Solemnity of Christ the King

My sermon for last Sunday, the feast of Christ the King:

The prayers and readings for today's feast highlight some of the aspects of Jesus' identity which go back to the first communities of Christians and the conclusions they drew about Jesus: his identity as the long-awaited Saviour and Messiah, as God incarnate and as their shepherd and king.

The gospels describe Christ as a king in several places - never as a tyrant who rules his people with a rod of iron, but as a servant-king or (in the imagery of today's first reading) a "shepherd-king". And, as today's gospel passage informs us, Jesus demonstrates the character of his kingship by eventually laying down his life for his sheep.

If we turn to today's second reading - a rather long, difficult and possibly confusing passage from St Paul's letter to the Colossians - we find Paul doing what he felt he often had to do: tackling erroneous and misleading ideas about Christ and the gospel message which had taken hold of some members of the new Christian community.

Part of the problem, it seems, was that some people found it easy to believe that Jesus was divine, but they couldn't accept that he was really, fully human as well. They thought that the material world and the human state were too squalid and degraded for God to enter into, and that Jesus appeared more or less in the disguise of a human being. (One of their claims, for example, was that as Christ had walked along, during his ministry, he hadn't left any footprints in the ground, because really he was a purely spiritual being, a kind of angel.)

St Paul was anxious to correct these notions, and he paints a picture of a divine Christ, certainly, present from all eternity, active in the creation of the world, higher than any other throne or domination, etc. - but someone who came down from the divine heights to the human level, lived a precarious human life in simplicity and service, and, in the end, submitted to death in order to reconcile the rest of the human race with the Father.

Jesus wasn't pretending to be human, and he wasn't acting a part when he died on the cross. St Paul's teaching is that it was only by being fully human that Jesus was able to represent us all, and open the way for us all to be reconciled with God.

Today the tendency of a lot of people is to go in the opposite direction: not to doubt Jesus' humanity, but to doubt his divinity. There's a way of reading the gospel story, which I think is quite common today, which involves casting Jesus as a good man, a gifted moral teacher, who ran foul of certain vested interests and was put to death for proclaiming inconvenient truths.

All the supernatural elements in the life of Christ, from the Virgin Birth to his Resurrection - and including of course any idea that he was God Incarnate - are regarded as myths. Jesus becomes just a good moral example, one of many in history.

The truth is that neither of these extremes - denying Jesus' humanity or denying his divinity - reflects the all-important experience of the first Christians, or the conclusions they drew based on their experience.

The first Christians, perhaps partly because many of them were so close to, and indeed involved in, the events of the Incarnation and the life and mission of Christ, found it easier than people do today to maintain these two aspects of the truth about Christ: that he was God, that he possessed divine power and majesty; and that he was human - he came into life in the usual way, needed other people to look after him when he was young, got cold and hungry like everyone else, genuinely suffered during his passion, and so on.

And of course these two beliefs about Christ are completely linked: in the precariousness and the humble service of Jesus' earthly life, and especially in the sacrificial love that he showed in his passion and death, Jesus was revealing God's true nature: not some tyrannical deity, reflecting the behaviour of so many human monarchs, but a servant-king, a shepherd-king, whose whole purpose is to care for, to rescue, eventually even to die for his sheep.

That's the message St Luke conveys vividly by giving Jesus the title of King at the precise moment he's hanging on the cross. Here, Luke is saying, is the true image of God's kingship.

So in many ways the faith and the level of reflection that the first Christian communities possessed about Jesus was deeper and more sophisticated than we sometimes give them credit for. They weren't ignorant peasants with their heads full of superstitious notions about the way God works.

Today's feast in fact invites us to take our cue from them: to engage with their faith and their conclusions about Christ, and not to be satisfied with superficial ideas, or misled by the kind of misunderstandings that people inevitably fall into when they read the story of our salvation from an ignorant and faithless standpoint.