Today we celebrate a feast which has deep roots in Scripture and Tradition, and yet is also a very recent innovation -none the worse for that of course. I shall come back to innovation at the end of what I want to say.
Beginning with Scripture, recall the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, which includes 'Thy kingdom come' addressed to God as 'Father'. Once Jesus' ancestors had opted for a king as a human source of authority and trust, they had sometimes addressed God as king, as in our Psalm today (Ps.93). Jews were and remain very wary of naming God in human terms, but it could sometimes have a point. In this case, it reminded their earthly kings that there was a creative and redemptive authority beyond them, the source of the best they could do and able to overcome the worst. In fact it was the primary task of the king to keep attention focussed on God. Recall the source of our 'Sanctus' in the liturgy, Isaiah 6, where the prophet saw the heavenly king enthroned beyond the earthly.one, surrounded by creatures singing out God's holiness, with the whole earth full of his glory, his authority. As our Psalmist puts it, 'Thy testimonies, O Lord, are very sure; holiness becomes thine house for ever'. As God, so earthly king and people - don't forget, the Psalmist sings.
Trust in God could be sustained at an appalling cost, to put it mildly. For instance, take the book of Daniel, ostensibly set in the period of exile in Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem in the sixth century BD, when kings of the Jews were more or less over for good. Daniel actually relates to the horrors of the mid-second century. For after the death of Alexander the Great, his empire was carved up by his generals. One of them got his hands on the cross-road territory at the eastern end of the Great Sea, territory which included what was left of Israel-and-Judah. In the course of time, one of that general's successors, Antiochus, styled himself not just king, but a king 'Epiphanes', manifesting the divine in his own person, or so he thought. He seems to have worn a magnificent headdress, like rays of light. No tact, obviously, if reigning over a people profoundly suspicious of confusing human with divine authority! Jews of course had to learn the language of their conquerors - Greek - and even translated their Scriptures into Greek, but resisted other elements of Greek culture. They were bound to suspect elements of it tied up with homage to the gods, such has athletics and horse-racing, gods whose images and temples might now appear all over the place. There were also issues about food, and the huge offence of having pigs' flesh made sacrifice in the most sacred shrine in Jerusalem - in the temple (such as it was) rebuilt after the return from exile. No Torah was to be taught - a whole way of living obediently to God was to be wiped out.
Rebellion was inevitable, and the consequences disastrous. There was no literal release from a lion's den or a burning fiery furnace for the martyrs of the rebellion- recall the stories in Daniel told to encourage the persecuted to withstand terror. Yet from the utter fidelity to God shown by the martyrs there was born a new vision of God enthroned, coupled now with the vindication of those martyrs. For the writer of Daniel saw that 'there came with the clouds of heaven one like a Son of Man' brought into the very presence of God, and given an indestructible kingdom. Here was the promise that God vindicates those faithful to him. (See also 2 Macc.7 in the Apocrypha).
The end of rebellion and persecution merged into political disruption, until a sort of stability came with Roman occupation, the Great Sea now a Roman lake. The Roman governor normally lived up on the northern coast, but came down to Jerusalem at times when he might expect trouble - Passover, for example, with its renewed hopes of liberation. When he visited Jerusalem he most probably stayed in a Herodian palace, with its series of linked courtyards, through which he could move from public to private very easily. The governor would be rather short-staffed - he was responsible for only a very minor imperial province. He had to make up his own mind about all sorts of matters not covered by Roman law, and most of those he dealt with would not be Roman citizens.
One such governor, Pilate, up at crack of dawn to clear his desk with his secretaries, as usual with Roman administrators, found himself with a nasty case to decide. Brought before Pilate was a Jew, Jesus, perhaps by this stage somewhat unkempt, certainly vulnerable to abuse, and an object of fear to some. They want to be rid of him. Thus the writer of John's gospel chose the exchange between Pilate and Jesus to focus precisely on the key issue in the narrative of how Jesus is brought to his death. Is Jesus the one in whom divine authority - glory, is indeed manifest? It's a narrative far more harrowing that those stories in the book of Daniel, because it surely re-relates the nugget of a particular historical incident, written up in dramatic form to be sure, but reliable enough. And it is likely that it is the realisation of its importance that gives Pilate his place in our creeds - not just a helpful memo to aid the rough dating of Jesus' execution, but the recollection of the significance of the exchange between the two.
