Christ the King – Peculiar Faith

The Realm of Love has No King

I fell in love with Arthurian legend as a child, and not long after that with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—they both feature irresistible kings, and they manage (quite convincingly) to make many believe in the possibility of not merely benign but even benevolent monarchies. Those stories often lulled me into a peaceful sleep as I dreamed of dwelling in fairy-tale kingdoms, maybe even living as a knight myself.

I carried those images with me into my Christian imagination, substituting King Jesus for Arthur and Aragorn, embracing a full-throated apocalyptic vision of God’s coming “kingdom” to set things right at last (with plenty of knights on horseback).

But I just can’t do it anymore. It has always been challenging to thread that needle for the sake of a “good king,” and these days even more so while living in a patriarchal society currently shaped by the ascendancy of White Christian Nationalism. But even more than today’s cultural currents (though they are strong indeed), the biblical witness to a livelier —and indeed, lifegiving—image of God’s realm of love has shifted my vision dramatically.

More than only setting aside potentially “unhelpful” images (to put the matter mildly), I have come to appreciate that this is about ongoing conversion for me, a conversion to a genuinely different way of thinking, and conceiving, and imagining whatever we think the word “God” means and how Jesus manifests divine presence—and it’s not about “royal splendor.”

I realized all this in a fresh way this past week as I was preparing for the seventh and last Sunday of the Easter season, the Sunday after the Ascension. For reasons I couldn’t at first discern, I found the traditional liturgical texts for the day annoying, then abrasive, and suddenly directly at odds with what the lectionary seemed to invite.

We’ve been using the 1979 Prayer Book lectionary at my parish this Easter season as a way to include texts from the Hebrew Bible. Reading the portion assigned for yesterday from the first book of Samuel (12:19-24) felt at first jarring and then suddenly liberating.

The ancient Israelites made a serious mistake, with consequences that lasted for centuries. The portion assigned from that book captures the moment when they realize this. Prior to that moment, the people had lived in a loosely organized confederation of tribes. They enjoyed the leadership of those whom God appointed on occasion to serve as “judges,” as they were called, insightful and inspired leaders to help the people live more fully into their covenantal relationship with God.

Samuel was the last of these judges and the first of Israel’s prophets. This was at a time when the people had grown restless: they had mostly forgotten the charismatic leadership of Moses and Joshua, who had led them out of their slavery in Egypt, and they were increasingly unhappy with the judges God appointed.

The time has come, they said to Samuel, for us to have a king.

Oh, Samuel said, that’s a really bad idea. He tried to explain that having a king and living in a kingdom would change dramatically what it means for them to be a people and how they live in relationship with each other.

But no, the people insisted: we want to be like all the other nations; give us a king.

So Samuel prayed about it and then reluctantly gave them what they wanted; and it did not turn out well. Samuel had warned the people about this very thing—your familial, economic, political, and religious lives will change, and not for the good, he said, if you have a king; and of course he was right.

Monarchies by definition create hierarchical societies; everything is structured vertically, in relationship to the monarch. The monarch’s subjects are related to each other only because they are all subjected to the authority of the crown. This is always true, regardless of the character of a given monarch—whether benign, benevolent, or brutal. Samuel himself made quite persuasively made this argument in detail just a couple of chapters earlier (8:10-18).

So it was of course more than a bit unnerving to reflect on that passage and then prepare Sunday’s liturgy with the collect appointed for the day from the Prayer Book, a collect in which we name God as “the King of glory.” We then praise God in that same collect for exalting “Jesus Christ with great triumph to God’s kingdom in heaven.”

It is of course quite easy, and very common, and probably perfectly natural for most of us to think of images of royal triumph for the Eastertide Sunday after Ascension Day. Yes, and…how curious that on such a day the lectionary would assign a biblical story that calls into question the value of kingly power—even warning us against any attachment to thrones, of any kind.

Reading Samuel’s caution about royalty together with a passage from John’s account of the Gospel deepened the day’s dissonance for me—and in a good way. That pairing reminded me that John always scrambles the most typical assumptions about power.

Very early on in his account—in the second chapter—John’s Jesus overturns the moneychangers’ tables in the temple, and that image of “overturning” runs throughout John’s account and all the way to the end. At the “last supper” the master becomes the servant, washing the feet of those whom he now calls friends; and John even refers to the suffering of Jesus on a cross as the very “glory of God.”

