Out of this World

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 24, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: John 18: 33-37

The feast of Christ the King, more recently known as the Reign of Christ, has a backward-looking and forward-looking aspect. The backward-looking aspect traces back to what the Old Testament, and therefore the people of Jesus’ time, regarded as the high watermark of God’s relationship with Israel. This was the time of King David, roughly a thousand years before Christ, when Israel’s military and economic strength peaked and it dwelt in the Promised Land and was about to build its magnificent temple. So expectations of the coming Messiah were that he would turf out the Romans, restore the monarchy and set himself up as a king to lead Israel back to independence, security, prosperity, and faithfulness to God. The forward-looking aspect was that, although many of these expectations were not fulfilled in Jesus, and his death was the opposite of what messianic anticipation had assumed, those expectations were simply transferred to eager expectation of the last day, when Jesus would return in triumph and judgement, and justice and peace would universally prevail.

So this feast day begs two very significant theological questions, arising from that backward- and forward-looking aspect. Question one is, In what sense did Jesus do something in the first century that means he reigns today? Question two is, At what moment in the future will Jesus call time and usher in his full and final reign? I believe these two questions and their answers decisively shape what we think Christianity and being a Christian are all about.

So to question one: In what sense did Jesus do something in the first century that means he reigns today? Of course, some would say, he doesn’t reign today; he was just an interesting first-century figure whom many have followed, and who provides us an example of wisdom and sacrifice but nothing more. I’m going to ignore that answer, because Christianity assumes in Jesus we see the truth not just about now but about forever, and such an answer rules out forever. There’s broadly three other answers.

Answer one is, Jesus did something decisive in the first century that means he reigns wholly and tangibly today. It affirms God as the creator and director of all things, and sees the world as a puppet theatre in which the puppet master pulls strings and guides creatures and inanimate objects around the stage. It maintains that, when things went wrong with creation, the Father and the Spirit sent Jesus to put things right and, as his reward, put him in charge of everything. It’s an attractive model, because it portrays Jesus as changing the world politically, socially and culturally; but it runs up against the problem that, if Jesus is really in charge, he’s not doing a very good job. If he were a corporate leader, he’d be facing calls to resign, whether because the forces of creation are causing so much suffering and death to human beings, or because human beings are happily knocking seven bells out of each other. In short, it’s not going terribly well. And the idea that it wasn’t going well but Jesus came and fixed it all fails the basic observational test: not a lot seems to have changed since before Jesus came.

Answer two is subtler. It says Jesus does reign – but not in the way you think. It takes its cue from today’s gospel, where Jesus says, ‘My kingdom does not belong to this world.’ It works in two stages. Right now, Jesus leads a kind of guerrilla movement that dwells under the radar, being the true heirs and destined inheritors of the world, but being for a period of time obscure and hidden and suppressed. So Jesus’ followers communicate with nods and winks and gestures like a secret society, and exist in a kind of parallel reality to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, that alternative state will one day become the whole of reality. Jesus represents the beyond in the present, the ultimately true in the temporarily visible, the forever in the now. It’s like he exists in five dimensions, but we only have three dimensions, so we can only understand a piece of the whole. Eventually, one day, we’ll comprehend the whole thing. This is an answer that avoids seeing Jesus as a failure, but seems to give up on the idea that society can actually change to become more just, joyful or safe – so it gives us little to hope for, short of the last day.

Answer three to how Jesus reigns today turns the assumptions of the question round. It sets aside notions of victory and conquest, and the traditional picture of Jesus on a heavenly throne with orb and sceptre. Instead it says, Jesus didn’t come to sort everything out. He came because the whole purpose of creation from the beginning was for God to be with us, and Jesus is that being with. Jesus doesn’t have an agenda like throwing the Romans out of Palestine. He’s seeking to be with us in all circumstances, whatever befall. Like the second answer, this third response does see a big discontinuity between here and heaven. It says in heaven all the obstacles to our being with God will be taken away, and we’ll have pure being with, shorn of selfishness, small-mindedness, envy and fear. But unlike the second response, and like the first response, this is a truly social vision: we won’t just be perfectly with God but we’ll also be perfectly with the wider creation and with and one another. This answer doesn’t have a failed Jesus or an other-worldly Jesus like the first two. But its drawback is, it doesn’t have much use for the notion of a king who reigns and conquers and judges. Instead it reconceives kingship as representing what lasts forever, in other words love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness and faithfulness.

