What comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘king’? Is it castles and crowns, royalty and rubies? Or perhaps who’ll be next on the throne?

Or does it bring to mind more mundane and earthly things: Burger King, Liquor King, King Toyota; King Prawns, King Penguins; King Kong, The Return of the King; King Country, the Maori King; or if you’re into history or a follower of politics, Michael King or the Honourable Annette King?

Whatever your response, you have to admit we use ‘king’ language a lot. It’s a good word to describe something supreme; and so it’s not unusual to find the word rolling off our tongues as well, as a way to describe Christ.

In fact, it’s most apt on a day like today, Christ the King, the last Sunday of the Church’s year, when we sing of Christ’s reign over all creation.

As Paul says: ‘[Christ] is the image of the invisible God’, ‘his is the primacy over all created things’, ‘in him the complete being of God… came to dwell.’

This language is powerful, worthy of a king; but it’s not to everyone’s liking. For some, to call Christ ‘King’ is unhelpful, it’s to make him out to be more like Henry VIII in the Tudor series, eyes fixed on power and privilege and the next woman, than ‘God with us’ reaching out to the common person.

Likewise, in a world where democracy sits on a pedestal and monarchs look destined for the museum, it can seem outdated. It makes Christ and/or God appear distant and other, with little interest in either us or the environment.

Sally McFague puts it this way: ‘God as king is in his kingdom – which is not of this earth – and we remain in another place, far from his dwelling. In this picture God is world-less and the world is God-less: the world is empty of God’s presence, for it is too lowly to be the royal abode’.

Furthermore, as Rosemary Radford Ruether says, the roots of oppression are a love of prestige, power and wealth – things we associate with royalty!

So how are we to resolve this tension? We want to acclaim Christ as king, yet not make God out as distant and aloof and uninterested in ordinary life.

We find our answer, I suggest, in today’s other readings. 

In Samuel’s day, the people of Israel cried out for a king. They wanted to be like the other nations, and so God granted their wish. God gave them a king. But as the scriptures show, their experiment with royalty had mixed results.

A few kings stand out, take for example David and Solomon, but even they had their Tudor-like moments: the seduction of Bathsheba and an obsession with grandeur. The others mostly acted as if God wasn’t around.

So this is where Jeremiah comes in. ‘You’ve got it wrong’, he says to the leaders. And he speaks for God when he says, ‘I’ll make a righteous branch spring from David’s line, a king who shall rule wisely.’

And, of course, for Christians, these words are fulfilled in Jesus.

But even if Jesus is the just and wise ruler spoken of in the book of Jeremiah, it still doesn’t solve our problem of king language. The real question, in fact, is how can we speak of a God who is beyond what language can describe?

One answer is by using metaphors. Here, words and images are used to speak about God, like Christ is king. But this doesn’t mean he’s literally a king. Just as saying he’s bread or light or a good shepherd doesn’t mean he is bread or light or a good shepherd. Metaphors help us talk about God, they point to what God is like, but God remains essentially different.

Furthermore, by using these metaphors Christ subverts the way the images are understood. Jesus gives new meaning to what we mean by ‘king’.’

This is made clear in our Gospel. It may seem strange to hear this text today. Certainly we hear it more often on Good Friday. But I think those who put the readings together each week have got it right. F or in the mocking words of the mob, and the humiliation and agony of the cross, a truth is told.

Christ is king… but like no other.

You may recall the story The Young Prince. Written by Oscar Wilde, it goes to the heart of what this day is about, the true nature of Christ’s kingship.

Wilde tells of a young boy who is thrust on to a throne on the death of an aging king; a young boy denounced by his grandfather, for the boy was the offspring of an illicit relationship and grew up the son of a common peasant.

But because of guilt, or out of the desire for an heir, the king on his death-bed sends for the boy and he’s brought to the palace. A robe of tissued gold, a royal sceptre, and a crown of rubies are placed before him.

But on the night before his coronation the boy has three dreams. In each he’s shown a place of suffering and death and disregard for human life.

In the first he is shown an attic where gaunt and sickly figures sit hunched behind looms weaving a robe fit for a king. In the second he’s taken to the ocean depths where he sees a young naked slave lose his life for a sceptre’s pearl. And in the third it’s to a riverbed mine where he watches as fever and plague take the lives of those searching for rubies for a king’s crown.

“Who’s this king?” the boy asks, and a voice replies “Look in this mirror and thou shalt see him!”

The next morning, the morning of the coronation, the young prince awakens and tells his courtiers to take away the robe of gold, the crown of rubies, and the royal sceptre. Instead he puts on his tunic and sheepskin cloak. He holds in his hand a shepherd’s staff and places on his head a circlet of wild briar.

Then alone he rides toward the Cathedral. Along the way he’s mocked and laughed at, and the nobles glare threateningly. But defiantly, in goatherd’s dress, he stands before the baffled bishop and beneath the image of Christ.

And there he kneels. The sunlight streams through a stained glass window. A sunbeam weaves round him a robe, the dead staff and thorns blossom. He then stands, in the raiment of a king, and the people fall upon their knees.

The bishop cries “A greater than I hath crowned thee”.

So, what comes to mind when you hear the words ‘Christ the king’? Is it power and privilege and wealth? Or is it a child born in a manger, a teacher of compassion and truth, whose life was cut short on a cross, rejected and left to die like a criminal, but raised to life and now reigns over all?

This is the question, I suggest, we’re asked today: who do we follow?

May it be the servant king, whose power is made known in weakness, and whose glory is revealed on a cross; as the song declares, ‘this is our God, the servant king; he calls us now to worship him’!

Amen.

A sermon preached in St Alban’s Anglican Church, Eastbourne, on Sunday 25th November 2007 by the Reverend Damon Plimmer.
(Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43)

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