Frances writes on next Sunday’s readings :- The feast of Christ the King originated in 1925 and under Pope Pius XI. We have to try to understand what that feast said at the time, and what it is saying to us today. In its original context of course, is originated in a war torn Europe at a time when France would still have been in tatters, and Germany a failed and disgruntled and humiliated nation. This is to say nothing of all the other countries which joined in, including a Britain suffering the loss of thousands of young men. So many places are still scarred by that war, as memorials all over the world bear sad witness.
The Near and Middle East has, throughout its amazingly long history, suffered the carnage of war in one form or another time after time. The amazing statuary of the Assyrians and Babylonians, now being blown to bits by Isis, stand as mute but powerful witness to the aggression of the superpowers of their day. It would appear that the whole understanding of kingship from time immemorial has been about the pushing out of national boundaries at any cost, and regardless of the harm that caused to others. Great empires like Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Rome and Britain were built on the ruins of those of their conquered enemies, who were absorbed into their states as vassals and slave labour. The development of what we so optimistically term ‘civilization’ is, we should pause to reflect, largely built on the blood of the conquered. It appears that somewhere along the human ‘development’ trajectory we have always got it horribly wrong.
In our gospel (John 18:33-37) in which Jesus more than holds his own against Pilate, the Roman governor of Palestine, Jesus challenges this whole concept of kingship. The Jewish authorities had presented Jesus before Pilate on a charge of political unrest. Pilate, who hailed from a Rome which knew more than a thing or two about insurgency and its control, questioned Jesus as to the nature of his kingship. Jesus admitted that if he had been an earthly king he would undoubtedly have put an army in the field against him, but insisted that his kingship was of quite a different understanding. The kingship of Jesus is about revealing the truth, God’s truth to the world. Jesus, we must recall never mixed with the powerful and those in control, but had instead, a ministry to the sick and the hungry, the needy and the outcast. It was a mission which aimed to make whole, a message of sharing and compassion based in his knowledge that that is what God is like. His message had nothing to do with power and force and the subjugation of thousands. I guess his kingship is one which we still find it enormously difficult to fathom and mostly one which the world still rejects. Yet it is the model proclaimed by his resurrection from the dead.
This is precisely the message of the reading from the Apocalypse (1:5-8). The writer of this extraordinary book certainly lived at the heart of the Roman Empire, and was amply acquainted with its savage control of the medley of peoples in the Province of Asia (Western Turkey) to which he wrote his message. Asia was an immensely rich province, full of Italian traders and people of ancient stock going back to the Greek occupation of its coastal cities and subsequently subject to Persian policies of resettlement. Sacked by Mithradates, stripped bare by Brutus and Cassius to fund their civil war, Asia always bounced back. It was the jewel in the crown of Roman governors on the make, and its people knew all about kings and conquest. Power, naked power, was what ruled Asia, and it was into this killing-field that John brought his message of the ultimate and peaceful reign of the one, true God, one whose power would not be subject to the next attack and coup, but would last eternally. The extraordinary claim that he made, and that Christianity continues to make, that this universal and peaceable rule of God has been won by the death of Christ on the cross, vindicated in resurrection, is still a stunning claim, stripping empires of their power. If it was unnerving then, think of its impact now.
When Daniel (7:13-14) wrote his vision of the universal rule of God in the mid second century BC under the harsh rule of Antiochus Epiphanes IV, another of those super powers to hit the East in the wake of Alexander the Great, he again was writing to counter the prevailing thuggery of yet another conqueror of Palestine. This time one who demanded that Jews conform to paganism like the rest of his Greek empire. Our writer would have been all too aware of the history of his people from the Old Testament, and would have known too that these invaders come and go. Whilst their occupation of the land could be devastating at the time, Daniel knew that it would not last, and so he wrote his Jewish compatriots a story, in fact a highly subversive political tract, encouraging them to stand firm in the faith of their fathers in the face of the threat imposed by Epiphanes. He set his story during the time of the Babylonian conquest of Palestine some 400 years earlier, as a way of masking the urgency of his call to action, and at the heart of his call is the passage we read today. In his vision, a martyred man is taken into the presence of God and given universal sovereignty over – wait for it – not just some scrappy bits of the Middle East, but over “All peoples, nations and languages.” All the world becomes the servant of the one true God, and his kingdom is eternal, his empire indestructible. It was the stuff of every tyrant king’s fantasies; the very thing they all knew was unachievable because built on power, aggression and fear that could not be sustained indefinitely. Daniel knew differently, and offered his people a quite different hope of salvation, one which put its trust wholly in God and never in human force. It is one which can still offer us comfort today bombarded as we are with horror images from Isis, and other cults of death.
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