Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Today is the last Sunday of our church year and it is also Christ the King Sunday. Next week, the first Sunday of Advent, we will begin again as we anticipate the birth of Christ, the incarnation of God in a tiny baby and as we think about when Christ will come again. But first, as we wrap up this liturgical year, we pause to consider Christ as King and what that means for us as we live and move and have our being.
It is strange in 2024 to be worshipping Christ as King, in a world in which kingship has been reduced to a somewhat farcical symbolic position—think of King Charles of England. Surely this is a medieval celebration that doesn’t have much to say to us today in a time when the power of kings is all but gone. But you know what? This isn’t a celebration from medieval times. In fact, it is the newest liturgical celebration in our church calendar. It came into being in 1925 through an edict from Pope Pius XI as a response to the rise of powerful and dangerous dictatorships throughout Europe. He created this feast as a statement to the world that true power is not power over. True power is God’s power and God’s power looks very different from how humans normally envision power. True power is the love of God that is more powerful than any power that any human being could ever wield. It is the power to give up power that others might have the freedom to be, the freedom to exist, the freedom to love (or not love). It is the power to say, “I love you so much that I give you the freedom to choose me or not choose me.” This power is never coercive or authoritarian. A very needed message in 1925 and I think a very needed message today in a time when we see more and more people getting behind authoritarian leaders who have coopted the symbols and name of Christianity in order to gain support and followers.
So, let’s talk about what it means to say that Christ is King, for there are some very loud voices in our country right now that are saying that Christ is meant to be a worldly king whose followers must use “righteous” violence to make the United States the country that God wants it to be. They are claiming that Christ the king wants an America that holds to traditional patriarchal white Christian values—Christianity as the preferred religion of the nation, married heterosexual men as the head of every household and institution with women and children subordinate to them, and white native-born people at the top of the hierarchy. And many non-Christians, because these voices are so loud and prominent, think that this is what all who call themselves as followers of Christ believe. They think this is Christianity. But these Christian nationalist beliefs are not scriptural, and they are dangerous for Christianity and the world. They are especially dangerous for anyone who falls further down the Christian nationalist hierarchy, whether it be in terms of race, gender, sexual or gender identity, or place of birth. The idea that God is a God of power over and not power with and for has nothing to do with Christ the King as revealed to us in Scripture and nothing to do with the kingdom of God. And as followers of Christ, we need to get very clear about what we believe is the real message of Jesus and we need to make our voices just as loud or louder than the voices of the Christian Nationalists if we truly believe that the world needs Jesus as revealed in Scripture.
For most of human history, to be a king was to have massive amounts of power. To be a king was to be immensely wealthy. To be a king was to have absolute power over all the people under your dominion. To be a king was to be second only to God, and for all practical purposes to be God as far as human beings were concerned. But Christ the King revealed to us in Scripture is none of these things. Christ the king of Scripture voluntarily chose to have no worldly goods, to live with the poor and the outcast, and to side with those who had no worldly power. The only time Jesus was treated even a little bit like royalty was on Palm Sunday, and he turned that on its head too. He didn’t enter Jerusalem on that day on a beautiful stallion with soldiers all around him. He entered on a donkey with his disciples around him, and he rode to his death.
Christ the king so disrupted those with worldly power that the political and religious powers of his day arrested him and crucified him. The power of God as shown to us incarnate in Jesus is not about having power over others. The power of God is the power of love, absolute and total love. And in the end, this love, this power of God triumphed over the powers of this world, and Christ was raised from the dead. The powers of the world did not have the final word. God’s love had and has the final word. Relinquishing power is the true power.
Now, you might be saying to yourself right now, “Suzannah, that is lovely theology but not really very practical in the real world where most people want power over and are very willing to step on you to get it.” While I am someone who believes in aspiring to the best in spite of the worst, I am not naïve or stupid. I do know that the desire for power-over, whether it be power-over our children, our spouses, the environment, our friends, our workplaces, and so on is an extremely powerful desire and most of us will succumb to this desire at least some of the time. I also know that God became incarnate in Jesus in order to show us another way to live and move and have our being. Power over leads to anger, hate, aggression, violence, suppression, exclusion, oppression and death. Power with leads to life. Control over our neighbor leads to harm for our neighbor and ourselves. Love for and with our neighbor leads to a better world for all of us. I don’t know whether this message will or can be heard, but I do know that it will definitely not be heard or followed if we don’t speak it and live within our families, in this community, in our workplaces and every place in the world where we live and move and have our being.
Christian Nationalism worships an omnipotent (all-powerful) God who rules by coercion and force and wants His followers to bring all of humanity into line with the divinely ordained hierarchical order that places white American Christian heterosexual men at the top of the hierarchy and places everyone else in subordination to them. This Christian Nationalist God condones any means that His followers may use to bring about such a world, even if what they do weakens democracy, causes outbreaks of violence, and raises up leaders who lead less than honorable lives. In Christian Nationalism the ends always justify the means.
But our Christian Scriptures do not reveal to us a God who looks anything like the God of Christian Nationalism, and the God revealed in the Jesus of Scriptures gives us no divinely ordained hierarchy but instead simply tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. God cannot be both all-powerful and loving if we continue to define power in human terms as power over. But God is all powerful if we define power as God defines power as being power with, mutuality, and love of neighbor. I cannot love another human being and judge them at the same time. I cannot love another human being and consider them less than me or others because of their race, gender, sexuality, age, marital status, nationality, or any other descriptor we can think of. I cannot love my neighbor and treat them in any way I would not want to be treated. God cannot be both good and powerful as humans define power, and neither can we. Only a God who is powerless can help us by teaching us how to love one another. And I fear if we don’t learn this lesson very quickly, we will destroy each other through violence, war and environmental degradation.
The world says the king is the leader of armies, and our God says a King is a shepherd. The world says that royalty is the birthright of a few, and God says that the royal priesthood is all of us. The world says that the way to life is through power over others and God says the way to life is through the cross. Christ the King’s power is love. Christ the King’s power is compassion. Christ the King’s power is justice and mercy. This is the king that we, those of us walking the Christian path, follow and obey, and as followers of this king we are called to show the world the same kind of love. The world needed this love 2000 years ago when Jesus walked this earth. The world needed this love in 1925 when this feast was created. And as I look around the world right now, the world urgently needs this kind of love today. May we embody the love of Christ the King in all that we say and do. Amen.
