Sunday, November 24, 2024
Christ the King Sunday
What is your image of Christ?
The Rev. Mark Wilkinson, Rector
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Katy, TX
Today we bring the church year to a close with the Feast of Christ the King or as some refer to it the Reign of Christ. This is the Sunday when we celebrate Christ risen on his throne as you see in many paintings and on many church domes especially in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. This is a day that focuses on the transcendent image of Jesus that we hear in the Nicene Creed. However, according to Diane Butler Bass in her Cottage post this morning. “This isn’t an ancient holy day. It was first proclaimed by Pope Pius XI in 1925 to reassert the primacy of Jesus’ lordship over the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism in European politics.”
Your image can be transcendent which is Christ that we celebrate today or immanent, Jesus down here with us. When I asked the Tuesday Bible study about their images I heard both and a couple of people including myself said, “Well it depends, sometimes it’s Christ on the throne and other times he’s right here with me.“
The Wednesday theology lunch has finished a book by Fr. James Martine SJE entitled Come Forth. It is the story of the raising of Lazarus from John’s gospel. He spends a good bit of time on examining or asking us to examine our image of Jesus for it is truly important to think about this. Ask yourself the question Jesus asks the disciples in several of the gospels, “Who do you say I am.” Who is Jesus for you? What is your image of Jesus? I’m going to stop for just a moment and let you think about that.
The difference between the image of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark that we have been reading this year and of Jesus as Christ in John is really important because these two gospels depict Jesus in very different lights. Let me explain.
Mark was written somewhere around 70 CE. The temple had been destroyed, the 5 year revolt of the Jews had ended in total destruction of Jerusalem and the near annihilation of the Jewish population in that part of the world had occurred. It seemed that their world was ending and Mark’s gospel reflects this. However, the image of Jesus that flows through Mark’s gospel is of the preacher, teacher and most of all healer. This is an immanent Jesus, one who is down here in the trenches with us in our daily lives. This is a Jesus that is filled with compassion and love.
John’s gospel written in the late 90s or later is written by a community possibly in Ephesus that has been expelled from the synagogues following the Council of Jamnia where the rabbis decided that any Jew who declared that Jesus was the Messiah were heretics and barred from the synagogue. The world had not ended as many in Mark’s community believed would happen. The new church is truly becoming its own faith however there was great bitterness focused at the “Jews” in this gospel. For a modern analogy, think in terms of the embattled Palestinian Christian’s relationship with the modern state of Israel. That is the level of hard feelings we see in John.
However focusing on just the transcendent Christ does not give us a complete picture of Jesus any more than the image we get from Mark’s gospel. This is truly a case of not one image or the other, but of both and.
The view of the transcendent Jesus that we get in John makes sense given the community and the situation in which the gospel was written. When you are in the position of John’s community you really want and need a powerful transcendent savior. One who will lead you into the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed throughout his time on earth.
We may be at time for some of us that the transcendent image of Christ on the throne may be a helpful image for our world today. Christ the one who was and is and is to come, the Alpha and the Omega as we here in our reading from Revelation. An image of Christ the king, in charge of his kingdom may be what many need today. This is one of the reasons I am spending so much time talking about the two equally important but very different images of Jesus Christ.
On Wednesday the theology lunch group is watching a Richard Rohr series on his book the Divine Dance which is about the Trinity. If you even begin to understand the Trinity which is hard for most people you realize that the Trinity takes in and fills the entire universe whether people use the word Trinity or not. God, Christ and the Holy Spirit fill all aspects of the world and this concept of communion is really important in a world that seems to seek not unity but division. Christ the King may the image we need.
Now all of this speculation about images of Jesus is important, but as I reflected on this gospel this week I found myself drawn to the middle portion.” My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world my followers would be fighting to keep me from being turned over to the Jews. As it is my kingdom is not of this world.” I realized that in all the commentaries that spent time on the kingship of Jesus, none of them talked about his kingdom “that is not of this world.” What does Jesus mean by that?
Herod certainly doesn’t understand because he is of “this world”; the world that is one where we are all separate, all fighting for our little piece of whatever is important to our ego driven selves, what Richard Rohr refers to as our false or ego self. Jesus proclaims a kingdom of love and mutual support. One where we are all united and interconnected rather than all separate. This is what Richard is talking about in this quote:
The Risen Christ represents the final and full state of every True Self: God-in-you who is able to see and honor God-everywhere-beyond-you too! In other words, Christ is more than anything else a “holon”—a scientific term for something that is simultaneously a whole by itself and yet a part of a larger whole, too. Jesus is telling us that we are all holons! We all participate in the one single life of God.[1]
This is what I meant earlier when I said to understand the Trinity and Christ’s place in the Trinity is to understand that the Trinity is in everything in the universe.
Physicists are discovering how everything is in fact connected. It is one of the cutting edge areas of study in the field. They are discovering what the mystics of the world, regardless of religious faith have learned. That we all are one, united in our belief system by the Trinity. For the flow of love of the Trinity is not restricted to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That loves permeates everything and everyone. Is it any wonder Pilate didn’t understand what Jesus meant when he said my kingdom is not of this world.
This image of the kingdom is radically different from the world that Pilate, Herod, the Romans and the Jews lived in. To be honest it is the world the disciples lived in and as we see in Mark so frequently do not understand because it is such a foreign idea to their world. Jesus’ kingdom is a kingdom of love and connection. If we are all connected we cannot hate the other without hating our selves. If we love ourselves we therefore love the world. Does that sound at all familiar? Love God, love your neighbor as yourself, because we are all one. I can hear Michael Curry, “if it isn’t about love it isn’t about Jesus,” and I might add it is not about God.
The kingdom that Jesus is king of, is a kingdom of love. The kingdom is a world where we wouldn’t have to go down to the Beacon to feed people our world has forgotten. The kingdom is a world where every person is important and valued as a beloved child of God.
For me, this is Christ the king who we celebrate today. Christ, the king of love, whose love permeates everything and never fails.
[1] Rohr, Richard http://email.cac.org/t/ViewEmail/d/BF496223842046722540EF23F30FEDED/BBC62F1EC1C6D196C68C6A341B5D209E