Sermon: Christ the King 2010

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 21st November 2010
Venue:: St John the Evangelist, Milford
Service:: Eucharist
Readings:: Luke 23:33-43

Four years’ ago Her Majesty the Queen (some of you will remember) came to Guildford Cathedral for the Royal Maundy. About a month before her arrival the Queen’s Private Secretary, the Chief Constable, the Major, various Police, the Queen’s Private Secretary’s Private Secretary - I think there were about 24 people in all - came to case the joint. Was the Deanery sufficiently near the Cathedral? It’s only a few minutes by steep steps but rather a long way by Rolls Royce, down Madrid Road, Guildford Park Road and up Ridgemount into Cathedral Close. There was a lot of argy-bargy about all this and in the end, when lots of soundings had been taken, it was agreed that the Queen could come to the Deanery for a drink before the lunch that the Mayor was giving at the Guildhall.

But then, the week before the Queen was due to come we were told she wouldn’t have a drink, she wasn’t allowed to have a drink until she came (so the Courtiers told us) to the Guildhall. How was I going to give a drinks party when the chief guest couldn’t have a drink? This was very perplexing, as I had fifty people to present to the Queen over a drink. I asked a friend who’d been Secretary to the Prince of Wales for ten years and Sir Stephen said to me, ‘Whose house is it?’ ‘Mine’. ‘What would you offer a guest?’ ‘A drink’. ‘ That’s what you do, have a tray of drinks in the hall, offer the Queen a drink as she comes in. If she doesn’t want to have one, she won’t have one, but everyone else can. Just behave normally when you’ve got the Queen in your house!’ Sir Stephen said, ‘Courtiers’ (and he spoke from his own experience) ‘get our prestige and power by knowing what the Sovereign will or will not do, what she likes and doesn’t like. You must take no notice of us.’

Today is the Feast of Christ the King, and here’s a text for us from St Luke’s 23^rd chapter: ‘The soldiers joined in the mockery and came forward, offering him their sour wine. “If you’re the King of the Jews”, they said, “save yourself”’. But he couldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of king; not a magician, not a pretend human being - God dressed up as a human being - but a human being who’d laid aside the status of kingship, emptying all that out in the Incarnation and in the Atonement.

In 1925, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and in the heady atmosphere of fascist reaction to revolution in Spain, Portugal, Italy and in the Vatican, Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King. There’s something rather uncomfortable about this feast, because it most definitely comes from an anti-revolutionary stance, though Pope Pius said, in his encyclical Quas Primas on the 11 December 1925, the Feast of Christ of King was to mark ‘the all-embracing authority of Christ which would lead mankind to seek the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ’. But what kind of king and what kind of kingdom?

On the Dean’s beside chest of drawers are piled a miscellaneous collection of books into which he dips before falling into an exhausted slumber, and one of them, The Court of France 1789-1830 is a historical examination of the courts of France just before the French Revolution and afterwards. The book shows decisively that the French Revolution resulted in a stronger monarchy and a larger and more elitist series of courts than had existed previously. The book also helps the reader re-evaluate Louis XVI, when our sympathies have heretofore been with his more romantic wife, Marie Antoinette. What the book decisively shows is that the court was almost an entity in itself, had a life of its own, knew exactly what the King would and wouldn’t do, and this was all revived again under Napoleon, and yet again revived at the Bourbon Restoration with Louis XVIII and Charles X.

As with courtiers, who seem to know exactly what the sovereign is allowed to do and what he or she is not allowed to do, so with the Church. So, you must be careful of dignitaries, even of the Dean of Guildford. We tend to over-egg the pudding and to make more comfortable what is in fact uncomfortable. We have to live with uncertainty if we are to follow Jesus and understand what his kind of kingship means. Like the Queen coming to the Deanery where she might or might not have a drink. She might do what the courtiers said she’d do, or she might not.

Pausing for a moment with our own Sovereign, I wonder how many of you saw the British Legion Service of Remembrance in the Albert Hall. There was a poignant moment at the end when the assembled members of the Armed Forces raised their caps to give the Sovereign three cheers. Then we saw the Queen, an eighty-four year old woman, who has been at the centre of public life since before she ascended the throne more than fifty years ago, and she gave a smile and raised her hand to wave. Such was the applause, she made a slightly tentative second wave, and then went home to get ready for the Cenotaph the next morning. I was rather moved by this, the Queen who doesn’t feed on adulation, is slightly shy and deeply dutiful, shows us what kingship is about. I think, one may say, this is in part because she is a devout Christian woman. She knows, during a long reign, that although the Court and the public realm demand first, Coronation and then yearly, the putting on of a crown at the State Opening of Parliament, the real work is done by listening to people, signing documents, questioning politicians, offering advice, just being there.

So, there are a lot of things to think about on the Feast of Christ the King. There’s the nature of kingship itself and the nature of the Kingship of Christ. A danger, and it’s present in the New Testament, is that Jesus of Nazareth is slightly skewed by the panoply of kingship, the images and language and atmosphere of the autocracies and absolutisms of the ancient world from Babylon to Rome. But notice where the proclamation of Christ’s Kingship is made - it’s on the Cross. St Luke, chapter 23, verse 38: ‘There was an inscription above his head which ran, “This is the King of the Jews”’. This blood-stained Cross was Christ’s throne, and indeed it is the Gospel theologian, John, who shows us that the Cross is the place of Christ’s Coronation. The ancient world that brings us the Bible, the panoply, ceremony and ritual of our own English Court, display monarchy, but Jesus is a monarch of a different kind. John, chapter 18, verse 36: ‘Jesus replied, “My kingdom does not belong to this world, my kingly authority comes from elsewhere”. “You are a king then?”, said Pilate. “Jesus answered, “King is your word, my task is to bear witness to the truth.”’

Every time we come to church in Milford or in the Cathedral we’re surrounded by religious imagery, religious words, ceremony, ritual, even of the simplest kind. It’s heavy with tradition, some of it helpful, some of it less so, and the Bible is exactly the same; the theology of Luke and the theology of John, filled with images and ideas and concepts and words from the past. But at the centre of it all is a young rabbi from Nazareth, whose kingship was not of this world and whose only crown was a circlet of thorns. It’s this king who comes to us now in the bread broken and the wine outpoured, and if we open our imaginations to him this morning, not only will our ideas of kingship be transformed, but our lives may be transfigured.