“The King of Glory: By Water and by Blood,” Carol Grace Blomer

For John, Jesus does rise but not with royal power; John doesn’t include any account of the “ascension” at all. For John, the glory of God is instead divine solidarity—the one who dwells among us as one of us, the one who washes our feet, the one who dies just like us is the risen Jesus, who takes our humanity right into the very heart of God.

That’s not what most people expect to hear about God. Indeed, it’s much easier to speak of the exaltation of Jesus with more familiar images of power and in ways that we might more commonly expect—with images of kingly splendor, for example, and with the language of “ascending” and “going up and high above.” I suspect our traditions use such language to inspire praise and worship. After all, kings and crowns are symbols easily understood across cultures to convey a sense of divine sovereignty and lordship.

But that familiarity and ubiquity is exactly the problem. From Samuel to John, and many others in between, the problem is this: the language of royal power obscures the power of love.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is “good news” precisely because it overturns our expectations about divine power—just like those tables in the temple are flipped. The Gospel scrambles what “Lordship” even means when speaking of God.

As John describes it, Creator God enters God’s own creation, takes on creaturely life itself, its joys and sorrows, even death—and then raises it up, raises up creaturely life into Creator God’s very own heart.

Let’s be clear: that’s not how a “proper god” ought to behave; this is nothing less than scandalous.

We know how kings and queens should behave—they reign over a realm, just like gods and goddesses dwell above their dominions. But that’s not how the God of Jesus behaves and that’s not where we should look to find Creator God. As the angels say to the post-ascension disciples (and I now hear their tone of voice as chiding), “why are you looking up?” (Acts 1:11)

God, the Source of Life and Creator of all things, is not “up there” but found in the very things God creates and loves so deeply—including us. This is the astonishing insight we heard from John’s Jesus yesterday (17:20-26). God bless John, but his convoluted language all but guarantees most will miss the life-changing claim in that passage.

Jesus envisions that we ourselves would enjoy the very same unity, the loving union, that he enjoys with God—the very same.

By entering into deep solidarity with us, God invites us into deep and loving solidarity with each other, and indeed with the whole of God’s creation.

That’s the textual bread-crumb trail that led me to wonder what possible difference any of this might make for the world today, which is devolving and unraveling all around us.

The daily news now chronicles a world increasingly divided into insiders and outsiders, a world divided into “acceptable people” and “dangerous people,” and as we enter into LGBTQ Pride Month, we should be sure to note this: all those divisions are inscribed on the most intimate and closely held aspects of who we are in our gendered, sexual, racial, ethnic, and relational selves—on all of us.

These heartbreaking divisions are created by systems of domination and sustained by imperial regimes, and I am more convinced than ever that the Church must be very careful not to attribute that kind of power to God; far too many already assume that God looks and acts just like that—as monarch, king, and even tyrant.

Or less severely, many grew up (as I did) loving the old standard hymns like “Crown Him with Many Crowns” and enjoying the old paintings of heavenly thrones and thrilling to the sound of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” with its stirring vision of the “King of kings and Lord of lords.”

Yes, and still, and yet in some of the equally significant strands of biblical and theological traditions these kingly assumptions are quite remarkably overturned—yes, flipped like those temple tables—and all for the sake of love. Many of us heard the sound of those tables flipping yesterday morning, from the very last chapter of the Bible.

In the Revelation to John (22:12-14,16-17,20-21), just as we might expect (and as Handel set to music), we do find images of royal power—and then precisely what most do not expect: even the vision of a heavenly throne has no king! That throne is occupied instead by a lamb who was slain, and the invitation issued from that throne is not to a coronation but to a wedding feast.

“The Spirit and the bride,” John writes, “say ‘Come.’
“Let everyone who hears say ‘Come.’
“Let everyone who is thirsty come.
“Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”

Everyone who hears.
Anyone who is thirsty.

I do not hear any conditions, not a single caveat, not one exception in that invitation.

Let everyone who is thirsty come and drink.

Honestly, I believe with all my heart that this simple invitation would change the world. The world is not interested, not one bit, in yet one more king sitting on a royal throne in some distant heaven dividing the world into yet one more time in “haves” and “have-nots.”

