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: Faith
Faith: A Journey of Discovery
New thinking and the questioning of inherited beliefs is not an aberration from Christianity, nor a sign of heresy or disloyalty. It is deeply embedded in the nature of the Judaeo-Christian heritage itself. From the very beginning faith has evolved through questioning and argument.
At an early stage in the history of their faith Jewish people began to move away from the old idea that their God had chosen them for special favour irrespective of how they behaved. The stories of the patriarchs in the Book of Genesis – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their families – show them getting up to all kinds of things we would consider reprehensible – deceit, trickery and theft – and prospering by them just because they were specially favoured by their God. In time this changed. People began to see that God was not an arbitrary, capricious despot, but a God who was consistent, fair, and just. God expected standards of behaviour from his people. They must not worship another god or make idols. They must not murder, commit adultery, steal, deceive, or plot against their neighbours.
In the book of Deuteronomy (ch 28), the conditions of God’s relationship with his people are set out at length. If the nation serves God faithfully and obeys the commandments, it will be blessed in every way. The people will live safely in their land, enjoy rich crops and abundant harvests, good health, long life, and many children. They will be defended from all their enemies and win all their battles. But if they turn away from God and act unjustly, they will face disaster on all sides.
The history of Israel in the books of Samuel and Kings are a long illustration of this principle. When there was a good king who reigned justly and encouraged people in the pure worship of God, there was peace and prosperity, but when there was a king who disobeyed the commandments, there was famine, disease, natural disasters, defeat in war, and all kinds of misfortune.
Sometimes the historians had difficulty in explaining certain parts of the history. King Josiah, who instituted a thorough reform of religious practice and was a good and faithful king, was killed in battle at the age of 39. The historian explains this by saying that the nation was still being punished for the terrible sins of his grandfather Manasseh (2 Kings 23:25-30). As an old scripture said, God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 20:5). But there was one prophet, Ezekiel, who disagreed with this. He was addressing the Jewish people when they had lost their freedom, their holy city, and their land to the Babylonians. They were in a depressed and defeatist mood, believing they were being punished because of the sins of their forefathers. Ezekiel offered them hope by asserting that God’s judgment does not go down through the generations – every individual is rewarded or punished according to their own behaviour (Ezek 18).
But some people realised that this too is not always true. Many of the Psalms and other writings drive home the message that good people are rewarded with long life, health, prosperity, and large families. The wicked may appear to prosper for a time, but they will eventually suffer for their sins. The Book of Job is a passionate argument against this. It presents the hypothetical situation of a man of impeccable piety and virtue who loses all his property, his family, and then his health. His friends (‘Job’s comforters’) preach to him the conventional message that suffering is a punishment for wrong-doing, and that his only hope is to confess his sins and pray for forgiveness. Job refuses to believe that he has deserved what he is suffering. He insists on arguing his case with God. In chapters of profound poetry, the whole question of the working out of God’s justice in human life is pondered. There is no ultimate answer, but the interesting thing is that in the end God commends Job for having the honesty and courage to argue with him, and rebukes Job’s friends for having the audacity to try to defend God’s justice with shallow arguments.
The belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people also undergoes some questioning and development within the Bible. It was probably at a time when Jewish leaders were becoming increasingly strict in maintaining the purity of the ‘holy people’ that the little Book of Ruth was written. One of ancient Israel’s close neighbours was the nation of Moab. There was a long history of feud between the two peoples, which was enshrined within the Scriptures in a commandment saying that no Moabite should be admitted to the congregation of the Lord even to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:3). Ruth tells the story of a Moabite woman who remained faithful to her Jewish mother-in-law and was rewarded by marriage to a prosperous Jewish farmer. The story ends with a little genealogy showing that the great King David was a great-grandson of that marriage!
Before that time, the prophet Amos had already questioned what it meant to be the chosen people. He asserts that being chosen does not mean God is always on their side – it means that God will judge them more strictly than others (Amos 3:2). In another place he suggests that they are no more special than any other nation anyway. They may boast about God giving them the land of Canaan, but did not the same God give other nations their lands (Amos 9:7)?
The Jews’ long experience of oppression and suffering generated a deep change in their perception of the meaning of being chosen. Even when they were at their best and most faithful to God, they suffered. A prophet at the time of the Babylonian exile came to see this as part of what it meant to be chosen. They were somehow fulfilling a purpose in the world by the very fact of their undeserved suffering (Isaiah 53). This became a central part of the way Christians saw the whole story of Jesus, the crucified Messiah who embodies the nature and destiny of the holy people. In the New Testament we find the firm belief that God is above all a loving God, and the daring insight that real love shows itself in weakness more than in coercive power: ‘God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength’ (1 Corinthians 1:25).
When sceptics point out that the Bible contradicts itself. they are really missing the point. The contradictions are part of the essential nature of the Bible, and of the whole history of Jewish and Christian faith. Faith in God is an ongoing journey of discovery, constantly dealing with the unexpected, interpreting experience, and discovering new truth. As God says to Moses, ‘I will be who I will be’.
A Funny Thing, Faith
There is a story of a man who came in from town and said to his wife, ‘That vicar of yours is a right hypocrite’. His wife said, ‘What makes you say that? He’s a very nice man.’ ‘Well,’ said the husband, ‘he’s always on about heaven and how we should all look forward to going there. I saw him in town today, and as he was crossing the street a car suddenly came round the corner at top speed. Judging by the way that vicar moved, I don’t think he’s in any hurry to get to heaven!’
Life after death is not the only aspect of faith that we have mixed feelings about. When someone is ill, we pray for them. Some people believe in miracles of healing. But we still go to the doctor. Christians believe Jesus is their authority. Jesus told us to lay up our treasures in heaven, not on earth, but most of us like to have enough money in the bank for a comfortable life and some security.
It’s a common fallacy that everybody either believes in God or they don’t. Some of the most prominent believers have their times of doubt, and atheists sometimes doubt their atheism! A vicar was once asked whether he really believed in God. His reply was: ‘I believe in God on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I don’t believe on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and on Sundays I’m too busy to think about it.’ Real faith never comes easily. It is always a reaching out for something we can never fully grasp or prove. It battles constantly with doubts and questions.
Believe it or not, this is just the kind of faith we find in the Bible. We tend to assume that the Bible lays down the law about God, but in fact those who wrote it were themselves seekers, struggling towards faith just like many of us. In the Psalms they often ask God why he isn’t listening to their prayers. The Book of Job is one long argument about whether God’s ways are fair. The Book of Ecclesiastes questions whether life has any meaning at all, or at least any meaning that we can understand.
And perhaps the ultimate paradox is that according to two of the four Gospels the only words Jesus said on the cross were, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Christians believe Jesus was God. How do we get our heads around that one?
And yet, some of the people who suffer most say ‘God is good’. Faith is challenged everywhere, but somehow it won’t go away. During the Nazi holocaust a group of Jews in Auschwitz decided to put God on trial because of what he had allowed to happen to them. They concluded that he certainly had a case to answer, but then the ‘court’ was adjourned because it was time for prayers!
Free to Love and Believe 