Today being Christ the King Sunday, and myself never having lived under the authority of an earthly king, I thought I’d better do some research into how my peers think about kings. So I did what contemporary people do, and turned to the Oracle of Mountain View—that being Google—for insight.
I figured that I’d learn a lot just by typing “king” into the search bar. You may be familiar with what happens when we do that. Google—in its algorithmic wisdom—will attempt to complete the phrase based on the most common recent searches. I imagined the search engine might helpfully suggest phrases like “King Arthur” or “king sized bed” or maybe even “King James Bible.” But no. On the day I went investigating the internet, the most commonly searched term beginning with “king” was “King of Wishful Thinking.”
Really. For the record, that’s a song by the British pop duo Go West. Maybe you recall the lyrics “I’ll get over you, I know I will, I’ll pretend my ship’s not sinking. And I’ll tell myself I’m over you, ’cause I’m the king of wishful thinking.” Google really surprised me, because this song was most popular when it was featured on the soundtrack of the 1990 movie “Pretty Woman.” Ancient history, in the timeline of contemporary music culture. But a thoroughly modern conception of kingship.
Kings, in the sense that Biblical peoples would have understood them, are kind of anachronistic to people like us. Likewise shepherds. We are generations—and in most cases continents—removed from the models of security and guidance that those images were intended to convey in the lessons we just heard. In a post-pastoral and post-monarchal society, we’ve mostly romanticized these historic roles. Shepherds are the ones in clean white robes watching over impossibly green hills dotted with fluffy white sheep—we’ll see a lot of that image at Christmastime—and kings are well-dressed A-listers whose exploits grace the pages of European tabloids.
But just because we don’t have firsthand experiences of kings and shepherds—in the way that Jesus understood them—doesn’t mean that we don’t want what the Biblical images suggest they provide. Human beings still want leaders to protect us, fight our battles for us, and keep us safe. We want wise guidance and care, just as the ancient Jewish people did. This kind of kingship is far preferable to wishful thinking. But let me ask you: is this Biblical image of kingship itself wishful thinking?
We might well wonder where that authoritative Biblical king is to be found in these days of dangerous global warfare, ongoing gun violence, and even the tragedy of homelessness in our own cities. Where is the king of good judgment when we see our leaders, our neighbors or even ourselves making bad decisions? I’ll confess that I am a bit uneasy with the image of sorting sheep and goats and sending some to the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Maybe you are too. That judgment imagery feels so very final, and I kind of want the church to be the king of second chances. Or even seventy time seven chances, as Jesus himself counseled Peter. But after having spent a full liturgical year listening to the Gospel of Matthew—written just after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE—I can understand why the stakes seemed so high and the choices so binary in his community.
In this high-risk context, Matthew presented Jesus as making choices. That’s clear in his version of the Beatitudes. The subsistence farmers and fishermen Jesus associated with were the majority of Roman society of the time, located near the bottom of a vast hierarchical ladder, barely above the beggars, prostitutes and lepers whom Jesus ministered to. So when he taught that that the kingdom of heaven was for the meek and poor of spirit, he was expressing God’s particular love for those neglected by the empire. The kingdom that we heard about today—prepared from the foundation of the world—was a definitive inversion of the Roman order: the poor and oppressed would receive their reward, while the powerful would be brought down. In Matthew, we might say that Jesus has been preaching sheep and goats all along. And in this Sunday’s Gospel, he’s finally calling the question.
But the answer isn’t what anyone would have expected, then or now. Here on the precipice of Advent, it’s important to remember that the king of glory—that same king of final judgment—did not come to his people with an army and a throne. Rather, he came in the most vulnerable way possible, as a human baby born in a backwater town located in a rather neglected outpost of the Roman Empire. At his appearing, he did not need us to clean up our act. The Son of Man—who was also the son of a human woman—needed people like us to clean him up. I have a granddaughter in diapers so I am intimately familiar with that process. Jesus came to us needing protection and care for himself. And he commands us to protect and care for the least of these in our own time.
In so many ways, Christ the King Sunday is an entirely weird Christian holiday. And for what it’s worth, it always has been. It was created by Pope Pius XI in 1925 barely 100 years ago, in response to growing secular nationalism in Europe. As a kind of poke in the eye to Fascist and Nazi leaders who were threatened war, the Pope saw fit to remind Christians that God’s model of kingship is a peaceful one. We need that reminder now more than ever, no? So let’s welcome Christ the King with our own fervent prayers for peace in Gaza and the other conflicted places on earth. And welcome God with openness to the peculiarity of God’s coming to us in the power of utter vulnerability.
Shane Patrick—that’s Canon Connolly to us now—sent me a lovely reflection this past Tuesday. It was inspired by the Isaac Watts hymn we opened our worship with today at Trinity, whose refrain includes the verse “Let every creature rise and bring/peculiar honors to our king.” Reminding us that people who would follow so peculiar a king are going to be fairly peculiar ourselves. Yes, Isaac Watts may have been thinking about “peculiar” in the 19th century sense of unique or individual, but I think the hymn is equally true if we think of what we offer to Jesus as odd or even downright weird. Practices like Sabbath keeping, tithing, prayer, Bible study, care for the poor and seeking reconciliation in a bellicose world.
These ancient spiritual habits can seem anachronistic, idiosyncratic, or just plain weird in our time. But they are the peculiar honors Christians have always offered to our most peculiar king, and I know that many of you do them regularly. We do these things because they are right and because they make God’s world a better place for everyone. I’d even go so far as to say that a world where we do not care for the least among us is already punishment: for those who suffer, but frankly for the souls of any who have the capacity to alleviate suffering, but choose not to. But the Biblical king that Jesus modeled is not one who exercises power coercively, and we don’t offer him our gifts in order to earn his favor or to avoid his wrath.
We serve our God in thanksgiving, because grace is his most peculiar gift to use. Unearned, unasked for, and—if we are honest—barely understood. But on this Thanksgiving weekend, it bears mentioning that—while our king may have come without military honors—he did (and does) come with unlimited love and forgiveness. This isn’t wishful thinking; this is actually the clearest of Biblical thinking. So my dear sheep, avail yourself of God’s abundant love and mercy. And then go offer this peculiar gift to a goat who needs to hear good news.