That takes us to the second question about Christ the King: At what moment will Jesus call time and usher in his full and final reign? Unless you think the whole story of creation from beginning to end was mapped out on a strategic plan from the start, which is impossible to believe because surely Newcastle United would have won the league more recently than 1927, then there’s two possible options. Option one is that Christ returns when the church has fulfilled its purpose – when the world unites in harmony, goodness and faith, when the earth is filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. This option feels so far from likely it’s almost laughable, in a painful way. While the church does untold good, it seems to be as full of faults and fragilities as the world, and now that in most countries it’s been decoupled from political influence and worldly power, its hold on people’s imagination seems slight. So we can largely discount this first option.

Option two is the opposite: Christ returns when things have got so bleak that humankind and the wider creation have reached either a point of distress that’s beyond earthly redemption, or a degree of depravity that defies transformation. While it’s common today to think the world’s in a pretty pickle, it doesn’t take a moment’s reflection to recognise matters have been worse. Just how bad do things have to get before Jesus calls time on the whole project? This was the question in the minds of Jews who endured the death camps of the Second World War. It was impossible to imagine greater suffering or more extreme depravity. Why did God not see that as the moment to bring down the curtain? Surely this was the time for Christ the king to come on the clouds of heaven and call it a day? It’s this question that yields the two most important insights of this festival.

One is something we almost never dwell upon. Which is that, even if heaven is perfect, it will lack some things we currently have. If heaven is about re-creation and restoration, it won’t have procreation and birth. If heaven is about utter being with and seamless communion, it won’t have the process of misunderstanding and bad feeling followed by reconciliation and deeper understanding that is our daily experience of grace here and now. If heaven is about banqueting and sharing, it won’t have the experience of being hungry and alone that’s part of what makes being fed and together so wonderful. If heaven is about harmony and joy, it won’t have the experience of adversity in which courage and companionship emerge and are fostered. On the last day there will be losses as well as gains. The paradox of heaven is that it might be so good it becomes dull. We can’t simply assume God delays the last day out of negligence or inattention.

But there’s something even more poignant than that. In the Holocaust, people discovered the truth at the heart of the Christian faith. That truth is best expressed by Elie Wiesel in his book Night of the hanging of two men and a child in Auschwitz. Wiesel, a Romanian Jew, wrote the book aged 32, looking back at this life-defining experience when he was 16. These are Wiesel’s peerless words. ‘The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard [a] man asking: “For God’s sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows …”’

This story reveals the answer to both the great questions of the feast of Christ the King. God’s identity and purpose are not expressed in holding a remote-control device that orders world events from afar. They’re embodied in Jesus’ presence among us, in relationship with us, subject to the same hardship, adversity and hostility and in the end murderous violence that we are. In Jesus, God doesn’t stand aloof, but enters the story, with everything that entails. Christ has a crown, indeed he does: but it’s a crown of thorns. His enthronement is the exaltation of the oppressed and the affirmation that in him, God is with us come what may. Yes there is resurrection, but the resurrection, and later Pentecost, show us that, in the end, no force in the universe is stronger than God’s desire to be with us: hence love is stronger than death. The last day will one day come, but it will only show us what we’ve already seen in cross and resurrection: that Jesus represents God’s purpose never not to be with us; and that purpose is an eternal purpose, which neither death nor suffering nor any adversity can finally thwart. And it’s in the wonder, strength and hope of that conviction, that confidence, that truth, that, battered, bewildered and bedraggled as we are in the face of the world’s woes, we ultimately celebrate with joy on the feast of Christ the King.