This coming Sunday is known in many traditions as Christ the King Sunday. It’s the final Sunday of the church calendar, before we begin again with Advent and our preparing for the newborn king.
And though in many ways celebrating Christ as king is an excellent bookend for our church calendar, this coming Sunday is a relative newcomer to the church liturgical calendar, being instituted in the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as rampant nationalism continued to drive the divisions between countries that had already resulted in one world war.
Pope Pius challenged the Roman Catholic Church to recognize that worldly leaders did not hold the keys to salvation – only Jesus Christ did. Over the next few decades, other denominations, including our Lutheran Church, adopted Christ the King Sunday as a way to recognize Jesus’ ultimate authority in our lives.
But the thing about authority in our world – especially those who make claims of royal birthright – is they don’t like the idea of being seen as flawed or sometimes even as mortal beings themselves. Their power lies largely in their image, and many work hard to maintain that image of invulnerability. To them, to show weakness is to risk losing power, and power is the thing that they think they need most.
So this Sunday of Christ the King is a bit of a challenge to that understanding of what it means to be a king, because Jesus doesn’t respond to challenges to his authority with puffing out his chest and insisting others bow to his whims. He doesn’t maintain power through force or coercion. Pope Pius references the church father Cyril of Alexandria in his encyclical instituting the festival: “Christ … has dominion over all creatures, a dominion not seized by violence nor usurped, but his by essence and by nature.” Christ, our king, has been our king since the foundation of creation, and that nature is affirmed by how he claims us as his own – not through power as the world sees it, but through self-sacrificial love.
The true king of our lives lays down his power – lays down his very life – to save God’s beloved children, undeserving though we are. It is through this sacrifice that we are all given an example of true godly living, and a testament of what real power looks like. The power of this world will pass away, but the power of eternal life gained in the sacrificial love of Christ Jesus is already ours, because when Christ laid down his crown, he shattered the power of sin, and gave us all a royal inheritance through his grace. And if we all are inheritors of the promise, then the desires of this world should hold less sway on our hearts.
This is the hope of Christ the King Sunday – that we might release our need for salvation gained through the powers and rulers of this world and instead focus on the true power that comes from living lives grounded in the love and generosity of Christ Jesus. I pray as we enter into a new year in our journey of faith that we might lay down our desire for earthly power, and see the true power present in the king who wears no crown but one of thorns, designed for humiliation but destined for salvation to gather all under the reign of his eternal kingdom.
Pastor Chris