What can we say November 20? Christ the King

    Jeremiah 23:1-6. Pondering Christ the King, the lectionary suggests we should contrast the bad shepherds, the lousy kings, of which there were (and are!) plenty. We think “shepherd” as lowly, but in the ancient world, kings of vast empires were often spoken of as shepherds. Interesting, but this would be an unusual choice of lections for such a Sunday.

   Colossians 1:11-20. What a great text for Christ the King. I recall reading and then watching the film, The DaVinci Code, with my much beloved Ian McKellen playing the smug, sinister Leigh Teabing spouting absurdities about the 4^th century emperor Constantine imposing views of Jesus as divine on the subordinates in his empire. Colossians stands there, a mere 2, 3 at most decades after Jesus’ death, making the most extraordinary, divine claims about him. All of creation was about Jesus, by him for him. The language soars: he was/is/will always be the “image of God,” the “fulness of God,” “in whom all things hold together,” “the Head.”

   Colossians invites us to do what sermons too rarely do: simply to contemplate Jesus, to gaze, to be in awe. No moral, no takeaway. Dorothy Day, late in her life, was asked by Harvard sociologist Robert Coles to write some autobiographical recollections. Her reply? “I try to remember this life that the Lord gave me; the other day I wrote down the words ‘a life remembered,’ and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most – but I couldn’t do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!”

   He is the image. Coins in Paul’s world featured the image of the divine emperor. Jesus is fully stamped with God, and the image is genuine, not faked or exaggerated. Thinking image: I’m still stunned by Daniel Boorstin’s astonishingly perceptive book, The Image, which reads as if written in 2022, but it’s 60 years old now: “In this book I describe the world of our own making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology and our progress to create a thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.” He assesses our society’s self-deception, our national self-hypnosis, our insatiable demand for illusions. Celebrities substitute for heroes; American dreams are pitifully replaced by American illusions; images overshadow ideals. To say Jesus is the image of God could not be more counter-cultural.

   The beauty of Jesus as image of the true God? Dorothy Day fixated on Jesus, which served her and thousands of others well. David Ford wrote that the antidote to despair is praise. We praise Jesus. Despair flees. We are surprisingly liberated from the world portrayed by the Beatles’ “I me me mine.”

   He is the Center; in him all things hold together. In 1919, in the wake of the ravages of World War I, the Irish troubles, a flu pandemic to put Covid in the shade, and his wife critically ill, William Butler Yeats wrote, “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; everywhere innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely the second coming is at hand.” There is no center any more. Only Jesus can fill that space.

   And he holds what is separated together. He’s all about reconciliation. He can do this as we turn to him, as we embody his compassion, his listening, his empathy. It’s like Fr. Greg Boyle’s “Geiger counter”: we look for beauty and goodness. We don’t measure, we meet; we see not sin but son. It works in the way Christian Wiman narrates falling in love, that “sudden rift in my life and mind, as if our love demanded some expression beyond blissful intensity our 2 lives made. Love isn’t limiting. He quotes Elizabeth Bowen: “To turn toward one face is to find your self face to face with everything.” Could it be that God turns toward us in this one child, and as we turn to him, we turn toward each other in hopeful, reconciling ways?

   He is our Head. We may be fond of thinking of the hands and feet of Christ, and dream of being these. But it’s his head, thinking, looking, talking, weeping, sighing, hearing, pierced… O Sacred Head Now Wounded indeed. This is his kingship on this Christ the King Sunday. A crown of thorns, not Queen Elizabeth’s crown of jewels and ermine.

   The notion that the whole purpose of creation was… Jesus: I try to think of the whole purpose of my life being something or another. Maybe it was that day I reported in Christian Century when the infant child of precious church members was rushed to Duke Medical Center, as they’d discovered a malignant tumor wrapped around her spinal cord. I drove 3 hours to be with this family, but I had no words. I just cried. A grinning pastor kin to them somehow materialized, spouting words of confidence – which I did not have. The pediatric oncologist got to me: he had a plan, something to be done. I was so useless, and wished I’d gone to medical school instead. I decided to leave ministry. Really.

   Then, late into the night, as I was about to excuse myself, the parents asked me if I could hold their daughter for a while. She hadn’t stopped crying for hours. They were exhausted, and had a massive day ahead. Yes, I could hold her. They went off, somewhere, and I rocked this crying baby. Finally, she settled and fell asleep. What did I have to offer? Brilliant sermons? Wise theology? Clever prayers? All I could do was hold her.

   It occurred to me that all my training, my Ph.D. in theology and all my worships and experience in ministry, were preparing me for just this moment, to do nothing but hold a crying child in the dark of night. She got some rest, as did her parents. Really: what more did I go into ministry for, after all? I thought of Mary and Joseph rocking Jesus in the dark. It really was all about just this. Maybe all of creation was just about this, Jesus, God’s precious, vulnerable, suffering child, held, cradled, much loved.

   Luke 23:33-43. Christ is king? Want to see what his reign is like? He looks down, suffering the worst physical horror, personal shame and terrible ignominy, and forgives the jokesters who are mocking him. They don’t ask for forgiveness; they don’t confess their sins; they have zero clue who he really is. Unasked, he forgives. That’s all we need to know about the vastness of God’s mercy.

    The thief, portrayed in medieval art as holding Jesus’ hand as they march into heaven, has no stake to mercy, but receives it, and lavishly. What could be more elegant than the Taize chorus, “Jesus, Remember me, when you come into your kingdom”?

****

   Check out my book, valuable for preachers and laity during Advent, Why This Jubilee? - reflections on carols, sacred and secular.