Colossians 1.11-20, Luke 23.33-43
Christ the King, 20 November 2022, Austwick, Clapham
You would expect a king to be born in a palace, on soft white sheets, attended by doctors, nurses and courtiers, and to a great fanfare of public announcements; but He was born in a barn in the cold of the night with only some animals for company, while the unknowing, uncaring world passed by outside.
You would expect a king to be born of noble parentage; but His was an ordinary family, his mother a young country girl, and his father, a tradesman.
You would expect a king to be educated in the most elite schools: but He sought out his own learning, in the temple, at the feet of the religious elders.
You’d expect a young ruler to go on to an army college to complete his training in military style leadership; but this One served his time among the unrecognised crowds, learning to feed the hungry ones, to heal the broken ones, to comfort those in need.
You would expect a king to circulate among those born with the advantage of inherited wealth and status, the famous and the rich; but His closest companions were those who eked out a precarious living in and around the backwater towns of Galilee. [1]
Why call Jesus a king? It’s hardly a term he applied to himself. Think of the many times when his disciples or his detractors tried to pin that title on him and he repelled them, and how insistently he rejected Pilate’s probing attempts to get him to associate himself with the kingdoms of this world.
Why call Jesus a king when everything we know about his life demonstrates that he was the anti-king, a humble man with the least autocratic tendencies imaginable?
St Paul doesn’t call Jesus a king. He calls him ‘the image of the invisible God,’ for Jesus the man shows us what the unseen God is like.
So it is surely intentional of God to take on physical form in the shape of a Judean village carpenter’s son at a time of Roman occupation.
It’s surely intentional of God to model a form of leadership based not on mastery but on servanthood, a style of mission in which his students grow in skill and confidence as the Teacher progressively gives his power away to them.
It’s surely intentional of God to challenge, at every opportunity, the haughtiness of the self-conceited religious and ruling elite - to challenge them, without malice or aggression, but rather with compassion, and with grace.
It’s surely intentional of God to have persisted in disputing the credibility of these kings of the world by showing and telling them how His kingdom was of another order altogether.
The conflict which Jesus stirred up by doing this inevitably led to the cross. He battled the kings of the world armed with weapons that they could not match: forgiveness, grace, humour and love. The consequence was his crucifixion. In ways the kings of the world could not fathom, his crucifixion was his victory.
For the cross - ‘the blood of his cross’, writes St Paul - was God’s means of bringing peace into a troubled universe. The cross - ‘the blood of his cross’ - was God’s means of reconciling earth and heaven.
For from the cross emerged the resurrection, making Jesus ‘the firstborn from the dead’.
And from the resurrection followed the ascension, marking a new beginning for all creation.
Why call Jesus a king? It’s an imperfect term but it nevertheless helps us find a way to proclaim his universal sovereignty, to celebrate how his ascension revealed him to be Lord of earth and heaven. [2]
Now the kings of the world sit on thrones; they govern dominions like nations, colonies or corporations. The kings of the world rule through fear or force or power of influence. They are the powers-that-be, visible and invisible. They are Charles III; they are Elon Musk; they are Putin; they are the NHS; they are Shell Oil.
And St Paul teaches that all these thrones and dominions and rulers and powers have been created through Christ and for Christ.
Yes, the Lord of earth and heaven, as the creator of all things, is the One who brought all these powers to birth. The kings of the world are his children, created in love, created for good, made to please and serve his good purposes.
And if the powers are created good, then although they may have fallen, these powers can be redeemed. [3]
For the Lord of earth and heaven, the One we call our King, is the One through whom God ‘was pleased to reconcile to himself all things’.
The Lord of earth and heaven has a mission to reunite all creatures of a divided world, to reconnect the estranged, to harmonise the discordant, to synthesise the divergent, to put wrongs to right and to heal the broken earth.
In a chaotic world which seems at times to be spinning off its axis, ’He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together’.
His kingdom of love, joy and peace is unlike any we’ve seen or can otherwise imagine. But it is the truest active force at work in the universe, a force which can propel us from a place of despair to a place of hope, a force which can transform our inertia into fruitful good works.
And without a doubt, that’s why - today - our hearts are stirred up to call Jesus our King. [4]
Notes
[1] The opening section of this talk is based on my children’s poem Jesus - a funny sort of king.
[2] Common Worship: Times and Seasons: All Saints to Advent: Introduction to the Season.
[3] ‘The Powers are good. The Powers are fallen. The Powers must be redeemed.’ Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. p.3
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