Christ The King Sunday: Matthew 25:31-46
It is Christ the King Sunday, and I just finished listening
to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a trilogy of books (The Golden Compass,
The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) about a revolt against God (?) and The
Church (a sort of conglomeration of the Catholic and Calvin-styled Protestantism)
set in some sort of 19th (?) century version of Oxford and other
multi-worlds and or parallel universes.
Although its focus is on two twelve-year-olds, Lyra from one world and
Will from another, the conclusion (if there is one) seems to be to replace “The
Authority” (a rather decrepit angel on his last legs) and the Kingdom of God
with a Republic of Heaven - presumably
more of a representative democracy than a kingdom as we would think of it.
Given Pullman’s stated atheism and disdain for organized religion, the Republic
of Heaven sounds an awful much like the Anglican or Episcopal Churches which
already exist! It is all a wonderfully riotous, gripping and engaging adventure
which seeks to un-throne (no pun intended) the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord
of the Rings and Harry Potter all at once.
Despite the all too expected criticism and warnings from
certain quarters of, dare I say, Christendom, Pullman’s books raise a number of
important ideas and questions, not the least of which ought to be just what do
we mean by the Kingdom of God, and on the last Sunday of the Christian Year,
what do we mean by Christ the King?
It’s all too easy to agree with what appears to be Pullman’s
assertion that The Church (capital T, capital C) has got it all wrong – and we
ought to agree that throughout its history The Church has done and/or allowed
many awful, evil and horrendous things. Think The inquisition, pogroms, The
Crusades, and the sexual abuse of children to just name a few. Although one
ought to be intelligent enough by the 21st century to know that no
institution can honestly be judged by the actions of a relative few
individuals. And we may as well face it, the malcontent , evil and misguided
individuals who do bad things in the name of religion are a minute minority of
the billions of other people of faith who have made the world a better place
whether they be Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Confucian, Taoist,
Jainist, Sikh, Yoruba, Shinto or any other of the many wonderful cultural
variations of world religions and what is being called perennial philosophy and
wisdom traditions.
Designating this Christ the King Sunday is rather recent.
Pope Pius XI instituted the idea in 1925 and placing it on the last Sunday of
Ordinary Time is even more recent. It strikes me as curious. Curious in that
Jesus makes for a peculiar king – he who appears to have shunned all attempts
at making him a king. Jesus, like the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Muhammad
(to name just a few) wrote nothing down. No books, not treatises, no doctrines,
no philosophy. He was a teacher who seems mostly to have traveled by foot with
the lone attested depiction of him riding a donkey into Jerusalem on that
fateful Passover week – an act which in itself appears to be some sort of ironic
street theatre mockery of kingship, the Imperial Religion of Rome, and flies in
the face of all authorities: here is a “king” who is close to the people,
riding a humble beast of burden instead of a mighty steed of war, who welcomes
prostitute, tax collector and sinners to sit with him at table as he hosts the
blind, the lame, the outcast, soldier, foreigners, strangers, and quite honestly anyone and everyone who
wishes to sit on his right and his left.
Jesus commanded no armies and specifically orders his
disciples, that is, all those who would follow him in his way, to put down
their swords and love their enemies. And he routinely calls people to follow
him without any requirement of knowledge of the traditions, scriptures or
beliefs of any sort. We are commanded quite simply to “follow” him. It
continues to seem strange to me that Pullman, Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling and
others all seem to feel that for the world to be put right requires some sort
of cosmic warfare when those who call us to such a vision of shalom, peace and
justice always employ peaceful,
non-aggressive strategies of non-violent civil disobedience: think Palm
Sunday, Ghandhi, Martin King, the Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh and others.
And despite the indisputable fact that Jesus begins this
vision of a great judgment at the end of the age with the Son of Man sitting on
a throne, once again like Palm Sunday itself, he reinterprets the shape and
meanings of “kingship” and “judgment” in
radical new ways. For instance, those
being judged judge themselves by their actions, and even more so by their
non-actions: they welcome strangers, visit prisoners, feed the hungry, clothe
the naked, offer relief to the thirsty and so forth, or they don’t. Note also
that those who do these things are completely unaware that what they do is
extraordinary and worthy of reward. And neither those who act not those who
fail to act realize that the poor, sick, homeless strangers they do or do not
respond to with compassion are the very embodiment of the “king,” the anointed
one, the messiah, or are, quite simply, God in the flesh.
This is the scandal of Christianity – that our God sits not
on a throne but walks the streets with the poorest of the poor like a Mother
Theresa. That our God is the mother who lives on the streets with no place to
lie her head let alone the heads of her starving children. Or, the veteran who
after multiple tours of duty sees no way out short of leaving this world behind
in hopes of a much better hereafter. Our God is a very strange “king’ after
all.
I have no idea what Pius XI had in mind. Although I can hope
that he wanted us to reflect on just what sort of “king” Jesus is, one suspects
it was to shore up the authority of The Church on Earth. I am content to let
the Philip Pullman’s of the world continue to fight that cosmic battle. As to
the Kingdom of God, or even the Buddha’s nirvana, Jesus and the Buddha depict
this notion of the Earth’s Shalom as a very real presence here and now, not
some sort of life beyond the blue.
Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism are insistent on the very real
presence of the “kingdom” in our midst – in and amongst us all, in the very
things that we do every day, things that we do not even recognize that we do
them because to do them is quite simply the right thing to do. We just lay down
our swords, open our hands and our hearts and offer healing, love and
compassion to those in need, completely unaware that we serve our God, our
Christ, our King in so doing. Amen.
