Sunday Worship 23 November | Lectionary Proper 29: Christ the King

Colossians 1:9-20 

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

The letter we have heard from this morning was written to the church in Colossae, a cosmopolitan city in modern day Turkey, with a population of Greeks, Middle Eastern Jews and Phrygians. This mix of cultures seems to have led to the development of a syncretistic view of Christianity, in which Christ was seen as one of many emanations of the divine, and holiness was thought to be achieved through rigorous discipline. There is much to be gained from interacting with other cultures and faith traditions, but for every religion there is a core that must remain or it becomes something else, and Paul seems to have been concerned that this core was being weakened in Colossae. It is clear throughout the epistles that the sovereignty of Christ and the sufficiency of grace were the heart of what Paul understood to be the gospel, and we see him emphasise those themes in the opening of this letter.

He begins with the sufficiency of grace, although that is not the language he uses here. He speaks instead of being rescued by God, finding redemption in Christ, and being given wisdom through the Spirit. He expects to see a practical outworking of these truths in the lives of believers - he speaks of bearing good fruit, showing endurance and giving thanks - but he wants his readers to see that these are responses to grace not prerequisites for it. He is engaging here with a difficult tension which we see the early church wrestle with throughout the New Testament, with different writers correcting tendencies to overbalance in one direction or another. While Paul wrote to communities that seemed to think they needed to earn their salvation, and so emphasised that grace came through Christ, James seems to have encountered believers who were so certain that it was all God’s doing that they had become complacent about their own actions, and so reminded them that faith without works is dead. Both things are true

There has been a tendency to think that the early church wrestled with this tension because it was new, to assume that Judaism teaches that grace is earned through the law, and the idea that grace could simply be given is distinct to Christianity, but that may not be entirely fair. Obedience to the law has always been important to Judaism, but that itself can be understood as a response to grace, a practical outworking of the experience of God’s goodness. In every covenant in the Hebrew scriptures, it is God who acts first. Grace has always been the first move, and a life worthy of that grace has always been the proper response.

The word life is really important here, because so often we invert our understanding of inheritance when it comes to spiritual matters, as if we only inherit the promise of God when we die, when in fact Paul chooses the language of inheritance precisely because it came to us when Jesus died. The fullness of God’s promise will be revealed in eternity, but it is already ours to start taking hold of here and now. Faith is not an insurance policy for the hereafter, but the power to transform us and remake the world. We are already welcomed into the kingdom, so let’s live like it.

We call it the kingdom because Christ is king, and so here we come to the sovereignty of Christ and the second part of our passage. This is sometimes known as the hymn to Christ, and there’s something about the structure and the rhythm of it that feels very well rehearsed, so that many scholars believe Paul was quoting or reworking an existing piece of liturgy, perhaps one of the earliest creeds of the church. It makes sense that this is where Christian theology and doctrine should begin, because Jesus is the starting point for Christianity, but as a fulfilment of rather than a departure from what came before, and this hymn reflects that as it puts Christ above all things while clearly maintaining monotheism. As Catholic theologian Ralph Martin puts it, “he is not a copy or likeness of God but the ‘projection’ of God on the canvas of our humanity and the embodiment of the divine in the world of men and women”. What a great phrase to take with us into Christmas as we celebrate the moment of incarnation.

I recently heard someone suggest that the Hebrew Scriptures can be read as a series of thought experiments about the nature of God. If God is like this, how then shall we live? So let’s ask ourselves a question. If Christ is king, how then shall we live? It all rather depends on what kind of king Jesus is and is not. I do feel some discomfort with words like supremacy, because the strongest association that word has for me is white supremacy, which has long co-opted Christian language and imagery to try and legitimise itself, but that is not the kind of supremacy that Jesus has. In the same way, I flinch slightly at the line in our last hymn about wreaths of empire meeting upon his brow, because empire invokes ideas of domination and destruction, but again that is not what Jesus is about.

Kings rule from their thrones, descending occasionally to grace the people with a royal visit, dressed in their finery and surrounded by their guards. Jesus became fully incarnate as one of us, experiencing the unfiltered reality of our everyday life and death. Kings have traditionally claimed to rule by divine right, only appealing to their subjects to preserve their own power. Jesus certainly has divine right but he also has a manifesto, which is for the benefit of all. We heard echoes of it in our prayer earlier, which quoted from the Beatitudes. 

Jesus is a king who rules in such a way that blessed are the poor in spirit and those who mourn and the meek and those who hunger for righteousness and the merciful and the poor in heart and the peacemakers and those who are persecuted. Jesus is a very different kind of king, and his kingdom turns everything we think we know about power and privilege on its head. That then is how we live, by the rules of this upside down kingdom, knowing we serve a king who is over all things for all time, and yet also in this life with us.

As we do that, we need to take care that we understand what it means to be a king by looking to Jesus, instead of letting what we see of kings distort our understanding of Christ. Dangerous things happen when we slip into the second way of thinking, as Christianity can then be twisted to support all sorts of kings who bear no resemblance to Christ. Kings of politics and business and entertainment and religion who we follow not just to our own detriment, but to the harm of the vulnerable they use to bolster their power and feed their appetites. 

Today is known in some parts of the church as Christ the King Sunday, an observance founded by Pope Pius XI in 1925, when the memory of the nationalism that fuelled the First World War was still fresh, and the fascism that would lead to the Second World War was beginning to rise. Such observances may not be common in our own tradition, but now feels like a good moment to take note of this one. Because just as for the early church ‘Jesus is Lord’ meant ‘Caesar is not’, so ‘Christ is King’ means ‘these other fools are not’. I’m not suggesting we all need to become separatists or anarchists, as tempting as those options seem at times, but as nationalist and fascist movements and governments are on the rise again, we need to be firm in who we acknowledge as king, so that we can hold these other fools to account.