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Christ Pantocrator (all powerful)
detail from Paradiso, by Giusto de Menabuoi
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Colossians 1:17
He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Luke 23:35
And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’
Make America Great
Again!
Take Back Control!
These are the two slogans we’ll remember this year – both winning slogans, as it turned out.
They’re about
promoting power and unilateral strength and they’re against things perceived as
weakness or external threat.
From the point of
view of worldly power, they are exactly the kind of thing you would expect from
the kingdoms of this world – earthly rulers promise strong institutions that
can react to outside threats, and which are bolstered up by military
protection.
“Take Back Control”
was the Brexit slogan that won the day – suggesting ‘a sense of rightful
ownership’
(I can’t even remember the Remain slogan).
“Stronger
Together” – That was the US Democrats': that didn’t work; it proved much too difficult – no one was really feeling very together with the ruling Elite...
The rightful
ruling of a kingdom or a nation is the stuff of politics and on our news screens
every night.
How should a
nation be ruled?
Is might always
right?
Are Democrat
supporters right to fear Trump as an upstart and a maverick who will militarise
America and bring us into the 3rd Word War?
Or is he the
Messiah that the disenfranchised voters of the
rust belt (American Midwest) were hoping for?
On this feast of Christ the King, we will begin by
looking at the idea of kingship and ruling – a hot topic today.
Then we’ll look at Jesus as exalted King and as a suffering
human being.
Finally we’ll ask, how do we hold these two pictures in
tension, and why does it matter that we do?
*
1. People have
always sought Messiahs – anointed kings/rulers.
It was no
different in the Old Testament.
The people asked
Samuel for a king and it was always going to turn out bad (Saul).
‘We want to be
like other nations', they whined.
Other nations had
kings.
But kings (rulers) basically do two things: lead their people into conflict over territory and levy taxes.
It seems ironic
that Donald Trump, one of the richest men in the US (this is the man who has
gold taps in the bathroom of his private 80 million dollar jet) has become the
champion of the supposedly downtrodden…
Can you really be
a champion of the people if you are so removed from their daily lives?
Enter Jesus of
Nazareth – into a politically febrile environment – and into a tradition of
kingship.
The king was like God in the Old Testament, e.g. Psalm 110, where we read:
The Lord says to my lord:
“Sit at my right
hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”
The Lord will extend your mighty sceptre from Zion, saying,
“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”
“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”
The bible
offers Jesus, however, as an alternative king and also as a culmination of all
human hopes for a righteous ruler (though we don’t really know what we want).
Our Western mindset is based on the
theory of progress – everything’s getting better and better – the job of the ruler is to lead us into
greater material prosperity and protect us from outside threats at all costs.
In the Western
mindset we can and do expect increasing advances in technology that will
deliver us better health care and an answer to global warming without us having
to change our habits of consumption.
In contrast to
this theory of progress, we have the life, passion, death and resurrection of Christ.
And we have the
history of the Church - successful expansion but also persecution, and periods
of faithfulness, then unfaithfulness throughout history – the church
experiences lots of little deaths and resurrections but is always called to die
in order to live.
These things tell
us that True Life is not about humanly procured economic prosperity, but about losing your life in order to find it.
What will it
profit a person if he gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul?
In place of
endless progress, Life, in fact, feels more like two steps forward, and one
step back.
And so against the
backdrop of political upheaval, votes, elections and leadership questions that
we see on our TVs every night, we have today two illustrations of kingship that
are joined in the one person – Jesus the Christ, whom we confess.
*
2. Colossians – a
cosmic king – this is a ruler supreme over all the universe – in him all things
on heaven and on the earth were created, says Paul in Colossians.
This is a little hard for
a student of physics to take in perhaps, this ‘Cosmic Christ’ of Colossians…
Jesus the man, the
gentle saviour, the perfect human being, is easy for us to take on board, but
the COSMIC CHRIST?
It’s a much harder
concept!
'for in him all things in heaven and on
earth were created,…..He himself is before all things, and
in him all things hold together' (Colossians 1)
The idea of St Paul here encompasses even atoms holding together…
It’s a HUGE
intellectual idea!!
‘Through him, with
him, in him…’ we say in our Communion liturgy.
In other words,
everything revolves around the Christ of the cosmos and everything is held
together by him.
