Jeremiah 23:1-6 Ps. 46
Col. 1:11-20 Luke 23:23-33
The notion of Messiah was born in the biblical tradition as the divine conferring of leadership rights upon an individual whose identity was "divined" by the religious Judge Samuel. The very word Messiah derives from the mode of investiture, the pouring of oil, the anointing of the head of the chosen leader, the king of the people.
The famous Judge Samuel offered that God did not really want kings, but the people clamored for leadership like their enemies who had kings to conscript armies to protect their people or raid other countries to seize assets for their countries. Samuel warned them that kings would take property for his own and take their sons for battle. In a sense Samuel was warning them that the more absolute the power, the more likely a person with such power would be corrupt. The people prevailed upon Samuel and Samuel divined the selection of the first "messiah," the first man to be anointed with the oil of divine selection as King of Israel. And indeed Saul, failed mightily and gave way to his successor David, who also failed significantly, but who also had profound success to become the model for a future utopian Messiah who might return Israel to something of their days of Davidic glory.
The history of the kings of Israel both in the united kingdom and divided kingdoms reveal that their kings were relatively good and bad, and the biblical writings provide critiques of their reigns based upon their faithfulness to Torah religion. In this regard, many were found to be wanting, and faithfulness to the Torah was used as the criteria for assigning reason for the woes and the blessings which came to the people Israel.
The divine right of kingship is not unique to the Hebrew Scriptures; other nations had their own versions, and in the time of Jesus and the early church the Roman Emperors were venerated as gods and sons of gods. The association of deity with leadership was well known.
Jesus came into the world where the Caesars were proclaimed to be gods and sons of God. His followers had both the Roman models and the models which derived from messianic thinking of the Hebrew Scriptures and the apocalyptic writings expressing the hope for the intervention of some special anointed one. Some charismatic leaders were regarded to potential candidates for being the promised Messiah gained followers but were put down by the authorities as a threat to the power of the Caesar and his local authorities. John the Baptist, Jesus, and others died because they attained among their followers the designation as the promised Messiah. The Zealots who tried to mount military resistance to the Roman authority brought about years of various Jewish wars which were crushed by Roman military intervention.
The followers of Jesus came to spiritualize his afterlife as a continuing known personal mystical presence to them, who indeed would be for the time being, a King in the realm of their interior lives. As many came to confess Jesus the Christ, as the king of their hearts, a very significant social movement ensued. As the movement became successful, it become institutionalized for promulgation of their message and values, and the appearance of writings about Jesus and the movement is evidence of the institutional success of the movement. The writings included both Jesus as one who was coming again as a King, but in the significant and continuous delay of his return, Jesus was presented as the realized King in the hearts of many people.
The movement was so successful within the Roman Empire that by the fourth century the Emperor Constantine, reversed the notion of the divine right of kings; he designated the Imperial right of the Christian faith to be the preferred faith of the Empire; he only demanded that the bishops gather and agree upon a unified presentation of Christianity in the Empire so that the Empire would not be politically divided because of Christian religious disputes. The results of the Council of Nicaea really took over a century to come to significant unifying effect.
Since Constantine, the church has had various reciprocal relationships with kingly power in the world, and religious leaders have had the power to confer in the name of God and Christ, the right of the monarch to rule.
The origin of what has become the Feast of Christ the King came about because of the rise of suspicion of the divine connection with any earthly authority. One of the most famous philosophers of suspicion was Karl Marx. He assigned theology to the realm of ideology on behalf of royalty and ruling elites to maintain their oppression of the poor and the peasants of society. Hence the noted designation of religion as the opiate of the people. The Bolshevik revolution was a secularization of political power. Tsars, kings, and queens proved too be all too human in their kleptocratic ways, their corruption of power. In Marxism, religion was regarded to be an enemy to the type of communal utopia which was to be the preferred way for people to live.
Pope Pius XI, in 1925 saw this secularization of political authority to be a threat to the influence and mission of the church vis a vis political governance. The secularization of political power was seen as a real threat for Christian influence in society, hence the Feast of Christ the King was proposed as a way to re-assert the reconnection of people of faith with a perfect exemplar of political power. The feast we have today at the end of the season of Pentecost came about from this attempt to present the ideal model of political leadership.
This feast, of course, cannot avoid all of the irony of Christ as King. The inscriptions above the head of the dying Jesus on the cross proclaiming him as a king, were the mocking ironic words of the Roman Empire. But for Christian readers of these mocking words, they were secrets about the King who had ascended in their hearts as a rallying figure of mystical, spiritual, and social/communal identity.
The feast of Christ the King for us today is a reminder that no earthly king is omni-competent enough or kind enough to embody the perfect use of power. Earthly leaders fail, because the earthly wielding of power becomes too easily the Machiavellian ends justifying the means. Power for all too human people, becomes the end itself.
We need still the functioning of a utopian Messiah King to deconstruct the tendency for humans to be corrupted by power. We continually need to be reminded that the divine gift of power is to be used for the shepherding care of people, particularly, those who are most vulnerable and without power in our world.
Let us admit that Christ as King is still elusive for us and our world, but Christ the King can still become incarnate within us as our words and deed conform to the kind of loving care which Jesus exemplified for this world. Let this functional vision of Christ the King be for us the spiritual and moral exemplar as we continual try to surpass ourselves in the practice of love and justice. In this way we can make the hidden Christ the King evident in our acts of love. Amen.
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