This Sunday is the feast of Christ the King. During the time of his ministry recorded in the Gospels Jesus’ central proclamation was the call to enter the Kingdom of God. The term ‘Kingdom of God’ is a rather enigmatic expression, it sounds like a place that one can visit, a place like the United Kingdom, it isn’t, the Kingdom of God is not a place that one can visit; The call to enter the Kingdom of God is an invitation to a way of living. To understand it we have to go back into Israel’s history. In the first book of Samuel we witness a nation that unlike other nations does not have a king. The people go to Samuel and ask him to give them a king. Samuel is rather put out by this but when he complains to God, ‘the LORD told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king’.. (1 Samuel 8:7)
Israel was not meant to have a King, the Lord the God of Israel was to be their king.
This is part of the background to the proclamation of the Kingdom of God in the teaching Jesus, he is calling the people back to the Kingly rule, that is the sovereignty of God. Two things arise from that.
The first is this, if you have ever wondered why Jesus was crucified, then look no further than his proclamation of the Kingdom of God. In a land occupied by the Roman Empire this is a deeply subversive message. Jesus is saying that the true King is not Caesar but the Lord, the God of Israel. Moreover Jesus is the Christ, meaning the Messiah, meaning the one who is anointed by God to establish God’s Kingly rule. No wonder the Romans wanted to do away with him.
The second thing is that if we accept the Kingship of God, we have accepted God’s sovereignty over everything in our lives. Our way of life becomes wholly orientated towards God and God’s will for us. Anything that I think of as mine is already something that belongs to God.
‘The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it’. (Psalm 24 v1).
All that we consider be ours is actually held on trust, it has been lent to us but is not ours. But the proclamation of the Kingdom of God goes further even than that; In Luke’s Gospel we find Jesus beginning his ministry by declaring the year of Jubilee. In the synagogue of his home village, Jesus, quoting from the prophet Isaiah, said that’
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour[that is Jubilee].” (Luke 4 v 18-19)
Every 50 years in Israel there was supposed to have been a redistribution of the wealth in the land; Debts were to be cancelled, people who had sold themselves into slavery were to be released, and all the land that had been sold because people had fallen on hard times was to be returned to the original holders. Needless to say this had never happened. It became the expectation that when the Messiah came, he would declare the year of Jubilee.
After this announcement Jesus experienced his first rejection, and what has been rejected was the sovereignty of God, because this was God’s declared will.
When a rich young man came to Jesus he asked ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus told him to keep the commandments, and following that he said to him “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Mark 10:21)
He went away sad, unable to do this. And Jesus responded by saying
‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’… (Mark 10:25)
The Kingdom or ‘sovereignty of God [is] that time and place in which there are no rich and poor. By definition, then, the rich cannot enter – at least not with their wealth intact. Reparation is the only way in. … Jesus not only insists that redistributive justice is possible, he implies that without it we cannot speak of the sovereignty [Kingdom] of God…’ (Ched Myers – Say to this Mountain, Mark’s story of Discipleship, 127).
This is why Jesus’ message is so often rejected, anyone hearing it, myself included, will find this very challenging, and yet there it is, this is the king whose kingship we proclaim and try to accept in our lives.
One final thing, and this is very important, this is not about God having power, and very importantly, it is not about any human being claiming to have that power. Quite the opposite, the God and King who comes to us in Jesus is one who;
‘though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross’. (Philippians 2.6-8)
This is a God who has emptied himself of all that grasping and taking and powerful. “God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us”. (Dietrich Bonheoffer – Letters and Papers from Prison).
This is not a powerful King seeking to dominate us, but rather this a powerless servant King inviting us to join him among the powerless.
This is the King whom we proclaim on the feast of Christ the King.
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