Column on Christ the King

The church year and the calendar year do not coincide very often.. The church year comes to a close with Christ the King Sunday, and then we start a new church year with Advent. Pope Pius XI announced it only in 1925. As fascism was starting to take hold in Europe, the Pope wished to assert that governments should not seek to claim the role or status of the church in some sort of unholy union.  Religious people like to play around with the very notion of time, so that we may often say that a closing opens into something new.

For Americans, our democratic heritage makes it difficult to use the words king and kingdom easily. In my Reformed (Calvinist) tradition, Calvin divided the roles of Christ as priest, prophet, and king to fit the Biblical sense of anointing where we get the word messiah or Christ in Hebrew and Greek respectively. In our church this Sunday, we may read from the Barmen Declaration where the German church saw itself being absorbed into Hitler’s ideology, so it both asserted free space for the Church and  to the state. ”We reject...as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords...we reject that the church could appropriate the characteristics of the state.”

The kingly role is seen in Jesus as the opposite of what we expect in a king. Jesus did not exercise power over others. Jesus sought and seeks to empower others. Tradition sees it as rule over the church-protection from enemies-in guidance and in the push to a future where god’s way at long last finally takes command in human life but the life of the cosmos , the universe. Jesus frequently spoke of a kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven. Years ago, the Who sang Love Reign O’er Me, and that captures a bit of the sense of what we mean by the kingdom of God.

Christ the King looks forward because it is so difficult to detect the growth of God’s vision for us in a world so marred by injustice and violence. If we speak of Christ the king, we cannot speak of a reign over such a sorry mess.

It is a useful addition to our image of Jesus to celebrate Christ the king as future judge of all, a judicial function with the executive function, if you will. Take a look on Google images for Christ pantocrator, ruler of all. This is not an image of Jesus meek and mild. This is a stern visage, one of ill-concealed despair at what we do to each other, at times, in the name of religion.

In our ecological age, the kingly role of Jesus does extend to the cosmos. Most notably, we get a glimpse of it in Colossians 1 and Rev. 1 and 21. Jesus Christ holds all things together. In a world seeming to be caught in a whirl of centrifugal forces, this is good news indeed. In Jesus Christ cohesion occurs for our inner life and the glue that hold creation together. There the one who will be seen a slain little lamb is indeed the Alpha and Omega, the A and Z, the first and last, and the living one, there in God’s own abode..

A group of gentlemen gather in our church every Monday. they struggle with  holding the kingdom to heaven after death. Perhaps, we look at Christ the king less as a ruler of a location but the presence of God inside of us and engaged in the human and environment every second. To regard Christ as king is to see the world, a bit, through the eyes of God.