What does interest the world, and indeed what the world is desperate to know is whether all the thirsty will ever find drink, and whether anyone who is hungry will ever find food, and whether every single lonely heart will at last know the love that is freely given, with more that enough to spare, like living water in the deserts of a barren land.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is precisely that good news, the proclamation of exactly that Realm of Love—which has no king.

The King of Love for a Realm of Healing

After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the House of Windsor has seemed to me less like a “royal family” and more like a group of related British celebrities. When I think “king” I don’t usually think “Charles.”

“Kingship” always taps my childhood fascination with Arthurian legend, and my ongoing love for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I used to daydream of living as one of Arthur’s knights at his round table, or following Aragorn to this throne in the restored kingdom of Gondor. Those parts of me love the Feast of Christ the King.

The last Sunday after Pentecost—the very last Sunday of the liturgical year—is often celebrated with the image of Christ as “king,” an image for Jesus that has deep roots in Christian traditions even if the liturgical feast itself is mostly modern.

The lectionary continues its apocalyptic tenor for this feast and with some startling biblical texts, like the one from the Hebrew prophet Daniel (7:9-14), which includes a vision of the One who will come with the “clouds of heaven,” and who is given dominion and glory and kingship. Those heavenly clouds appear again in a vision from the Revelation to John (1:4-8), a vision of One whose coming every eye will see, and who is the ruler of all the kings of earth.

These are certainly the kinds of texts we might expect for a celebration of royal power. But something a bit deeper seems to be lingering beneath these splashy images of kingship. There’s an ancient desire percolating in all of this, a deep-rooted ache that stretches across both time and culture—the yearning to see wrongs made right, to restore wholeness in a world of fragments: the lost, found; the forgotten, remembered; the wounded, healed.

The Prayer Book collect for yesterday’s feast named that desire. In a world divided and enslaved by sin, that prayer affirms God’s will to restore all things.

That notion of “divine restoration” reminds me one of my favorite Greek words: apokatastasis. I actually devoted an entire qualifying exam in my doctoral program to that one word, and to the ongoing role it has played in Christian traditions—and that word has had quite a colorful career indeed.

The word itself appears only once in the Bible, in the Acts of the Apostles (3:21). Peter is preaching in Jerusalem about the resurrection of Jesus, the crucified but risen Lord who will come again, he says, at the time of “universal restoration.” That’s usually how apokatastasis is translated, and it captured the imagination of Origen, a second-century Greek theologian.

Origen argued that God will one day bring all beings back to their source, where they will be restored to union with God—not only all people but even the Devil and all his fallen angels! That is the day when God will be “all in all,” as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians.

That’s a startling declaration: God will not cease loving God’s creation, not ever, and God shall not fail in uniting all things in a gloriously divine communion of love—every single being, no exceptions.

Apokatastasis is in that sense not only startling but also apocalyptic—which is to say, a deeply revelatory word. The Feast of Christ the “King” reveals the underlying meaning of the whole liturgical year, that grand arc from Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, through Lent, Easter, and Pentecost—all of it reveals the unwavering purpose of God to restore, renew, and heal with love.

As I do every week, I spent some time searching online for visual images that might capture these complex desires and hopes. After entering the words “restore all things” in the Google search engine, images began popping up of the painstaking process involved when museums try to restore old paintings.

I actually find such work both fascinating and beautiful, but those images made me realize just how precarious the notion of restoration really is, maybe even spiritually dangerous: Was there ever a time when all peoples were unified? Can any of us name a distinct moment in the past when everyone flourished? Are we really pining for a perfect world that we somehow lost long ago and now we want to recover and restore it?

No—that’s going backward; we need to travel forward. The disciples asked the risen Jesus about this very thing in the first chapter of Acts (1:6): Is now the time you will restore the kingdom to Israel?

No—resurrection does not return to how things were but moves forward to God’s own vision of how they should be.

As I sorted through the online search result (without much to inspire me), I decided to use one of my favorite icons, one that depicts Jesus harrowing Hell between Good Friday and Easter morning. Part of what I love about that image is the effort Jesus seems to be making to yank Adam and Eve out of their tombs on that day. The past matters in this dramatic moment, and nothing and no one is left behind. But the momentum here is definitely forward, not backward.

