On the Kingship of Christ
- preached at the Church of the Transfiguration, N. York City.
Feast of Christ the King, 20/11/2016
This is Jesus, the King of the Jews
A
few years ago, Jan and I saw a play The Testament of Maryat the Barbican theatre in London. I’ve since read the book by the Irish/American writer Colm Toibin who teaches for half the year at Columbia. The rest of the time he lives in Dublin. For those of you who are not familiar with the text, it’s a one-actor, one-act play about the storey of Jesusfrom his mother’s point of view. She never calls him by name; merely “he”.
And she hates the Apostles, who, she is convinced, have backtracked on the actual circumstances of Christ’s death, and have re-invented her son as the salvator mundi, the Saviour of the World. After they tell her just how Jesus was conceived, which is funny in itself, they proceed to tell her how he died, for everyone, for the entire world:
“What?” Mary replies, “all of it?”
You will have gathered by now that this not a Christian play at all in the sense that it attempts to convert or convince, yet it disturbs and probes as all good drama does. One of the arresting themes in the play occurs at the beginning, before the monologue begins. The actor who plays Mary is on the stage heavily veiled and looking like a classical Madonna surrounded by votive lights. She sits silently on stage, hands together in an attitude of prayer. The audience is allowed on to the stage and take photographs of Mary. Then the play is about to commence and ushers direct people to their seats, and Tolbien’s tale begins.
What we witness here is a preference for the sort of religion that can be photographed, that takes the edge off reality and favours neatness above the “unfinishedness” of the Gospel. The way the New Testament deals with this is in the confrontation with Pilate in the fourth Gospel where the Roman governor says, “So, you are a King then?” to which Jesus replies, “You say that I am”. It seems there is no such thing as “objective religion”. What we say about God necessarily implies a statement about ourselves. Have you noticed how our longing for clarity and (above all) certainty is frequently countered by Jesus with another question? For example, I want to know clearly what to do with my money.I want to know what is God’s desire for me in these matters – should I spend it all on ice cream, or should I use it to build a hospital? Jesus refuses to tell me even though the moral law tells me to build a hospital or do something useful with the money. But Jesus will not tell me, but instead asks, “Where is your heart?” He asks, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Or again, take discipleship. “Are you the Messiah?” the Apostles ask Jesus in the fourth gospel. And he won’t tell them. Instead he asks, “What are you looking for?”
Today is the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year, often called the festival of Christ the Eternal King. Yet (irritatingly) Jesus says the Kingdom over which he presides is “… not of this world”. The Mary of Toibien’s fiction might well ask, “Well, what world is it then if it is not of this world?”
It is of a different order, a different type of Kingship so it is rather pointless to list aspects of Kingship (especially in America), and simply apply them to Jesus. It is, for example, superfluous to substitute “President” for “King” and imagine you have made some kind of advance, and, as actual Kings fade from the earth (as they seem to be doing), so the meaning of Christ’s Kingship and real authority becomes clear.
The Kingship of Christ in ironic. The three Gospels of the Liturgical year of Matthew, Mark and Luke offer three different ways of looking at this Kingship. In St. Matthew we invariably have the ironic parable of the Sheep and the Goats; in St Mark we have Jesus’ remark, “My kingdom is not of this world”; and today, from St Luke, the account of the Crucifixion where Pilate writes the mock title, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews”. Let us remember this. The title is power; the suffering man below it is powerless. Nailed down, immoveable, powerless.
The Cross has become so familiar a sign in Christian history that it is difficult to reclaim its irony, let alone its profound indignity. We put it on our tombs as a sign of victory, we carry it in procession replacing the Roman Eagles as a sign of power; we write it over the dead as a sign of redemption often forgetting it is a central symbol of powerlessness. The early Church was so ashamed of the way Christ died that it was three centuries before the Crucified was represented in art. The first known image of Christ is found in the catacomb of San Sebastian in Rome where Jesus is drawn as a beardless young Shepherd with a sheep slung over his shoulders. But some art historians now think it may be a goat. Makes you think.
The festival of Christ the Eternal King always reminds me of the parable of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov where one of the brothers. Ivan, shares his understanding of Christ’s death with his younger brother Alyosha. The parable is set in the future where Christ comes back and, as you might expect, continues his work of healing and teaching. The Church, in the form of the Grand Inquisitor, is now firmly in charge and has taken over Christ’s teaching. Law has replaced grace. Jesus, now always referred to as “the Prisoner” (as Mary refers to her son merely as “he”), is arrested and interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor who accuses Jesus (surprisingly) of heresy:
- the heresy of giving people freedom
- the heresy of NOT telling people what to do.
The Inquisitor says to the Prisoner:
“There has been no lack of warnings and signs, but you did not heed the warnings. You
rejected the only way by which men might be made happy, but, fortunately, in
departing, you handed over the work to us … You have given us the right to bind and
loose and, of course you can’t possibly think of depriving us of that right now. Why,
then, have you come to interfere with us?”
And so he goes on, railing relentlessly against Jesus and accusing him of freedom, the freedom that men and women don’t truly want at all. We say we want freedom, but we don’t want it at all. We want law. Note this: every dictator, including Adolf Hitler, was elected.
The Parable has a surprising ending:
“[The Inquisitor] saw that the Prisoners had been listening intently to him all the time,
looking gently into his face and obviously not wishing to say anything in reply. The old
man would have liked him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But he suddenly
approached the old man and kissed him gently on his bloodless aged lips. That was all
his answer.”
That Kiss is the meaning of Christ the King;
- true power coming from powerlessness
- true freedom coming from chains
and liberation coming from a man nailed down, immovable and yet profoundly free.
Roger Sharr