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I was in London a couple of summers ago at the same time as some friends from Virginia who were traveling with their daughter It was June, so there were a lot of events involving the royal family: The Queen’s birthday, the Trooping of the Colors, the Royal Ascot horse races. If you’ve ever to been to London in June you know that royalty seem to be everywhere.
My friends took full advantage of that, walking all over London to get a glimpse of the queen whenever possible. I think if they’d been wearing a Fitbit or some other device that counts how many steps you take in a day, it might have exploded. I think my friends were living out that American fascination with things royal – an interest that, ironically, might come from being citizens of a country with no royalty at all (except in the world of entertainment) which centuries ago fought a war with a king for our freedom.
Why this fascination with kings and queens? I wonder if it is that sense of tradition and pageantry that seems so stable and safe in the rapidly-changing world we live in. We love that the queen travels around at ceremonial occasions in a horse-drawn carriage accompanied by soldiers in fancy dress uniforms. We love that the guards at Buckingham palace are all business, never cracking a smile. We love the idea of the power, wealth and status of the monarchy – a family that is both part of the nation and also at arm's length, solely because of pedigree. In a way, it’s the stuff of fairy tales.
So as we celebrate the feast of Christ the King (or if you prefer, the Reign of Christ) today, we might have some unpacking to do. What in the world does it mean to be Christ the King – past and present? Where does this come from? What does it mean for us?
The feast of Christ the King is actually a Roman Catholic holy day that has been around since 1925. We don’t have a day called this on our prayer book calendar, but the readings on this last Sunday before Advent always have this theme. So this has become an adopted holy day of sorts.
And the question that surrounds our observance is ‘What do we mean when we say Christ the King?’ At one level that is easy to answer by saying we worship Jesus as Lord and king and savior. But that almost begs the question of what kind of king Jesus is. After spending several days in an interfaith community at the Parliament of the World’s Religions last month, where people of deep faith worshipped God in many traditions, I want to be careful about our celebration degenerating into some kind of triumphalism that would minimize their expressions of faith. And when we look at the gospel reading for today, we certainly see a different picture of a king than we do in the temporal world. Jesus is our king and our savior, but is a different kind of royalty than we meet in the streets of London or in some other monarchy
What we see is in the scene in the gospel is Jesus standing as a prisoner before Pontius Pilate, humiliated. Later in this account he is flogged, mocked and then crucified. This is hardly a picture of traditional royal posture, but it is part of our story. As Pilate interrogates Jesus he asks him if he is the king of the Jews, a question that Jesus deflects. ‘My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus finally replies, adding that he came into the world to testify to the truth.
Obviously none of this lines up neatly with what we usually expect of kings and clearly Jesus is king in a new – perhaps emerging – way. A way that would change the world and continues to change the world. We need only look at the days he and his disciples journeyed and ministered on this earth to see his humility, simplicity of life, compassion for the least and the lost. He is a servant king, calling others to servanthood as well. This is part of the truth that he lives.
I want to offer two perspectives on this that I hope will help us see something larger in the idea of Christ the king. The first is a big picture view – a cosmic perspective – and comes from Ilia Delio, a scientist, a theologian and a Franciscan sister. Sister Delio is a wiry, energetic teacher and scholar and a prolific author who spoke at Gonzaga University a couple of weeks ago. In her book “The Emergent Christ,” she uses insights from physics and theology to develop a portrait of Jesus in a dynamic and cosmic way, drawing on both theology and science.
A disclaimer: I am not a physicist – or any kind of scientist and only make a small claim as a theologian. But listen for a moment to a tiny slice of Delio’s thought and ponder how it might speak to Christ the King. She begins by reminding us that it is an emerging, evolving universe and an emerging, evolving world we inhabit. She talks about how Christ evolves, just as the universe continues to evolve and change because Christ is the agent of creation. As we say in the creed, “through him all things were made” (and continue to be made…).
She quotes from Teilhard de Chardin, also a scientist and a theologian, who said, “We need a Christ who is no longer master of the world solely because he is proclaimed to be such, but because he animates the whole range of things from top to bottom.”
In other words, Christ is still at work, calling forth newness both in the physical universe and in us. We, too, are still evolving. Delio points out that we often look to God and Christ as things in the past – as if we looked in the rear-view mirror to see where we came from. But instead, she says, we are also being pulled forward – challenged—to continue to be transformed by divine love and to put that into action. Pulled forward by this Christ we have come to call King.
The second insight, one more grounded in the realities of everyday life, comes from Barbara Lundblad, professor at Union Seminary in New York. She looks for where we see Christ the king at work in the gospels and here and now in our world—places that don’t line up with our stereotypes of royal behavior. She says,
“We'll look in places we never expected . . . We see Jesus engaging in deep theological conversation with a Samaritan woman who had had five husbands and was living with a man who wasn't her husband! We see Jesus bending down on the ground to be with a woman accused of adultery. He leans in close to hear her voice when nobody else bothered to listen. We see Jesus putting a towel around his waist and then kneeling on the floor to wash his disciples' dirty feet.
Jesus is a king who never rose so high that he couldn't see those who were down low. Even today, we see Jesus in tent cities where people live together after losing their homes to foreclosure. We see Jesus in public housing where people are still waiting for the power to come on after the storm. We see Jesus in shelters where women have sought refuge from abusers.”
And I would add we see Jesus in crowded refugee camps and among those fearful of acts of violence and terrorism. We see Jesus in in the hollow eyes of a starving child and in the shocked silence of a family whose child was shot and killed in a drive by shooting. In short, we see Jesus not in royal procession with pomp and circumstance, but in the procession of all of humanity seeking to live together in peace, with dignity and with hope.
May it be so.
