“May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power”.
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It is often remarked that many today long for the simplicity, resolve and effectiveness of the strong man, almost whatever the aim and whatever the methods.
Christ the King – celebrated for the 100th time this year – puts this longing in question.
It has become the feast to conclude the liturgical year – the kingship of Christ as the symbol of what we have heard and received – before we turn afresh with Advent and the new liturgical year to what is yet to be, to the last things.
As St John puts it: “truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ” – our fellowship, our koinonia.
Or, from the Letter to the Hebrews: “the Son is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being … When he had made purification for sins he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high”.
This very political word, king, is used to rebalance us in our right relation to God and all his works: Christ the King fulfils the natural order of all created things. The eternal and the temporal meet in him and, through him, in fellowship.
So, this morning’s sermon also will have two parts – like the Wilton diptych, perhaps.
The first – the first panel – is a portrait of ‘the King’, as we in this part of the world have come to understand it.
I visited Balmoral this Autumn. The portraits there were of Their Majesties the King and Queen walking in their garden, tending plants, creating a social and cultivated environment or ecology.
It is an image of authority different to the ‘no kings’ demonstrations, and maybe closer to the mark. The Vatican is reported to have described the UK crown as the last of the Christian monarchs.
In a recent talk by Dr Charles Insley, a medieval historian at Manchester University, on Benedictinism and the English state, which he delivered earlier this year to lay Benedictines, he argues that in the 10th century there was a deliberate extension of royal authority among the English from personal lordship to more uniform rule. The king became able to tax and to judge; crucially this went hand-in-hand with the monastic reform associated with St Dunstan and St Æthelwold.
A suitable theme for today, I thought, preaching in a monastery church.
Both reforms standardised their respective rule and did so in the name of Christ. The monasteries, Dr Insley went so far as to argue, became surrogate royal presences in such wild places as East Anglia and Northumbria.
The King – it was King Edgar at the time – and lay patrons adapted their exercise of authority after the pattern of the Benedictine Abbot – they took ritual seriously, and counsel, and penitence. This is the King as Abbot-shepherd of his people. The image is there in Chapter 2 of the Rule of St Benedict, ‘The Qualities of the Abbot’.
This still matters. The coronation rite of Edgar in 973, compiled maybe by St Æthelwold, is essentially the same rite by which King Charles was crowned 1,050 years later.
King Edgar’s reign, says Dr Insley, came to be seen as a golden age, a model. The frontispiece of the charter in 966 for the new minster at Winchester shows Edgar, with his queen and Æthelwold on either side of him. He is crowned and prostrate before Christ in majesty above, himself surrounded by angels.
It is a vision of a holy society, one which orders and enlarges the spirit – the nation as Christian household, as is the monastery.
And so to the second panel of my diptych which, you may be relieved to hear, is not from the 10th century but from scripture: ‘Christ’.
Jeremiah, in the Mattins reading, reminded us that Israel’s pattern of kingship is that of the shepherd-King, David – David who risked his life with sling against the wild beasts and against Goliath, to save his father’s sheep. The shepherd-king attends to the sheep and does not scatter them.
God says, “I myself with gather the remnant of my flock”. As Jesus puts it: “The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” [John 10:11]
And we find that the gospel for today, this great feast of kingship, the culmination of the year and the hope of all creation, could not be more stark or more simple or more to the point. It homes in unwaveringly on the very moment of our rescue, as on Good Friday.
We are at the cross:
“let him save himself”, they say – the leaders say.
Which is exactly what the good shepherd does not do.
He saves others: the thief, the Jewish nation, all.
Are we looking for a single, effective force?
Christ is the one of whom we have said already this morning:
“by love alone he draws all nigh” and “he will himself be peace”.
His “gentle sovereignty” we acclaim.
And this asks of us that our lives, our communities, our fellowship, be shaped in this likeness: “he is the head – the head of the body, the Church”.
So to conclude:
St Paul in the Letter to the Colossians expands from this single point of rescue at the blood of the cross to encompass creation, the visible and the invisible,
all, together, in fullness and at peace – a right and just rule.
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
And so we are.
Let us look forward to what is yet invisible to us with joy and anticipation, Christ being our King.