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The last Sunday of the Christian
year is now celebrated as the feast of Christ the King, or The Reign of
Christ.
This is a relatively new practice, instituted by the Roman Catholic
church in
1925, and followed by other churches for only the last few decades.
Although it
rounds off the year appropriately with a culminating affirmation of the
supremacy and majesty of the risen Jesus, it brings two risks with it.
To
begin with, it appeals to a rather
antiquated conception – kingship. The world is long since gone in which
kings
and queens, surrounded by immense wealth and splendor, exercised
absolute power
and were regarded with awe because of it. No one attributes such status
to
other human beings now, or is likely to make the mistake of treating
them like
gods. So how can applying ancient royal images to Jesus Christ enrich
our
understanding or increase our devotion? Secondly, there is the risk of
an unattractive
triumphalism. Invoking the image of Christ the King can sound very much
like an
expression of Christian superiority.
Though
writing for a world in which
supreme imperial power was indeed the norm, St Paul in the Epistle
offers us a
way of responding to the first point. He tells the Ephesians that God
--the
creator of all that is -- has used his power to raise a criminalized Jew
in an
obscure part of the empire ‘far above
all rule and authority and power and dominion’. That is to say, the
truth about
Jesus sets the political power of earthly kings in its proper
perspective. For
all their majesty, such rulers are powerless to save us from sin and
death. Their
kind of ‘kingship’ is importantly hollow – an assessment that continues
to
apply to modern states.
To
hail Christ as king, therefore, does
not mean claiming supreme power for an alternative political candidate,
but reversing
our whole way of thinking about power.
It is on the Cross, after all, that Jesus receives his Crown of
Thorns. It
is of course true, as the Gospel parable of the sheep and the goats
affirms,
that Jesus has been given the final word of judgment over all creation.
This
does not license Christian triumphalism, however. On the contrary, it
leaves
believing Christians with a new and more demanding responsibility – to
make
sure that they see and honor Christ’s kingship in the poorest and
humblest
parts and people of the world.
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