Christ the King 2022
2 Sam 5:1-3; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:35-43
“The Queen is dead: long live the King”, if anybody is interested. Now, don’t misunderstand me: I am well aware that millions of people throughout the world were interested in the Queen. The death of Elizabeth II brought expressions of admiration and respect from all parts of the globe. Even Sinn Fein, which used regularly to be described as “the political wing of the IRA” expressed condolences, and two of its leaders told King Charles that his mother had contributed greatly to the peace process.
Queen Elizabeth was admired for her personal qualities. For seventy five years, she strove to fulfil the promise made on her 21st birthday that she would devote her life “whether it be short or long” to the service of the people of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Two days before her death at the age of 96, she was still working. How many of us, if we live so long (which God forbid in my case) will be able to claim the same?
Elizabeth II’s faith was something which she wore on her sleeve, as the only public figure who would repeatedly refer to Jesus as “Our Lord” without an instant’s hesitation. She was also a good friend of the Catholic Church, enjoying a warm relationship with both Cardinals Hume (to whom she referred as “our cardinal”) and Murphy-O’Connor.
Now, as she has gone to her reward, we have a king, though I am not sure that anybody has noticed. He is the Duke of Lancaster, which confers some importance on him, but, other than that, King Charles III seems largely to pass under the radar. To misquote a song made famous by Max Bygraves “Kings ain’t what they used to be”.
But stop a moment. What kind of king was the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords? He was a joke king, deliberately so. The sign affixed to the Cross—“This is the King of the Jews” as Luke reports it—was a jest, a calculated insult both to Jesus Himself, and more particularly to the Jewish people.
Pontius Pilate was declaring that the Jewish people, on their own soil, were so abject, so pathetic, that a humiliated, bloodstained wreck of a man wearing a crown of thorns, was the only person fit to be their king. Yet the insult went far deeper than that. For centuries, ever since their return from the Babylonian Exile, the very concept of a king had been abhorrent to the Jews, who now acknowledged no king but God Himself. To have a dying criminal declared as their king was a religious, as well as a national, insult.
Effectively, it meant that this despised and rejected figure was being presented to them as God. Isn’t that the greatest irony of all? For so indeed He was. This broken man was indeed the one in whom and for whom all things were created, as the Letter to the Colossians declares: He was the beginning, and was to be the first born from the dead, truly the King of the Jews because truly God.
Who noticed? A thief, a crook, one who by his own admission deserved his sentence and punishment. As, throughout His life, Jesus had attracted the poor and the wretched, beginning with the Bethlehem shepherds, so at His death it was one of the lowest of the low who glimpsed the truth behind the appearance, who realised, however dimly, the truth of Jesus’ kingship.
What are the implications for us? I suggest that they are twofold. Firstly, if we are to understand who Jesus is, we must somehow see Him with the eyes of the poor and lowly, and not from the viewpoint of the ambitious, the power-seekers, those with a sense of self-importance. Secondly, because we have been baptised into the kingship of Christ, we must be imitators of Jesus in His self-sacrificing love, a love “costing not less than everything” as TS Eliot expressed it: a love which sees the potential for paradise even in the most wretched of people. And incidentally, if we are going to have a king, nay even a Duke of Lancaster, perhaps it will be no bad thing if he largely passes unnoticed.
