Christ the King

St Mary’s Barnes, 8 am

Luke 23.33-43; Colossians 1.11-20

The theme for this Sunday is Christ the King. Interestingly this is a modern innovation, and encouragingly, one which is shared by many mainline churches, including Roman Catholics.

Today’s Gospel pictures the image in a way which is at once provocative and ironic. Jesus is on the cross and above him are written the words ‘This is the King of the Jews’. What could be more absurd or provocative. This abject, condemned nobody a King? But what for an early believer could be more ironical? For Luke who wrote the Gospel and those who read it deeply believed what those words proclaimed, believed indeed that he was not just King of the Jews but King of the Cosmos. So it is that we have todays amazing wonderful passage from the letter to the Colossians. Amazing that within a few decades someone could write of this victim of Roman power that he was ‘the image of the invisible God’ and that ‘ all things were created by him, and for him…the first born from the dead; that in all things he might have the pre-eminence.’

Someone recently sent me a link to a lecture by Tom Holland on why he has become a Christian.[1] He said that when he was a child he loved dinosaurs because they were so large. And when he grew up he still loved large powerful things and was drawn to write his best selling books on Roman imperial power. Then he came up against this totally humiliated, excruciatingly tortured figure and how Paul was totally gripped by him and how it turned upside down all that we normally think of as great and powerful.

So it is that when we think of Christ as King we think of his just and gentle rule, his servant kingship, and of the ultimate triumph of suffering love over the forces of darkness and chaos.

When we look at the world today with its wars, crimes and cruelties it is difficult to think that Christ is really King of all this turmoil. Clearly his Kingship is not yet fully manifest. So it is that daily we pray ‘Your kingdom Come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. But what we know as Christians is that we are already subjects of that kingdom. We already live in the divine milieu. As the epistle put it ‘God has brought us into the Kingdom of his dear Son.’ So it is that we pray not just ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven but your will be done in me and through me, done in the spirit and after the pattern of Christ’s love for us.