but I think I know better now. It was the gentle Christ who, when he was threatened, threatened not again. "He was pierced for our transgressions, tortured for our iniquities; the chastisement he bore is health for us and by his scourging we are healed." The Lamb has identified himself with all humankind in its solidarity of guilt and suffering, and in the blood of the cross, opened out a new and better way. Seen this way, today’s Feast becomes ‘the symbol of justice and peace for those who experience injustice and have no peace, with the prospect that “he will wipe away all tears from their eyes, for the former things are past…”. It is not the church but “Jesus the King” who is the Lord of History.’
So we are asked today to look at the pain and the evil, the violence and cruelty and conflicts in our world. But we discover that these are not the only realities. Christ our Lord is the supreme realist, and we may believe him when he says:
How blest are those of a gentle spirit;They shall have the earth for their possession.
How blest are the peacemakers,They shall be called the children of God.
So we look eagerly and expectantly at the things which are unseen and eternal, for we believe that our light affliction, which is but for the moment, works for us an eternal weight of glory.