Christ Pantocrator* is a title of Jesus meaning Christ all-powerful, not in the sense of ‘he can do
anything’, but in the sense that every second, every minute, he is actually doing everything needful to
continued existence, right now: he holds it all together.
If you want to
grasp the idea of the cosmic Christ, meditate on Colossians 1:15-20.
This is the KING.
He makes all other
kings look like tiny ants.
In 1925, amidst
rising nationalism and secularism (sound familiar?)Christ the King was inaugurated by one of the Popes to remind the
Catholic Church that kingship was in God’s power to give and that Christ was the
ultimate king.
In the weekday Lectionary
we’ve been in Daniel, who had the vision of the everlasting kingdom, amidst
other godless kingdoms rising and falling.
This vision was
needed when despotic rulers were on the rise and especially when they were
threatening the very existence of the people of God.
So that’s one picture
of kingship from the bible: the mighty exalted king – the cosmic Christ ruling
in the everlasting kingdom.
And here’s another:
Jesus on the cross.
The sign on the cross read: “The King of the Jews”, but the Pharisees were
incensed about this.
They told Pilate
to change it – to ‘This man said I am the king of the Jews.’
But he said what
is written stays written.
He had the last
word!
The mockers were not
mocking Jesus for being a criminal, they mocked him for saying he was a king.
What sort of a
king would go and get himself crucified?
*
3. These two
contrasting pictures of Jesus are summed up in his name: Jesus Christ
As Richard Rohr
has pointed out – Christ is not Jesus’s surname! Christ is his all- powerful
title.
Jesus = the man
who went to the cross,
CHRIST = the all
powerful king, now exalted in heaven, but who existed from the beginning of all
time, the Logos, in whom all things hang together.
What do we do with
these two pictures before us today? (the suffering human and the all powerful
God?)
Because there are
in tension and theologically they have caused problems for the councils of the
Church.
Do you stress the
humanity over the divinity? The ordinary man who understands our suffering,
over the all-powerful God who can deliver us from it? Or do you stress the
power at the expense of the vulnerability?
Are we powerful,
as Christians, or vulnerable?
Are we powerful,
as humans, or vulnerable?
No other religion
has this idea of human and God combined in one unified nature – and anyone who
tells you that all religions are basically the same, cannot really know what
they are talking about.
And this twin
identity of Jesus Christ, the human and the divine, is what we celebrate at
Christmas in the Incarnation.
It’s of primary
importance in our faith yet I still meet people who’d call themselves Anglican,
who haven’t realised Jesus claimed divinity. They think he’s just a moral
teacher.
Someone said to me
recently, that she didn’t really trust Jesus because you can’t put so much
emphasis just on one human…. (!)
If we can get something
of his actual nature over during our Christmas services and concerts, we’ll be doing
well!
BUT why does it matter
that we worship Jesus, Christ, the suffering one and the divinely exalted one?
What do we risk if
we stress one picture of Jesus over another?
I think some of
the angst around church decline and church growth that we see at the moment is
about missing the connection, stressing one over the other, not understanding
that we have to lose our life in order to gain it, like Jesus did.
There is a proper
‘dying’ that the church has to undergo – a dying to feelings of privilege,
feelings of superiority, assuming people want to know what we think on things,
feelings of moral one up-manship.
If we model
ourselves on the Jesus of the cross, who did not count equality with God
something to be held onto but who emptied himself on behalf of others – that is
a good sort of dying.
Then there’s a bad
sort of dying in the Church, which comes from apathy, complacency, wishing to
be shielded from the mess of other peoples lives, holding tenaciously onto the
past, not investing energy in succeeding generations who express their faith differently.
That’s a sort of dying that parts of the C of E are experiencing. And it’s
painful.
*
Leonard Cohen died this week. A writer in the Church Times paid tribute to him,
claiming that many of his comments and certainly his poetry and songs, pointed
to an implicit understanding of this winning combination of suffering and
glory, that we are presented with on Christ
the King.
Cohen wrote “there
is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.
The crack is
suffering. The light is the glory.
He also said “A
scar is what happens when the word is made flesh”.
‘The Word’ –
Christ eternal, the Pantocrator.
‘Made flesh’ – our
loving Jesus, who suffered on the cross and understands what we’re going
through.
This is the God
that we worship today, on whose nature we model our own lives for the good of
others.
Alleluia, Amen.
