The Feast of Christ the King began only last century in 1925, at a point when kings were reducing – indeed, some had already gone to the guillotine. It only reached our calendar as the last Sunday of the Christian year in 1970. So we might wonder what it’s for, especially when Royalty doesn’t always get a good press. Last week we had one such. The king, Mauricio Pochettino, the manager of Tottenham Hotspur football club, was sacked. Just as suddenly, there was a new king, Jose Mourinho, who had been waiting, idle in London, since being kicked out of his last team, Manchester United, 11 months ago.
A football commentator described what happened like this. He said ‘If you look at the anthropology of what happened, it goes back to a very primitive story, of the most ancient tribal societies. They need a king, someone to embody what the society stands for, someone to claim its victories, embody the tribe and celebrate its successes. But, in tribal societies, every so often things go wrong: the harvest fails, a plague strikes, a powerful enemy attacks, and the king fails to ensure success. Will this new king at Spurs perform, or will he prove to be as self-seeking and useless as the kings of Israel condemned by Jeremiah? The king should be a shepherd for the people, and indeed a football manager is there to shepherd the squad in his charge. But ‘you have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them’.
The accusation against Jesus, the charge nailed to his cross, was, that he was a king. And indeed, our gospels are not ashamed to assert that. Indeed, our epistle reminds us that, before even the gospels appeared in their present form, Paul had included what appears to be this most ancient Christian hymn in his letter, proclaiming that Christ is, not just king, but ‘The image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.’ It is the centrepiece of the first Christian sermon, Peter’s proclamation on the Day of Pentecost. ‘let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.’
The implication of this, realised by the first generation of Christians, was that our understanding of everything, and particularly the whole of creation, and of what God is like, had to change. And, by implication, what a real king might be, has also to change. For the king, traditionally, leads his people out to battle. The king inspires his football team to believe they can win. The king, in any conflict, is on OUR side against OUR enemies, and leads us to defeat them. He inspires his followers to battle.
But look what happens when we realise the implications of the resurrection of Jesus. He is not only king, but ‘The firstborn of all creation; through whom all things in heaven and on earth were created’. There is now no person on earth who is not a member of this kingdom. No-one is an outsider. No-one is an enemy. There is no place for us to exercise our wrath and our anger because God loves all that he has made, every person that exists. God is not angry, not even with those who put his son on the cross. To those who crucified Jesus he said ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’ To the condemned criminal he said ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’
What we believe, in the light of the resurrection, is that he is not only king of all believers but king of all unbelievers also. The very term ‘king’ hardly does justice to what Jesus represents for us. But what might it mean? I think first of Costa Rica; a tiny slip of land uniting two continents, with Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the south. Cost Rica made treaties with its two neighbours, and in 1949 abolished its army. One result was great and lasting prosperity. Another was a huge influx of Quakers from the United States, who wanted to settle and live in a country dedicated to peace. And they have today formed much of the backbone of the country’s prosperity based on farming and tourism. The country is clean, safe, with a delightful friendly population ad stable government.
We have relied on the wrong kind of king; one based on our ancient primitive model of generals, emperors and, let us admit, football coaches, and not one based on the kingship of the one through whom all things and all peoples were made. To such a notion, the very idea of a king of peace is unimaginable. But then, in spite of being a Christian country, we have been a nation of wars, conquest, invasions, and celebrating our foreign war mongering and guaranteeing our peace not with treaties with our neighbours, but with a nuclear deterrent. Our history goes from 1066 through Agincourt and the 100 years war with France through the Spanish Armada, wars with Holland, with Napoleon, and finally two world wars. The scandal is that we’re in danger of remembering more about the wars, including one that ended over 100 year ago, than why we made peace by joining the European economic community in 1973. This began as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 with the deliberate intention after the second World War in a century of preventing further European wars. Weapons were about coal and steel, so this was an attempt to beat swords into ploughshares, to use steel only for peace. Later the single market was also designed to prevent wars between former antagonistic states. It may not be perfect but when before have that had we had over 70 years without a major European war? We probably wouldn’t fight over coal and steel any more, but the seeds of economic war and jingoistic nationalism are all again rampant in the nations of Europe and beyond. Such narrow nationalistic political leaders are no better than the very worst and most tribal of football coaches.
On this Feast of Christ the King we need to look again at what we mean by true kingship, and how we understand the implications of the realisation that our creator has taken human flesh, lived and died to demonstrate the nature of true kingship. So, on this recently invented feast of Christ the King, may I suggest that, to get truly into the spirit of what it means, you do what is traditional at this season and you listen to Handel’s ‘Messiah’. If you can, join a bunch to sing a scratch performance, and when you do remember that the fabulous climax is the real celebration of Christ the King, which we’ve done for centuries. Sing along to the Halleluiah Chorus, that majestic music which brought the king to his feet and now should do the same for all of us, which concludes with the proclamation of Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lord, and ‘He shall reign for ever and ever’.