This Sunday, the last before Advent, is labelled in the Common Worship Lectionary as Christ the King. It calls us to reflect on what the kingship of Jesus is all about; what it means, in other words, to confess Christ as Lord. That’s important, for at times in the past Christians have indulged in an unhealthy triumphalism: a belief that one day we ourselves shall lord it over others. Nothing could be further from the picture of Jesus and his reign that emerges from the Gospels, as the following meditation, taken from my 2009 book A Most Amazing Man (Year C) and found also in the non-Lectionary version of that title, A Man Like No Other 1, makes clear.
Christ the King
Luke 23:33–43
The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ Luke 23:36, 37
Meditation of one of the soldiers who crucified Jesus
What was all that king stuff about?
He didn’t look very regal to me,
stuck up there on the cross,
a crown of thorns thrust on his head.
Yet there it was,
writ large above him:
‘This is the king of the Jews’.
A sick joke, we decided,
Pilate’s way of showing that troublesome people just who was boss.
And good thing too,
for they were always up to something,
determined to hassle us if they could.
Yet this time, strangely, they were jeering him,
not us,
cursing and shouting insults at that Jesus fellow
worse even than ours.
Whatever throne he laid claim to,
they didn’t recognise it,
all of them apparently, save the merest handful,
hungry to see him go.
So we joined in the fun,
delighted for once to have the mob on our side.
Only, now, I wish we hadn’t,
for there was something strange in the way he hung there,
the way he suffered and died.
None of your usual anger or self-pity.
No cries for mercy or oaths of vengeance.
Just an uncanny, awesome dignity
even as he shuddered in agony . . .
and when he spoke,
it was with words of forgiveness,
love,
almost, it seemed, a hint of triumph,
as though, despite us having put him there,
he was in control.
He’d saved others, so some said –
why didn’t he save himself?
But then, what would a true king have put first:
his throne,
or his subjects?
It made me wonder, I don’t mind admitting it –
perhaps, after all, he was a king.
Quite how, I can’t fathom,
but I tell you what,
if it was meant as a joke calling him ‘King of the Jews’,
it badly backfired that day,
for in some strange, but unmistakable way,
he had the last laugh.
Prayer
Lord of lords and King of kings,
teach us to honour you
through living by the values of your kingdom:
to serve you through serving,
love you through loving,
give to you through giving.
Come into our hearts,
our lives,
our world,
and rule among us.
Amen.