This week's sermon

Christ yesterday and today; the Beginning and the end; Alpha and Omega; all time belongs to him and all the ages; to him be glory and power through every age for ever. Amen.

I suspect that the feast of Christ the King may arouse some mixed feelings – if it arouses any feelings at all, of course, not being entirely familiar to an Anglican or Episcopalian congregation. It was in fact introduced in the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI in 1925. This was, significantly, the sixteenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea. which defined the dogma of the Consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and added to the Creed the words "of whose kingdom there shall be no end," thereby affirming the kingly dignity of Christ.

Mixed feelings? I know that some people consider that this feast emphasises Christianity to the unreasonable detriment of all other faiths, and that it is therefore divisive. Well…maybe it is in one sense. A rather traditional old priest of my acquaintance, when accused of being “divisive” in his insistence on certain aspects of Christian morality, roared “The Day of Judgement will be divisive!”. And, whether we like it or not, so it will. It is not up to us to condemn others, but it certainly is up to us to make sure that Christ and no-one else is our king. It is a word used by Jesus himself. In one alternative reading for this Feast, the Parable of the Sheep & the Goats in Matthew chapter 25, it is notable that at the beginning Jesus refers to the Son of Man, but at the end, when judgement is pronounced, he says “The King”.

Now, I am mystified by the strange logic which refuses to adorn churches and vestments beautifully (which need not mean expensively!) on the grounds that Christianity and Christians should be humble and simple. Fine. But how refusing to God the honour and glory due to Him can demonstrate my humility I am at a loss to understand. The churches and vestments do not celebrate me, nor is God only my God, as if His splendour reflected upon me and not upon others, whose God is inferior or non-existent. As Pius XI pointed out, God is the God of the atheists too, whether they like it or not.

I wonder whether the same sort of reasoning might be behind the discomfort some people do feel when they consider this Feast. We have so long been warned against “triumphalism” and “imperialism” that we have come to believe that it is a serious sin. But, great heavens! – and I choose my exclamation with care – could someone tell me what is wrong, or mistaken, about proclaiming, with joy, and from the housetops, the triumph and the power of God? “Far be it from me to boast”…indeed. But have we forgotten the second half of that phrase: “except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”?

Glorying in the Cross is not just thanking God for having died to save us. It is not, primarily, rejoicing in our share of the Cross. The Cross, the point of the Cross is, first, not the suffering but the love which is behind the suffering; and therefore the effect of it. Love may not have an external moving cause – in God it has not; all his motivation is within himself – but it must necessarily have an external (by which I mean external to itself) final cause. The final cause of the love which underwent the Cross was our salvation; and that is not a question of warm feelings, or even of forgiving us our trespasses. The Cross would not have been necessary for that. As Thomas Aquinas says, a single drop of Christ’s blood would have been enough to save the whole world from every sin. But there was one thing for which the Cross was necessary: it was the decisive event among those events which we glimpse in the Apocalypse: the war against the devil and all its works. The Cross is not just (though it is that) the sign of love. It is the sign of victory. I do not understand how Almighty God can have a genuine struggle with his finite creatures; but if he can, and our faith tells us that he can and he did, then the Cross is that struggle and that victory.

This feast is a shout of joy; of joy – and, yes, relief – that the devil did not have the last word, that God is almighty, and that all is well.
If this is triumphalism and imperialism, the triumph we celebrate is not ours. It is the triumphalism that led us to add to the Lord’s Prayer “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever”. It is also an underlining of the paradox that God reigned on the Cross – one of the alternative readings for this feast is the death of Jesus. His power is so absolute that even apparent defeat cannot overcome it. I think we need this reminder just before Advent, just before the incarnation, when God seems so terribly powerless and vulnerable. His love is obvious – it cannot be in doubt. But his power, the power of a new-born baby, or indeed of an embryo, which for so much of modern science is a “non-person”, can indeed be in doubt. But not after the feast of Christ the Universal King.

It is striking that this feast was introduced at a time when monarchies everywhere were breaking up or had broken up, when the very concept of kingship was passing away as if old-fashioned and no longer relevant to this new world. And now, in the third millennium, there are only a handful of kings and queens left, and none of them, in the west at least, has any real power: those there are are mostly figureheads, or even figures of fun (see Private Eye, constantly!)

But I do not think Pius XI was out of touch and trying to hold back the tide of the modern world by introducing a feast which gave Christ an outdated title. On the contrary, I believe that he read the signs of the times; saw the future clearly, and drew the only conclusion possible for a Christian or, come to that, a Jew. “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.” It is inevitable that all kingdoms and kingships will pass away; there is only one that will not. “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.”

As Christ said: In the world you will have tribulation; but fear not – fear not! – I have overcome the world.

I’ve been speaking about Christ the King – but we should also remember the traditional Anglican name for this Sunday, dating from long before the introduction of that feast. This is Stir-Up Sunday, which has nothing to do with Christmas puddings, but refers to the old collect for the day; one, I think, that should not be lost.

And so let us pray to Christ our King: Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.