A year’s end
Today we have reached the end of the Christian year. Next Sunday we celebrate the beginning of a new year with the first Sunday in Advent. This last Sunday of the year is also sometimes called the feast of Christ the King.
The kingship of Christ
At a time when there is so much anxiety about leadership all over the world and certainly in Europe and America, it is worth considering what sort of King Christ can be and what the quality of his Kingdom is for us. “O rex gloriae Christe, veni orbis cum pace” (Christ glorious King, come to earth with peace) is the most common inscription on old bells lifted high and ringing in church spires, and even though Jesus says of his own kingdom that it is not ‘of this world’ it is certainly ‘in the world’. In the protestant tradition Christ’s kingdom is present in the individual believing Christian and in the catholic tradition it is present in the church, as good Anglicans we are allowed to believe both!
Truth and freedom
In his discussion with the worldly ruler Pilate (John 18-33-37) Jesus tells Pilate a few home-truths about his kingship: when Pilate asks him ‘what is truth’ Jesus implies that there is no answer to this because the question should have been ’who is truth’, truth emerges by following the person of Christ our King. At the time of Jesus only Kings were truly free everybody else was somehow enslaved or bonded. In that sense his kingship sets us free, free from sin, from the fear of death and from the devil, and in that sense we inhabit with him a space of freedom, from within which we can begin to change the world. The Prayer Book collect for this Sunday, begins with the memorable phrase ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord the wills of thy faithful people’. As well as this being a timely reminder to us that this is now time to start preparations for our Christmas pudding, we are inspired by the stirrings that Christ our King can provoke in our hearts.
Bernhard Schunemann
