Christus Rex

May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Today is the feast of Christ the King. The last day of the church’s calendar before we move onto Advent and looking forward to the coming of Christ. It is the high point of the Church’s year before we start again from the beginning, and so I think it’s right to see this feast day as primarily about celebration. Christ is our king! Long live the King! Long live the true King of all the world!

We get a slight reflection of this kingship, a small taste of this, a small idea of what true royal celebration is like when we have a coronation. And one of the most joyous I have come across is an account by a historian of the coronation of George III. The coronation apparently mixed splendour with farce. Someone lost the Sword of State, the Dean nearly dropped the Crown, and the King often had to call out during the coronation to set matters right. There had been no dress rehearsal, and someone had forgotten to provide the King and Queen with any chairs to sit on. The service took six hours. “The whole was confusion, irregularity and disorder”, said one writer—including people noisily eating their picnics during the solemn moments. How wonderful! I think. But also how gloriously imperfect!

Sadly human rulers and human kings are not perfect. Earthly kingship is only a pale shadow of the real thing. Earthly kings and rulers let us down. They make mistakes. They sometimes cause harm.

But we are lucky, as Christians. As Christians, we are unlike anyone else. Although we may outwardly seem the same as others, and even our personalities may not be much different from *atheists*, yet we have the surety, the certainty, the rock deep down on which our soul is founded, that Jesus is Lord, Jesus is King—we get to say that about our God, the God who lovingly created us and all that is.

Now the people of Israel, you may remember, when they didn’t have a king, asked the prophet Samuel for God to give them a king to rule over them, and Saul became the king of Israel. The theologian Gregory Boyd notes here that “By putting trust in a human ruler the people of Israel are rejecting God as a ruler. We either find our security in God as our king or we find our security in some kind of human rulership. It is a sin of insecurity in not trusting God as king, but instead finding other sources of protection. It is based on a mistrust of God as King. [We should put our trust first and foremost in God, and then conditionally in human rulers.] We might at times approve of a particular person or policy in government as good for society, but as Jesus’ followers we aren’t to place any hope or trust in any government.” As Christians our security is in trusting God, and that is a surer foundation than anything we might cling to in this world.

If you place your life into God’s hands, and cast all your anxieties on God, because God cares for you, then your life will be founded on the one true source of life, real life.

We have the immeasurable grace to be called citizens of the kingdom of God, but it is true nonetheless that we still have to navigate living in the kingdom of this world, and that is the hard task before us. To navigate living in this world while being called to live as citizens of the next… Until the time when Jesus will return in power to renew the heaven and the earth.

For this is another reason why we can rejoice when no one else can… The world is very evil, and wars and insurrections seem if anything to be increasing. But Jesus will return. Yes Putin is mad, and Trump is Trump, but the Son of Man will come with the clouds, with power and great glory, and he will come to judge the earth; the bringer of peace will come, and we can rejoice at the return of Christ the king.

Holy Communion is a foretaste of that Messianic banquet, and we are then sent out into the world to be the body of Christ, the royal people of Christ the King. And we get to “proclaim the might acts of God who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.”

Amen.

The Rev’d Michael Aylmer, St Mary Magdalene Enfield, 24/11/24