Reign of Christ
It’s always weird to me when we have these special Sundays in the liturgical calendar, like Reign of Christ Sunday, and the narrative skips way ahead. I think it kinda spoils the mood for the whole season to jump to the part of the gospels when Jesus is actively suffering and dying. Isn’t this week Thanksgiving? Aren’t we getting ready for Christmas? Would it be too much to ask to get a family-friendly scripture about giving thanks or the importance of seeing your parents around the holidays? Rather than a story of Jesus going to a feast or a party, we’re reminded of his death, just as we’re starting to prepare for his birth. As much of a bummer as this can be, I want us to take the time to really encounter this story, and to hear it apart from the rest of the passion story—especially since I know that not all of us attend the Good Friday services when we would usually hear this part of the story. When I was a ministry intern at the Saratoga Springs United Methodist Church, the Christian Education Director there was never shy about the fact that she skipped Good Friday each year because she “doesn’t do death.” I suspect she’s not alone in feeling that way, though I think you miss some important context if you just go right from Palm Sunday to Easter.
Besides taking the opportunity to read the story of the crucifixion on a Sunday rather than a Friday, I also want to take a moment on this Reign of Christ Sunday to make the claim that trying to remove any conversation of politics from the gospel, doesn’t leave you with very much gospel. The statement that Christ is Lord is a political position. The titles we gladly use for him such as King of Kings, Prince of Peace, and Lord of Lords are all political titles. In fact, the Greek word that is translated as “lord” in the New Testament, is kyrios, which can refer to heads of households, minor nobles, and also the emperor of Rome, who was said to be the highest of lords, the greatest kyrios. If we take the position that Jesus is Lord of Lords, then we are saying that no one else is, and that Jesus is above the other powers and principalities of our world, as they exist. A kingdom is a political structure, and a reign is a political administration. The gospel message, and this is made abundantly clear throughout the season of Advent, is about upending the ways in which power is currently exercised and distributed. Any talk of a New Heaven and a New Earth, any rhetoric about filling the hungry and sending the rich away empty, any apocalyptic vision of what the Kingdom will look like one day—those are all political conversations.
So, while we are not called to uphold partisan power structures, we are called to engage in conversations about how power is structured. We’re called to examine critically and speak openly about who holds power, how power is being exercised in our communities and our country, and whether our power structures reflect the vision that God has for the Kingdom. And that’s the key to having conversations about politics as people of faith: keeping those Kingdom dreams at the forefront of our minds.
The Kingdom dream that’s presented to us in this gospel passage might seem more like a nightmare. It might seem a little doom and gloom, but I promise that there’s hope in there, too. That hope lies in a couple of places in which the gospel writer offers glimpses into what the Kingdom reality might look like. The first of these comes when the guard mockingly says to Jesus “if you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” For many of us, this might sound kind of reasonable. At this point in his life, Jesus has healed the sick, multiplied food, cast out demons, and even brought a man back from the dead. Would it really be so unreasonable to think that he could get himself out of this bind? For the guard, it only seemed right that anyone, but especially a person in a position of power, would only act in their own self-interest. Customary power, here, would be exercised through self-preservation. Power would be demonstrated by the ability to save oneself, to protect one’s own body. Because power, in Jesus’ day and in ours, means having control over the bodies of others. Rather than practice self-preservation, Jesus continues to practice solidarity, being incarcerated with those called criminals, and being executed alongside those found guilty of capital offenses.
Jesus’ relationship with his fellow victims of the death penalty tells us more about the Reign of Christ than just that it rejects self-preservation in favor of radical solidarity, though. It demonstrates that the Reign of Christ is about connection and community, especially in the darkest of times. The theologian Karl Barth used to preach regularly in a prison in Basel, Switzerland. One Good Friday, he was preaching from this text and described the three men crucified together at the first Christian community. The two other men “were certainly no believing converts, no saints,” Barth said. But even so, they were bound to Christ out of solidarity, out of a shared experience of incarceration, suffering, and execution. The Good Community, the vision that God has for us, is just that—a community. It’s not about power over, it’s not about the control of any body other than our own. It’s about connection. It’s about feeling for one another, allowing ourselves to be impacted by the suffering and the wholeness of others. In recognizing this connection and allowing it to impact us, the Kingdom where Christ is Lord becomes a place where none hunger, where all are clothed, and no one goes without shelter. It is a place where the Image of God present in Creation is what binds us together—not creed or dogma. That is where Christ leads us, if we are willing to follow.
All too often, this is not the model of leadership we see and experience in our communities. We hear Jeremiah’s cries of “woe” to the shepherds who divide their flocks, and it’s not difficult to see where those shepherds still reign today. There are those who would actively split up the flock, who thrive on division, on polarization, on deportation. Rhetoric of division, rejections of difference, overt quests for homogeneity in race, religion, sexual orientation, and political ideology split the flock and make it more difficult to seek out the reign of solidarity, and the Good Community that feels the joy and sorrow of others. There are those in power, those with authority, who actively seek to split up communities. But there are also those who passively allow the flock to wander, who have not attended to the flock. It becomes a shared responsibility to bring the flock together, to embrace connection and reject division, isolation, and individualism. The Kingdom of God where Christ is Lord is a community. It is a place of humility and solidarity, that lives out the South African concept of Ubuntu—I am because you are. A community that recognizes our common needs, and our common dreams. This is our call, to seek out the Good Community, to build a space in which Christ’s reign might become apparent, and where we can live out our call to be Christ’s people—citizens of no Kingdom but God’s.
This is the message of Advent, after all. It is a message of death—of the passing away of what once was. It is a message of suffering—of feeling the pain, the fear, the despair of others. It is a message of hope—an overturning of the way things are now, and the building of something new in their place. May this be the message that guides us through this season. May we seek out the Good Community together. May we hold one another accountable in love. May we live as Christ’s people above all else, in all that we do. Let our waiting commence. Amen.