The Harrowing of Hell (apse in the Chora Church, Istanbul)

Adam and Eve signal that momentum for us in their apparent reluctance, as if they are thoroughly disoriented by the whole prospect of an Easter Jesus. This is not a moment of restoration, of returning to a known past—Jesus is not putting them back in the Garden of Eden; he’s raising them to new life.

That’s the paradox of all theological symbols—they are rooted in the known to help us imagine and anticipate the unknown.

The familiar, well-known symbol of Christ as “King” must point beyond what we now know of kingship and toward something new. And that’s why it’s so important that the lectionary included a poignant moment for yesterday’s feast from John’s account of the Gospel (18:33-37).

This moment in John is not one of splashy glory or heavenly pyrotechnics. To the contrary, Jesus is standing before the Roman Governor Pilate, a vignette that disrupts our usual assumptions about royal power.

“King of Glory: By Water and by Blood,” Carol Grace Bomer

The contrast between these two figures could not be more stark—Pilate robed in imperial power; Jesus with no power at all over his own fate and on trial for his life.

Pilate wants to know if Jesus is a king.

“My Kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus replies.

While some have taken this response to mean that Jesus is concerned only with some far-off heavenly realm that has nothing to do with Earth, that’s not the substance of John’s Gospel at all. “For God so loved the world,” John famously wrote, not to condemn it but to save it.

Moreover, the encounter with Pilate is but the culmination of a whole series of encounters in John, moments of contrasting the power of “this world” to destroy Earth and the power of God to heal and renew Earth.

“My Kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus says, “if it were, my followers would fight.”

Heavenly power on earth will never be established with weapons and violence but only with the truth. This is why I was born, Jesus says, this is why I have come, to “testify to the truth.”

In a world of coercive deceptions and brutal violence, the truth of the Gospel is just this: only and nothing else but love will save us.

Love is not weak.

Love is not merely sentiment or a cozy feeling.

Love is not a last-ditch, stop-gap measure by liberal snowflakes when otherwise real-world practical strategies fail.

Love is brave, risking all for what matters most, willing to lose everything to gain what cannot be lost.

Love is fierce and strong—stronger than even death.

Love incarnate stood before Pilate.

And so we Christians celebrate that embodied moment of “known royalty” for a realm still unimaginable. Most of us do so at the Eucharistic Table—where we move from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the strange, from memory to hope.

At the Table, we try as best we can to put Gospel truth into practice, bearing witness to a world where all welcome, no one is forgotten, and everyone is healed by love—everyone, no exceptions.

Leave No Goat Behind

Why does someone’s triumph nearly always require someone else’s demise?

This is of course the classic “zero-sum game” dilemma—you can’t win unless I lose. When resources appear limited, the more I have means others have less.

A more pointed version of this query has been percolating in my thoughts as the liturgical year draws to a close: must we read the parables of Jesus as if they were all just religious versions of a divine zero-sum game?

The last three parables in Matthew’s account of the Gospel are classic examples of this quandary. Two weeks ago, the lectionary gave us the story about ten young women; five had enough oil for their torches, which means the other five had none (25:1-13). The next week, we heard about the harsh master’s servants; the one who had more than enough was given even more, which means the one with very little had even that taken away (25:14-30).

Modern Western society trains all of us in a culture of zero-sum gaming. There must be losers in order to have any winners; we can’t be insiders if there aren’t any outsiders; there can’t be any sheep without goats—as many of us heard from Matthew’s Jesus just yesterday (25:31-46).

But is this really the only way to read our sacred texts? Where have our cultural assumptions interfered with our spiritual insights?

These aren’t just idle queries; it’s high time the Church stopped reading the parables of Jesus in ways that create whole classes of excluded, despised, and even damned creatures of God.

The stakes are extraordinarily high here. We are living dangerous zero-sum games every single day on a global scale with other human beings, with other species, and with Earth’s own precious ecosystems—and these divisive and violent tendencies are often justified by citing parables that appear to favor sheep (all of us good people) over goats (all the others).

We must and we can read sacred texts differently, for the thriving of all and not just for some. This is what I struggle with at this very time of year, as our liturgical year comes to a close and many churches (including my own) celebrate “Christ the King” Sunday, usually with triumphal images of divine judgment. Enough of that—it’s time get real about whatever kind of “king” this Christ is.