So we find Pilate moving between one courtyard and another, sometimes taking Jesus with him, asking a series of questions of the prisoner. Jesus is defenceless apart from his utter trust in God and his own wits and intelligence. Most of Pilate's questions he either ignores or deflects back to Pilate, firmly dislodging the charge of rebellion. His claim is that his authority is not derived from anyone remotely like Caesar or his representative in Pilate. His authority is 'not from this world', but from God who has sent him into this world to bear witness - to be 'martyr'--to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth - who trusts God - hears his voice. Does Pilate? And the hearers and readers of the gospel know that Jesus enacts salvation, 'does the truth', performs it, as he provides wine, bread, the plenitude of life and health, sight, justice and peace. He even promises the Spirit of truth to his disciples. He has committed himself to the God he addresses not as king but as 'Righteous Father'. If he is right, he is to be acknowledged as the faithful witness, the redeemer, as the fearsome book of Revelation has it, in another text from a time of persecution and terror, this time Roman.
The book of Revelation moves us on from the book of Daniel, for the Son of Man, the vindicated one, is now Jesus, truly divine presence, Alpha and Omega. So 'thy kingdom come' becomes a prayer to God through Christ, king in a sense, a witness to truth in his utter humiliation, about to be scourged, dressed up like Antiochus Epiphanes in a thorn-crown, not one which radiates light, and finally, like all too many others, brought to a dreadful death. From this death, the Righteous Father who sent him recreates, receives and celebrates him. He becomes the one to whom we pray for mercy and forgiveness. So every time we say the Lord's Prayer, the 'Sanctus', the 'Kyrie', the Creed, we are involved in a political act whether we always recall that or not. For we are lining up with Christ instead of Caesar in the sense that we remember where authority lies, that is, where justice, goodness, truth are ultimately to be found and praised. We are practising courage, resisting being overwhelmed by fear and terror from no matter what source, including the terror and denigration that has been and still can be generated from within the church as well as from outside it.
So, there in outline is some of the material from Scripture and Tradition focussed in this feast of Christ the King. As I said earlier, as a distinguishable feast, it is an innovation, for both good and bad reasons. By the end of the nineteenth century, the papacy had lost its states and much additional power, and within the church there were those who wanted the recovery of power if not of territory. And they wanted societies to be Christian in the sense of being ruled in all aspects by religion, that is, ruled by those who thought they already knew what that meant - always somewhat questionable, in my view. If we are going to opt for theocracy, closing the gap between the divine and the human, we need exceptional sensitivity and care and the capacity for self-critique, the willingness to learn - none of which is inevitably self-evident in the church anymore than anywhere else. That apart, by 1925 the movement for a new feast had gathered momentum, so in a special encyclical the then Pope reasserted the need for the recognition of the Roman Catholic church as the manifestation of the kingdom of Christ on earth. The feast was originally to be celebrated before All Saints. It was after the second Vatican Council in the 1960s that it was shifted to just before Advent, and now with a rather different emphasis - on the freedom to be able to acknowledge Christ.
We may now well cringe at the language of the encyclical, but we can surely still have some sympathy with the then Pope's position. The church was struggling not just with the loss of its political power, but with huge changes in society in the aftermath of an atrocious war, and the consequences of a major revolution in eastern Europe. And the signs of the impact of violent and ruthless new political organisations were already to be seen. It all put the church on the defensive. Resistance was indeed needed, but how it was to be fostered and sustained, and how the church might survive - or not - was yet to be discerned. And the Pope was right to realise that whereas pronouncements reach only a few, feasts can reach everyone. He also made a shrewd move in linking the new feast of Christ the King to a much older devotion, that to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And if we think that sounds anything but Protestant, we can note that the very beginnings of that devotion are reflected in the hymn we just sang, 'O Jesu, king most wonderful' from the twelfth century, the Jesus of sweetness, who visits our hearts, who kindles our love for him.
How then does the feast of Christ the King seem to Episcopalians, in a very different world again from that of the 1920s or the 1960s, after an even more murderous second world war (with over fifty-five million dead) and conflicts abounding? The feast has its point when we shed ecclesiastical pretension, as presumably our various Liturgical Commissions saw around the turn of the millennium when then recommended it to us. In our society, the church has to earn trust, - it cannot just be claimed. But the church can be the place where as I have indicated, and for the sake of the world which the church exists to serve, we can learn greater courage, practice mercy, forgiveness and penitence, searching for the signs of justice which will pull us into God's future. So let us welcome Advent in the celebration of this feast today.
Sermon by: Ann Loades