The Overriding Theme '06

Texts: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Revelation 1:4-8; John 18:33-37

Today we come to the end of another liturgical year; and like any end-of-year occasion it gives us an opportunity to do two things – to reflect on what has been and to consider what is to come. We have spent the last year, as we spend every liturgical year, rehearsing our great Christian story. So today we can both sum up the story so far, and look ahead to the continuing of the story into the future, and to the eventual end of the story.

Our readings have a bias towards the latter, and I’ll say something about that in a moment. But we get opportunities to look ahead in the next few weeks during the Season of Advent, so my preference is largely to think of this day as Summing-up Sunday. What have we discovered over the last 12 months about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Good News, as we should call it, particularly as we head towards Christmas?

To help me answer that question for myself, I thought it would be a good idea to go back through the sermons I have preached during the last year. After all, I can’t think of any other reason for keeping them. I wondered if there was any particular topic that would emerge from all those words, and I found there was. I found that one way of understanding the sweep of God’s story as we have it to date is as a battle between God’s desire to bring all things back into unity, and our human desire to frustrate that plan at every turn. And there, I think, is the starting-point for thinking about the significance of the fact that the Church now suggests that the last Sunday of our year be celebrated as the Feast of Christ the King.

There are many Christians today who struggle with this sort of terminology. Some object on grounds of gender. “King” is a masculine word, they argue, and therefore exclusive. Others object on more political grounds. Our tendency is to cringe a bit at royal terminology – it’s a bit undemocratic for our taste. There are many who refuse to use the term “ kingdom of God ” for these sorts of reasons, preferring instead something like “realm of God”.

And, then, of course, there are those who argue that to refer to Jesus as King of Kings, or something of that kind, smacks of Christian imperialism – Crusader language: it won’t do in a world of plurality. Jesus might be King of the Christians, but he can’t be King of the Jews, Muslims, and all the others.

What are we to make of all this? My view is that we need to be careful that in seeking to avoid giving offence, we cease to give Christ his due. We are, after all, custodians and proclaimers of the Christian story, and that story is essentially about how God has chosen to be, and how God has chosen to reveal himself to humanity. It is either true, or it is untrue, that God came among us incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. It is either true, or it is untrue, that God is Trinity, one God in Three Persons. It is either true or untrue that there is only one God, that God is the creator of all things, and that God will one day draw all things back to himself in perfect unity. That is the story we have to tell. It is either true or untrue. And it matters greatly – the future of humanity – in fact, the future of all things – depends on it.

To begin at the beginning, there is a sense in which we shouldn’t start with Genesis. We should start with Jewish history as it actually happened, not as it was later written down and tidied up as history always is. It is quite clear that before there was a Jewish people, there were independent clans, not much more than large family groups, roaming around, clashing with one another, and trying to defend their own interests against one another.

The clans grew into tribes; and we don’t need reminding that sometimes tribes can disagree with each other quite fiercely. But over the centuries these tribes came together to form one people. And one of the unifying elements of this was undoubtedly the growing recognition that their clan and tribal gods were actually one and the same God. Scholars claim that the form in which we now have the great sagas of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, grew out of a desire to unite their different stories so that all the tribes could buy into the one narrative. Hence the various duplications we find in the texts today.

In other words, a key requirement for the tribes of Israel to become one people was to recognise that there is only one God among them. The most famous text in Judaism, the Shema, thus insists that the Lord your God is One Lord. The unity of the people is founded on the unity of faith in one God.

The next historical step was to go beyond the people of Israel , but that, too, took a long time. For centuries, Israel assumed that Yahweh was their God, and all the other peoples of the earth had their own gods. But gradually the realisation came, especially through the great prophet, Isaiah, that this was not right. That, in fact, there is no other God besides Yahweh.

And that, of course, raised an interesting question. If there was no other God besides Yahweh, did that mean that the other peoples of the earth had no god, or did it mean that Yahweh was the God of all the earth? The latter view came to prevail; but the Jewish people did not then draw the obvious conclusion from their own history. If they are one people instead of twelve independent tribes because they all worship the same God, then surely it must follow that if all the peoples of the earth worship the same God, we are all one people!

In one sense, of course, the Jewish understanding came remarkably close to that view. Their belief was that there were essentially two types of people, themselves as Jews and all others as Gentiles; and their theology was based on the fact that Yahweh was the God of the Gentiles as well as the Jews, but that he would deal with them differently. By the time of Jesus, there was quite widespread understanding that God would restore and redeem Israel first, and then there would be a great ingathering of Gentiles into the New Israel.

The Christian revelation took this understanding to its logical conclusion. In Christ, said St Paul , there is no such thing as Jew and Gentile; the two have been made one. The challenge for all of us ever since has been to get our heads around this astonishing truth, to accept it, and to live it out in our daily lives. We rebel against it in so many ways. We value our particularities. For some reason it is not good enough for us to be human beings. We divide ourselves by gender, by nationality, by faith, by language, by geographic boundaries, by anything else we can think of.

We laugh at Aucklanders, famously unable to agree with one another about anything. But listen to the arguments about electricity generation, and you will hear some good South Islanders complaining bitterly that our power is only going to be stolen by those on the North Island, as though that is some terrible alien place near the artic circle inhabited by hobbits or other non-human creatures.

Look at today’s gospel reading and there it all is in this short tense encounter between Pilate and Jesus. Pilate can’t get past the idea that Jesus is a Jew and he is not, even though both of them agree that it is the Jewish leaders who are bringing the charges. And if we follow the dialogue carefully we will notice that Pilate himself changes his ground a bit. First he asks Jesus, Are you the king of the Jews? And when Jesus teases him by asking whose idea that is, Pilate snorts: Am I a Jew?…It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me.

But after Jesus has spoken of his kingdom being from another place, Pilate says, You are a king, then!

And there’s the nub of the thing. If Jesus is a king, is he king of the Jews or is he king? Is he king of the Christians or is he king? The issue is not one of language or diplomacy. The issue is one of theology. To claim that Jesus is king without qualification of any kind is to claim that he is God. That is our story.

And to claim that there is only one King is to claim that there is only one human race – one humanity. That, too, is our story – whether we are talking about sports stadia, power generation or the peace of the world.