Here’s where I start, with the word judgment itself. As even a cursory skimming of the daily news clearly shows, the world is a tangled mess of complexities that often prevent us from seeing things clearly and directly. This hateful, violent mess needs to be sorted out.

And that’s the phrase I keep returning to in all the stories about divine judgment: the need to sort things out, just like sorting sheep from goats. Rather than leaping ahead to the dramatic image of punishment at the end of Matthew’s parable about those poor goats, the focus belongs first on what this parable is mostly about: seeing clearly, and discerning rightly, which is what it means to judge well.

Two things about this particular parable occur to me as helpful for thinking differently about judgment. First, Matthew’s Jesus is not interested in checklists. This does not sound at first like good news to me—I love checklists; I’m a post-it note junkie and I love checking items off my “to-do list.”

But that’s not what this parable is about. Just as Matthew keeps insisting throughout his account of the Gospel, it’s about a whole way of life, a fundamental approach toward the world and all others in it. When we have adopted and embraced a posture of compassion and love toward the world, we actually don’t need checklists—we simply respond lovingly, and with compassion, and for justice, and we do so as naturally as breathing.

Much to my chagrin, alas, checklists can actually get in the way of this kind of life. I truly sympathize with the so-called “goats” in this parable, the ones who are confronted with what they failed to do and who immediately object that those items were not on their “list”—hold on , Jesus! I wasn’t told that person was sick; I didn’t know they were in prison; no one taught me about the residential boarding schools where Native American children suffered; and I wasn’t even born when slavery happened!

These objections miss the point of Gospel life entirely. We’re not given a rulebook; we’re given a map so that we can travel well together no matter what we encounter on the road. And this, by the way, is exactly why Christian formation and Eucharistic worship are not merely optional but necessary and vital for God’s people—that’s how we cultivate lives of love and justice like muscle-memory.

And that suggests the second feature of this parable that might help in thinking differently about judgment: it’s not about others. Of course, I want to think of myself as a “sheep,” and I have a rather long list of those I’m sure are “goats.”

The modern Western world has inherited a long and painful history of making these distinct divisions almost at every turn: between tribes, nations, languages, races, sexualities, genders—the list of potential “goats” goes on and on.

But it’s probably worthwhile noting that the Greek word in this passage from Matthew is actually “kid-goats,” or babies. First-century shepherds often raised young goats with the sheep and cared for them in exactly the same way.

So the “sorting out” that happens in this parable is not between us and some exotic or foreign them; the sorting out happens among and within us. Divine judgment always begins not only at home but within our own minds and hearts. What needs to be sorted out in my own life? Which component parts of my own thinking need to be reoriented? How do I adjust my own course to stay on the good road?

These are the great questions of divine judgment, which are not about separating ourselves from others but discerning how to become the people God intends.

If typical notions of judgment fall away in Gospel parables, then standard images of kingship dissolve in the light of Christ. These realignments of judgment and kingship belong together. The lectionary also gave us reasons for this in a portion from the Letter to the Ephesians (1:15-23). There we read that the “king” is the one who lived among us as one of us, who suffered and died as one of us, and whom God raised from the dead for us.

This King is not the powerful monarch on high who condescends to step down from a heavenly throne but is instead intermingled with the dust of decay and the ashes of mass death and the dirt of our despair, buried there with us, and also with the promise of God: to rise up, Phoenix-life, with us enfolded in heavenly wings—and not just some of us, but all of us.

So here’s the thing: I have never liked the last three parables from Matthew’s Jesus. I think they mostly perpetuate exactly what has been wrong with institutional Christianity for quite a long time—the religious permission to judge and separate and divide and conquer. Besides all that, I rather like goats.

As I paused right there this past week and reflected on the goodness of goats, it suddenly occurred to me: There’s actually nothing in this parable to suggest that the final scene of punishment is inevitable. I would go further: the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a whole is good and it’s news precisely because God loves goats, too.

So what if Jesus told this parable to inspire us to live in such a way that everyone, absolutely every creature of God is welcomed into everlasting joy and delight?

What if God is calling the Church to exactly this kind of life, to do all that we can, with whatever we have, and for as long as possible to ensure that no goat is left behind?

That’s the road I want to travel toward the only “kingdom” I want to live in with a King truly worthy of our worship.