Christ the King

Christ Pantocrator (all powerful)

detail from Paradiso, by Giusto de Menabuoi

^{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 3^rd 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?

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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.”

The Lord will extend your mighty sceptre from Zion, saying,
    “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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

How cosmic is your Christ?

He is 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.  
Colossians 1: 15-16

I had a primary school teacher moment this week and made these jigsaw pairs for Sunday's all age talk on Colossians 1: 15-20, the pre-eminence of Christ or, depending on your age, How big is your Jesus?/How cosmic is your Christ?

There's a reason why I nearly always, out of the 3 set readings for Sunday, go with the gospel for an all age talk. 

Because stories speak loudly, and you can focus on narrative for younger minds, and the meaning behind the story for the older ones (though sometimes, a wonderful bright 6 year old can be relied upon to give the succinct theological meaning in front of everyone else, thus proving the truth, 'from the mouths of babes and infants you have ordained praise').

But this Sunday's gospel is (again) John 1 - the Prologue. We read it at the Carol Service every year: 'In the beginning was the Word'. It's a wonderful pean to the divinity of Christ, but it's not a story. So this Sunday we're going with the Epistle. And that presents some challenges for the children - hence the jigsaws. I enjoy preparing all age talks in the hope that, like the 1970s Heineken advert, they will 'refresh the parts other sermons cannot reach'.

But this still leaves the problem with preaching on doctrine, not narrative: how to avoid the sacred/secular divide? The sacred/secular divide line runs right through every area of life and even believers find it hard not to fall into the chasm - the chasm where you talk about religious stuff in church and then return to your normal every day life completely unaware of how faith relates to your life - to work, leisure, finance, parenting, politics, peace, ecology, healing.

Because the picture of Jesus in the Colossians reading is of a very big Saviour. This is not an image which fits well with the pluralistic range of 'saviours' on offer today. Even thinking about Jesus as a baby or a dead man who mysteriously re-appears is to limit the scope of what St Paul puts before us in this letter. Christ is cosmic. In him all things hold together - that is, atoms as well as the inner healing we all need before we can make peace with our lives and losses.

The pictures of Christ in this short reading are amazingly multi-faceted - hence the wide array of images on one half of the jigsaw pieces. Put briefly, Jesus is:

• fully part of the Godhead (the image of the invisible God)
• the agent of and reason for creation (all things have been created through him and for him)
• the being by which creation holds together
• the head of the body which is the church
• the alpha (beginning)
• the first raised (the first born from the dead)
• the one through whom we are reconciled to God (by his blood on the cross)

This doesn't just touch on theology but on the way we see the physical world, the metaphysical world, the ecclesiastical world, and the inner world. It speaks to the outburst this week by Stephen Fry, who railed against a God who was 'utterly utterly evil' because he apparently 'created' bone cancer in children. It speaks to the fear of death. It speaks to the human need to find meaning and purpose in life.

Christ is 'all in all' (another favourite Pauline phrase). Here's hoping that young or old tomorrow, we not only have a mind expanding experience of how big Jesus really is, but also take that picture out into the world - a world that is, despite the false sacred/secular divide, still 'charged with the grandeur of God' (Gerard Manley Hopkins). 

Lent for Extroverts 9: Too scary for kids?

The combination of small children and difficult bible stories is one of the more challenging aspects a Minister faces. On more than one occasion I have launched in to a great Bible story, only to falter half way through, suddenly hearing how it sounds to 21st century ears. 

'And God sent his final plague on the Egyptians, which is where we get the Passover, when the angel of death passed over and all the first born little baby boys died...'

'And it wasn't just Pilate who handed Jesus over; the Chief priests, the leaders of the Jewish faith, also wanted him dead...'

'And Jesus went into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil, errr...however you wish to imagine him...' 

'What did you learn in school today?'
'The lady from the church came in and told us all about the Devil. I'm scared Mummy...will the devil visit my bedroom tonight...?'
'And on Ash Wednesday she put ash on our heads and told us not to sin and we're all going to die...'

