Christ Church Cathedral

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46

I like cooking with basil. Recently I have taken to using the fresh leaves. I did not have much success growing them in the garden, but I find that the plants grow very well indoors on the kitchen window sill. So now I can make fresh pesto and add the chopped leaves to so many dishes, especially those with tomatoes.

The name of the herb comes from the Greek word basileuv, which means king. It is the royal spice, perhaps not only for its flavour, but because it was reserved for the use of royalty, just like sturgeon in England. In the years when I worked in the Soviet Union I always used to get a certain socialist pleasure out of eating smoked sturgeon sandwiches during the intervals at the Bolshoi!

On this last Sunday of the cycle of the Christian year, we celebrate the feast of the royalty, or Reign of Christ. We are, of course, Christ Church Cathedral, so we keep this festival as the feast of our dedication. This time next year we shall be thinking of this as we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the opening this building. Christ Church, however, was the name of this community long before it was a Cathedral and long before the present building, in fact from back in 1762. For us, therefore, the festival is not only about the dedication of a building, but also about the dedication of a community.

With that in mind let us try to unpack a little the theological idea of the reign of Christ. In Mark's gospel, The Kingdom of God is a constant theme. It begins in the very opening chapter:

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." ^[1]

The remainder of the gospel spells out what we should expect of this Kingdom of God. We should note, in passing that the intense use of the phrase is peculiar to the synoptic Gospels. It plays a much smaller part in John, Paul and the other New Testament texts. We also need to note that when Matthew is copying Mark's text into his Gospel, he most often changes the phrase Kingdom of God to Kingdom of Heaven. This is consonant with a general tendency of Matthew to present a more holy, pious Jesus than the rather earthy, human character in Mark. That Matthew says Heaven, rather than God is also in the same tradition as that of the rabbis, who used the word Adonai meaning Lord rather than the name of God, even when the name was present in the texts. Unfortunately, as the phrase Kingdom of Heaven has come down to us in the English translations, it has lead to the idea the we are speaking about a place, whereas in our Gospel texts, the Kingdom of God, or heaven, is about a state of affairs, a way of living and acting, when God is in charge.

When the gospels speak of the Kingdom of God, there is an implied contrast between that state of affairs and the state of affairs in the Kingdom of Caesar Augustus and his successors in Rome.  As the birth stories of Jesus began to appear in the second generation, Jesus' birth from a virgin is to be seen as a direct challenge to Augustus, who also claimed to be born from a virgin. Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday should be read as a contrast to the entry on horseback of the emperor's representative, Pontius Pilate, with his troops, to intimidate the people with the aim of preventing any riots at the Passover festival.

Whatever the Jesus of history meant by the Kingdom of God (and it is widely assumed that the phrase did go back to him), it is highly unlikely that he thought of himself as the King. But by the second generation of those who had understood the meaning of the resurrection and the living presence of Christ in the cosmos, Jesus had become the King. Look at our reading from Ephesians, not, despite the tradition of its title, written by Paul, but like Matthew and Luke, at least a generation later:

God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places,  far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. ^[2]

Compare this with our reading from Matthew:

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ...  Then the king will say to those at his right hand... ^[3]

The Son of Man, which in Mark was a way of saying an ordinary person, in Matthew has become a title of Jesus the King.

In this second generation, the claim of Jesus to be cosmic king and the challenge to the Roman Empire it entailed, must have looked, to the outsider, faintly ridiculous. The church was very much a minority and a persecuted community. Maybe it had socially moved upmarket from the radicalized homeless band who made up the first followers of Jesus, but it was still probably a community of the lower merchant class and the slaves of the Roman cities. But in the next two hundred years the numbers grew, it has been calculated at a sustained rate of about 40% per year. So by the time Constantine sat on the throne of the Caesars, he thought it wise to convert to the new religion, which now made up the majority of the population of his empire. Not long afterwards Christianity became the state religion.

As that happened, the idea of the Kingdom of God, which, from the Prophets onwards, had been about peace and plenty with liberty and distributive justice, now became the justification for the Roman empire and all the subsequent empires of the Christian world. The power of the King, crowned and anointed by the church, was exercised in the name of Christ the King.

Consider the final part of our reading from Ephesians:

God has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. ^[4]

Taking their cue from texts like these the church and is leaders came to believe that not only the King, but the Church, as Body of Christ, shared in the cosmic rule.

In our neighboring country the United States, an empire was built without an emperor. At first the myth of the king as Christ's regent was displaced by the myth of the chosen people. In recent years there has grown the myth of the president as the wielder of God's power. Maybe the next president will be a little humbler.

As we celebrate this feast of the Reign of Christ, we need, I believe to leave behind all this secular development of the myth of the rule of Christ and to go back to the ideas of the Kingdom which we find in the prophets and in the Gospels. In our Hebrew Scripture reading from Ezekiel we saw that he used the word shepherd as a metaphor for the ruler of the people. It is interesting that the terms pastor and pastoral, which basically mean shepherd and shepherding, are used by the church to describe the work of its leaders. But you will find that in this sense throughout the Scriptures shepherd is used to describe the evil rulers who exploit and destroy the sheep, and so Ezekiel's theme is that God himself is the only true King, who rules his people with righteousness and peace and plenty. Not only that: in this morning's reading, he tells us that God, in his rule, prevents the wealthy powerful sheep from exploiting and maltreating the poor and weak members of the flock. God's reign is truly a reign of social justice, in which those who really matter are the weak, the poor, the homeless, the marginalized and the exploited.

In John's gospel Jesus is the Good Shepherd, who knows his sheep by name, and leads them to the good pasture. In our reading from Matthew's gospel we see the eschatological thinking of the second generation, where Jesus as the King on his throne becomes the shepherd who separates the good from the bad and the ugly on the last day. But notice that the criteria for being counted among the good are neither piety, nor religion nor creedal orthodoxy, but the practice of human concern, practical love and compassion.

It is often said that politics and religion should not be mixed. If, by politics we mean the rule of the rich and the powerful in a world where 80% of the people are increasingly poor and 30% are destitute, then I could not agree more. If by politics we mean the use of violence whether physical, social, economic or emotional to impose our will and way on others, then I could not agree more. But to remove from the Christian religion a political concern and praxis for justice, peace and equity in the world, is to violate the whole of the Biblical tradition.

I can only hope that in the current affairs swirling around us at the present time, we are reaching a turning point and realizing that our world needs not only peace and justice between people, nations, races and religions, but between the human race and the fragile life support system we call the biosphere. It is of these things I think we should be thinking as we celebrate the Reign of Christ today and every day of our lives.

Let me add one thing. I have used this morning, as I often do, words like compassion, justice, love, peace and equity. These you know, are not words about nice ideas, not words to form a committee around and talk about for the next twenty years. They are words about political choices, social and democratic political action, and about living a lifestyle appropriate to them.

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[1] Mark 1:14b-15
[2] Ephesians 1:20-21
[3] From Matthew 25:31-34
[4] Ephesians 1:22-23