A Sermon preached on 24th November 2024
This last Sunday before Advent has been given the name “Christ the King Sunday”.
Many of us don’t like the idea of calling Jesus a king. Jesus himself rejected the title. When he had miraculously fed a crowd of 5000 men, plus women and children, the people wanted to make him king. They were already organised in groups of 50, like an army. But Jesus disappeared into the desert.
What we will be celebrating at Christmas is God’s coming into the world as a human being. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. Looking at him, we see all we need to know about God – he is like Jesus.
But the earthly Jesus certainly did not behave like a king. He spoke with the authority of a prophet, and he acted with the power of a healer, but he showed no ambition to be a king. So are we right in even comparing him with a king?
The controversy goes right back to the Bible itself. It seems that parts of the Bible were written by royalists and other parts were written by republicans. In the early days of Israel as a nation, they had leaders. They were not hereditary leaders nor official – they emerged and became leaders as the need demanded. There was Moses, who brought them out of slavery and led them to the Promised Land. Then there was Joshua, who took over when Moses died. The story continues in Book of Judges – a rather misleading title. It is not about sober old men sitting in the court wearing a wig! Some of them were judges of a sort, but mostly they were people God raised up to exercise his judgment and put things right. When things were bad for Israel, someone appeared and led them to victory, peace, and prosperity. One of the first was a woman, Deborah, who challenged and rallied the men to rise against the Canaanites. Then there were the ones whose stories entertained us as children: Gideon, Jephthah and Samson.
We have seen this happen down through history: Joan of Arc, William Tell, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. These were people of ordinary beginnings who found themselves in a cruel situation, did what they felt needed to be done, and unintentionally became leaders who changed the world.
The last of the Judges was Samuel. When he became an old man, the people came to him and said they wanted a king to rule over them permanently, like other nations.
God was displeased with this. It showed a lack of faith and a turning away from God who was their only true king. But he told Samuel to agree to their request.
Samuel warned them that they would regret it. A king would take away their lands, their crops, their cattle and their freedom, all to increase his own wealth and power. Behind this we can probably see the experience of the reign of Solomon, with his hundreds of wives and concubines and his enormous wealth that caused so much discontent that when he died the kingdom fell apart.
But in the meantime came David, who was a great and highly respected king whose descendants reigned in Jerusalem for hundreds of years. This created a mystique of the king, and the belief that the Kingdom of David was chosen by God and eternal. Though many of the descendants of David were bad kings – and David himself was far from perfect – there was the undying hope we find in passages like Isaiah 11 – the vision of a truly good and just king who would bring the people peace and prosperity.
In the course of time the nation lost its freedom and became more dominated by the powerful empires around it, but there still remained the hope of a Messiah, the “Anointed One”, the “Son of David”. And so the idea of a king is in the very name we call Jesus – the “Christ”, that is, the “Anointed One”.
Still today, people pin their faith on a great leader who will give them the kind of nation they long for. The Americans have elected a President who promises to lead them into their "golden age” and “make America great again”. Here in Britain we have got rid of a tired and unfair government and have hopes of better times under a new leader. Poor Keir Starmer looks as if the honeymoon is already over, but there is still ground for hope. Right down through history, people have tended to look for a great new world to be brought about by a new leader. But too often the new leader turns out to be as bad as the others, and even if he or she is genuinely and sincerely trying to do good, the task usually turns out too hard for them. We talk about Jesus as the King and the hope of the world, but after 2000 years the world doesn’t seem to have changed much.
But there is another vision in the Bible. Although Jesus was called “King”, “Lord”, and “Son of God” – all titles used for the old kings of Israel – the title he himself preferred was “Son of man”. What does this mean? It comes from the book of Daniel. Daniel has a dream of four great fierce beasts dominating and terrifying the world. One by one they are destroyed, and then comes “one like a son of man”, who is given “an everlasting dominion that shall never pass away”. This “one like a son of man” is interpreted not as an individual but as “the people of the holy ones of the Most High”. Not a Messiah, but a messianic people!
This is surely the ultimate hope. Real change in the world will not come by any leader – not even by putting Jesus on a pedestal and calling him a king – but in the hearts of the whole people. The Kingdom of God is the kingship of God, when God gets his way with humanity. And that is brought about by a community. That's why, in the New Testament, the Church is called the body of Christ.
And I believe that the Church is not a group confined to certain patterns and boundaries, but God’s vision for the whole of humanity – starting, of course, with you and me.
Tag: Christianity
Where Do We Start?
If we want to embark on the journey of finding our own faith, the things we believe in rather than what we have been taught, where do we begin? Ironically, the best answer is probably with what we have been taught. None of us is a blank sheet. We don’t start from scratch. We must start where we are. We do not choose our parents, our place of birth, our nationality, or the religious tradition we inherit. These things shape who we are, and no matter how far life moves us on from them, they are inevitably our starting point.
I was born into the Christian tradition. Both my parents were active members of a Baptist chapel in Wales. I was baptised by total immersion at the age of twelve. With all my experience of working in cooperation with other churches and other faiths, I am still a Baptist minister. But my life experience and thinking have made me a very questioning and unconventional Christian. If I had been born into a different culture, I might well have been a Jew or a Muslim, a Hindu or a Buddhist, but I like to think that, whatever faith I was born into, I would still have become an open-minded, questioning and unconventional member of that faith community.
I have great respect for other faiths and have been inspired by some of their insights. When I attend a synagogue, I have a warm feeling of being in my own faith’s ancestral home. When I talk with humanists, I feel there is very little difference between us. Nevertheless, I am still happy to call myself a Christian and have never considered converting to another faith or belief. This is not because I am certain that the traditional version of Christianity is true, but because it corresponds to the way I see the world, or – to be bluntly honest – the way I want to see the world.
Christianity is often described as an ‘historical’ faith. That is, it is essentially a story. It is the story of a God who created the world and created human beings in God’s own image. It goes on to tell how this God worked in a special way through the long history of the Jewish people, and how their understanding of God’s ways developed through their experience. It tells the story of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher who declared and demonstrated a radically new way of life, who died and rose again, and in whom sin and death will be defeated and the image of God will be restored in a new heaven and a new earth. It claims that God has been supremely revealed not in spoken or written words but in this man, the Word made flesh.
Is this story true? Some parts of it of course are history that few if any would dispute. Other parts are legendary or mythological. Some of its central parts are an expression of faith that can never be proved or disproved. But whether strictly ‘true’ or not, I think it is the best story in the world, the story that is most true to the depths of human experience. I find that the more I try to live as if it is true the better it works.
In a sense, faith means believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change. In the story of Moses at the burning bush, Moses asks God to tell him his name. God’s answer is ‘I am who I am’. Even that simple statement can have more than one meaning. It could be a simple refusal to answer the question. It could suggest that God is the mystery that can never be defined or even named. In the Hebrew language there is no clear distinction between the present and future tenses, and so the statement can just as well mean ‘I will be who I will be’. This too can have more than one meaning. It could mean ‘I am free to be who I want to be’, or ‘you will keep discovering who I am’.
This is an invitation to the journey of faith. It also suggests that new thinking is not an aberration from Christianity, a sign of heresy or disloyalty. It is deeply embedded in the nature of the Judaeo-Christian faith itself. We are not chained by history but invited to keep on discovering God in new ways. We start where we are, but the destination is yet to be known.
Free to Love and Believe 