However you cut it, the Christian story pulls no punches. And Lent is not the easiest season to inhabit. In preparing for this Sunday I toyed with the idea of visual aids for children, to illustrate the three temptations of Jesus, but dark figures in red cloaks, or worse, someone's modern idea of evil (which is always scarier) did not seem such a good idea.

Then I remembered Stanley Spencer's Christ in the Wilderness: The Scorpion (see above). It is one of five paintings exploring Christ and the idea of
wilderness, and was completed the year World War 2 broke out. I had always imagined the scorpion was the artist's impression of the Evil One but can't find any references to this interpretation, with most writers taking the creature at face value. 

But imagine the scorpion is in fact a depiction of evil and it opens up some interesting thoughts. Christ holds it in his hand. His expression is inscrutable. He could perhaps extinguish it with one blow but he appears to allow it to do its thing. Its sting is dangerous but not overwhelming. It is feared by most and must be treated seriously, but it is seen in the context of something much greater.

Meanwhile we'll make do with a basket of pebbles and loaves on Sunday (have you ever noticed how alike they look?) and leave depictions of dark temptation to the imagination of the film makers.

Language rich enough to eat

We're on number five of seven of the Advent Antiphons in our stately march (aka mad rush) through the final days of Advent before Christmas.

The 'O Antiphons' developed in the early church as sung prayers before and after Mary's hymn, the Magnificat. They refer to different names of Jesus from the Old Testament Wisdom and prophetic books.

And they do sing. Even if you don't know any Latin, it's like having swallowed a slug of something rich and fulfilling that will last you throughout the sometimes tiring preparation for Christmas. They're a veritable feast of words and allusions.

O Sapientia: 17 December.
Sapientia - wisdom. The feminine divine?
The word drips juice. Sap. 
'Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven, like the first dew fall on the first grass...' She was there in the beginning.

O Adonai: 18 December
Adonai - Lord. 
Adonis. 
Beautiful One. Christ identified as God Almighty. Can it be any clearer than that?

O Radix Jesse: 19 December
Root of Jesse.
Like the male version of Cinderella: 'Are these all the sons you have?'
'Great David's greater son'.
God's only son.
Radix: root. Radishes. Radical.

O Clavis David: 20 December
Clavis: key.
The key which opens and no one can shut.
The key which locks and no one can open.
Be on the right side of that key then.

O Oriens: 21 December
Morning Star: 
'O Morning stars together proclaim the holy birth, and praises sing to God the King, and peace to men on earth.'
(I thought the morning star was Venus, hanging there in the dewy mist as the day breaks....?
Or it there some biblical image I've missed?)

O Rex Gentium: 22 December
King of the people.
'God rest ye merry, Gentium...'

O Emmanuel: 23 December
Know this one. God with us.
'O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.'

I think of the O Antiphons like an Advent plum pudding - rich and full of goodness; ancient and long lasting. A wonderful mixture of things which fill and nourish in ways supermarket Christmas food adverts cannot compete with.

Happy munching.

34. Pilate's wife - he'll never listen...

A disturbing little detail can get right under your skin. A look, a gesture, an unresolved threat that follows you into your dreams.

Take the nightmares of Anglican ordinands in training: appearing in the pulpit with hardly anything on; being laughed at in assembly; singing Evensong with laryngitis...

Pilate's wife 'suffered much' in a dream about Jesus of Nazareth. The timing was the thing - they were just about to lead him out to crucifixion, this strange prophet, this miracle worker with the haunting stare....

Will her husband listen to her warning, sent in urgency: 'Don't have anything to do with that innocent man...' (Matthew 27: 19)?

He will not.

Suffering can be picked up on a different frequency, like those high pitched whistles only dogs can hear. It's like a menace leaking out, a warning of darkness to come, a low level rumble of evil. 

Dream as premonition. It's happened to me before.

'Behold the man', the Christ who had to 'suffer these things before entering his glory' (Luke 24, Emmaus road conversation).

And behold the woman who suffers on his behalf. Thank you Pilate's wife.