I apologise for this rather long reflection for the Feast of Christ the King, drawing on Matthew 25.31-46 and the appointed Psalm, 95, but I found myself wanting to wrestle seriously this particular year with the biblical motif of kingship, which I believe is an important key to engaging with this feast.
Canon Dr Clare Amos
Director of Lay Discipleship, Diocese in Europe
Clare.amos@europe.anglican.org
The west window of Holy Trinity Church, Geneva, depicting a ‘royal’ Christ holding the orb of the world in his hand. Used with permission.
It must have been almost exactly three years, during COVID times, when services were on line, the locum priest at the church my husband and I were ‘attending’ preached on ‘the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats’ (Matthew 25.31-46) at what was described as All Age worship for Christ the King Sunday. Well I say that he preached on the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats’, but actually it might have been called ‘the Parable of the Sheep’, because the priest in fact only read the Gospel as far as Matthew 25.40 – omitting the last six verses which focus on ‘the Goats’. And the goats and their fate didn’t get a mention in his sermon either. We got on well with our preacher, so afterwards we teased him about his choice to leave out ‘the nasty bits’. He justified his decision by saying that it was an All Age worship service – and that the fate of the goats was not an appropriate or helpful topic for those of tender years. I sort of understood his point of view, but it has still left me with some question-marks.
It is interesting that in their choice of the Psalm this week the lectionary compilers have opted for Psalm 95, for those of us old enough to remember Matins on a regular basis, the ‘classic’ opening psalm of the service referred to as the ‘Venite’. But they have not given us all of the psalm, verses 7b-11 are not included. It is of course precisely these verses in which a note of ‘judgement’ is sounded, ending with the sombre line, ‘Therefore in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest” which are omitted. It feels rather on a par with that leaving of ‘the goats’ out of the Gospel reading! I will return to the psalm in a moment.
I have commented in my previous blogs for Christ the King Sunday, ‘Kingship – not of this world (November 18, 2021) and ‘Stirring it Up: the challenging Kingship of Christ’ (November 19 2020) that I find ‘Christ the King Sunday’ which has come into our liturgical calendar largely as a result of developments that took place in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1920s and 1930s, quite problematic. I ‘purred’ when I discovered a couple of years ago that Bishop Tom Wright did so too! In his case it is partly because he feels that it usurps the traditional place of the Feast of the Ascension. I personally would add my intrinsic unease about all the huge ‘Christ-Roi’ statues erected in parts of Roman Catholic Europe and in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, which, whether they are intended to or not, subliminally remind me of ‘fascism’. However I have promised myself that this is not going to turn into another ‘anti-Christ-the-King-festival’ piece!
One of the areas of biblical study that I have found increasingly fascinating in recent years is the development and ordering of the Book of Psalms – why certain psalms have been grouped together – and why one comes after another. A particular point of interest comes at the end of Book Three (of the Psalms, Psalms 73-89) and the beginning of Book Four (90-106). I think that these two books are wrestling with the immense challenges of faith that the exile offered to ‘Israel’, in particular Judah and Jerusalem. Psalm 89 begins by setting out the ‘traditional’ understanding of ‘kingship’ in the period of the pre-exilic monarchy, in which the king, as descendant of David, was lauded as ‘son of the Lord’ and all manner of extravagant promises and expectations were laid upon him, with his role seen as to ensure the destiny and prosperity of his people. The first half of Psalm 89 (up to verse 37) expresses such ideas powerfully. But then there is a dramatic shift. Verses 38-51 seem to be written in the consciousness of the dreadful fate that had befallen the last of Jerusalem’s kings at the time of the Babylonian conquest and the exile of the people. All those hopes, all that theology, just dead in the dust. What future could there be for this people in exile once ruled by those kings of David’s line?
The answer is offered us in the next psalm – 90 – and psalms 91-100 which follow it, which include this week’s psalm, 95. As a group this collection of Psalms are often referred to as ‘the Psalms of God’s Kingship’. In several of them the phrase ‘the Lord is King’ appears in a prominent place in the psalm. But even in those, such as Psalm 95, in which the phrase is not explicitly used the motif of God’s kingship over the world and over humanity is surely present.
