Christ the King C (
Jeremiah 23:1-6,
Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:33-43
Pr. George L. Murphy
St. Paul’s Episcopal
Church,
THE MAIMED KING
“This is the king of the Jews,” the inscription on the cross, was the first proclamation of Jesus as king. It was mockery – “This is a king? He’s the exact opposite of a “real” king who’s supposed to defeat and destroy his enemies.” But we remember what Paul said: “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” The first one who honestly proclaims Jesus as king is the criminal dying on the cross next to his. When we celebrate this last Sunday of the church year as Christ the King Sunday we’re saying that Jesus is the real king, even though he’s the reverse of what sinful human beings think a king should be.
“King” seems like an obsolete term to us but what could we replace it with? President or CEO just don’t work. We’re better off sticking with king, which of course is a biblical term. But don’t think of today’s figurehead monarchs, bunglers who just happen to have chosen the right parents, rulers out for their own power or glory, or all the tyrannical rulers throughout history.
There is ancient mystique about kings. One idea is that the health and vitality of the land are bound up with the health and vitality of the king. That’s the source of the “maimed king” and the “wasteland” themes that appear in the grail stories – the reason the land is waste is that the king is wounded. Ideas like that seem strange to us but it’s the way ancient people thought, and in a way it isn’t so far fetched. The good ruler brings about the welfare of the community and the bad ruler harms the community. A nation can take on something if the character of the ruler. That’s the reason we speak of “Victorian England” or “the Eisenhower era” for good & ill. If ordinary rulers mold the nature of their realms, how much more will that be the case for Christ and his kingdom.
We might
think first of the way the Bible speaks of the kind of king who is healthy for
a people. It isn’t the stories of kings
like David and Solomon. There is a law
for king in the seventeenth chapter of Deuteronomy. The king, it says, “must not acquire many horses for himself.” (Again “horses” sounds
old-fashioned but think of humvees or Blackhawks for a modern equivalent.) Continuing, the king “must not acquire many wives
for himself, or else his heart will turn away; also silver and gold he must not
acquire in great quantity for himself.
When he has taken the throne of his kingdom, he shall have a copy of
this law written for him in the presence of the levitical
priests. It shall remain with him and he
shall read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the
LORD his God, diligently observing all the words of this law and these
statutes, neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor
turning aside from the commandment.”
In this light a king like Solomon with his multitude of wives and his wealth is almost an anti-king. The true king “shall not exalt himself over other members of the community.” He is to rule for them, not over them. The king is to serve the people. Lots of rulers have used rhetoric like that – think of “Comrade Stalin.” But the reality was quite different.
In our
First lesson the prophet Jeremiah is speaking in a time following the death of
a good king, Josiah, when his inept successors were quickly leading
To say that
Christ is the King means that Christ is our righteousness. You may remember that a month ago our Gospel
reading was Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the Temple. I made the point then that the one who is
righteous before God is the one who claims only God’s own righteousness. That’s why Jesus said that the tax collector
in the story was justified and the Pharisee wasn’t. The Pharisee thought that his righteousness
was his own property while the tax collector knew that it was God’s – that he
could stand before God only by living continually from God’s mercy. In that way he was like Paul, who spoke of “not having a righteousness of my own that
comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the
righteousness from God based on faith.”
“The LORD is our righteousness” - not just “my” righteousness. In American Christianity there’s too much emphasis on individual salvation to the exclusion of the whole body of God’s people. The individual is important but Christianity isn’t, in the words of one Country song, just “Me and Jesus got a good thing going.” The enlightenment project that got rid of oppressive kings unfortunately also tended to get rid of any sense of community. But it’s really true that no man, no woman, is an island.
We’re in it together.
How can we be together when there are so many forces pulling us apart and encouraging us to be concerned just with our own interests? Our Second Lesson has the grand Christ hymn of Colossians that speaks of Christ as the one by whom and for whom all things exist and in whom all things hold together. And the hymn concludes by saying that he is the one through whom God reconciles all things to himself, “making peace by the blood of his cross.” The kingship of Christ is seen most fully in his willingness to die in order to reconcile, to bring together, all things – that dying thief, and those first humans long ago who turned away from God, and you and me – reconcile us with God, and with one another and with all creation.
St. John Chrysostom said of Christ, “I know him king because I see him crucified.” It is the cross and resurrection of Christ that holds his realm together, that shows what kind of realm it is.
The story
of Adam and Eve back at the beginning of the Bible is a story of how God made
humans to be kings and queens of creation. “You made us the rulers of
creation,” one of our Eucharistic prayers says.
“But,” it goes on, “We turned against you and betrayed your trust; and
we turned against one another.” The
whole story from Adam and Eve on in the Old Testament is like that wasteland
story – the maimed monarch whose wound sickens the land. But at last there comes in our human form, in
our flesh, the true king whose wound heals the world and opens paradise - Jesus
of Nazareth, King of the Jews.