These psalms are telling us that even if human kingship ‘fails’, – as those kings of David’s line seemed to have done, God’s kingship will endure, ‘from everlasting to everlasting you are God’ (Psalm 90.2). It is interesting that Psalm 90 is the one psalm in the whole psalter that has a link to Moses in its title, ‘A prayer of Moses, the main of God’. There were two covenant traditions in the history and story of the Old Testament, the Mosaic (Sinai) covenant tradition, and the Davidic covenant tradition. They seem to have existed in a sort of tension with each other, and one of their differences, was their contrasting attitude to the role of human kings. The placing of the reference to ‘Moses’ at precisely this point, when the traditions linked to ‘David’ seemed to have failed is surely significant. The Mosaic/Sinai tradition was frequently hostile to human kingship – seeing it as attempt by humanity to usurp God’s rightful role as king. The Davidic covenant tradition however (at its best!) viewed the king as acting as a mediator between God and the people. The king’s closeness to God, and his own human status, combined so that he could ‘represent’ God to the people, and he could also represent the people before God. And – the tradition also suggested – at times this representational and mediatorial role might involve the king in suffering on behalf of his people. We do seem to catch glimpses of this in some of the psalms, and perhaps the servant songs of Isaiah 40-55, which themselves may have been composed partly as a response to the ‘failure’ of human kingship at the time of the Babylonian exile.
Some of these insights into the nature of Old Testament kingship, have come to the fore during this last year, especially around the time of the coronation of King Charles III. The coronation rite draws considerably from the Old Testament understanding of kingship. This is the first time that we have celebrated the Feast of ‘Christ the King’ since the coronation, so it is interesting to make such cross-references.
My ‘argument’ is that to understand the fullness of what it means to call ‘Christ the King’, we need to think of him holding together in his person these two competing Old Testament understandings of kingship: the one in which a human king of the Davidic line has a representative and mediatorial role, and the one in which the absolute supremacy of God as king is affirmed. I believe that the New Testament writers make precisely that link. I would also suggest that the ‘Davidic’ perception of the king’s special relationship to God played a substantial part in the development of New Testament thinking about the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. For me, that is expressed not least by the way that the Gospel of Matthew calls Jesus, ‘Emmanuel’ (God with us) both directly and indirectly.
If we look at the word ‘E/Immanuel’ in its original context (Isaiah 7.14; 8.8) it seems to have been a title given initially to a child born to the Davidic house of kings in Judah. Indeed the suggestion is often made that it was referring to the birth of Hezekiah, the son of King Ahaz and Ahaz’s successor. ‘Emmanuel’ was an appropriate title to give to such a royal child, given God’s ‘withness’ vis-à-vis the king. But even Hezekiah, ‘good’ king though he may have been, did not live up to the hopes placed in him, and so people looked towards the day that a child would be born who would truly reflect such a name and description!
And so to the Gospel of Matthew once again. In Matthew 1, immediately after a genealogy which has clearly linked Jesus to the family of David, as the birth of Jesus is announced we are told ‘And his name will be called Emmanuel, God with us.’ (Matthew 1.23) Then this assurance of God’s presence with human beings runs like a gentle heartbeat through the pages of the Gospel until it rings out once again in Jesus’ final words ‘I am with you till the end of the age.’ (Matthew 28.20) ‘I am with you’, that deliberate recapitulation of the ‘Emmanuel of Matthew 1, is Jesus’ claim to fulfil all those expectations of kingship, human and divine, of which our Old Testament scriptures have sung the prelude.
And yet there is another surprise for us. One final radical twist in Matthew’s tale – which leads us back to our Gospel reading for this coming Sunday:
Jesus, ‘Emmanuel’, promises to be with his disciples throughout all time. But where can we find and see him today? Matthew himself directly and explicitly provides the startling – and shocking? – answer. For in this Parable of the Sheep and the Goats we discover that we are being offered the opportunity to see Jesus with us in some very unlikely places – in the faces of the sick, the strangers, the hungry and thirsty, the imprisoned, whom the disciples of Jesus may choose – or refuse – to honour or minister to. ‘Lord , when did we see you hungry, or naked or a stranger or in prison? ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did to the least of my brothers and sisters – so you did it to me.’
So back to the Feast of Christ the King. Where do we find ‘Christ the King’ in today’s Gospel reading? Perhaps the answer is both in the figure of the almighty judge who doles out reward and punishment and in the figures of those – poor, sick, hungry, homeless – in whom Jesus invites us to discover his presence?
And one last thing. I had never spotted it previously. I mentioned above that one of the roles of Old Testament kings might well be to suffer as a representative on behalf of his people. I do not think it an accident that our Gospel reading for ‘Christ the King’ – telling of the figure coming ‘in glory and all the angels with him’ (Matthew 25.31) – is then immediately followed by the final prediction of Jesus’ passion, and the machinations of the religious leaders to achieve his death. “When Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples, ‘You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.’(Matthew 26.1)
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