Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46
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Recent American history has evoked a reckoning. Movements such as #metoo, the facing of past and present racism, even in the church, and the dismantling of many Confederate statues and symbols are but a few of the shifts in these years. This reckoning is an unveiling of the patterns of denial and privilege that is leading us to a deeper awareness of our collective unfinished business of creating a society with liberty and justice for all. Yet as our heightened commitment to justice comes as grace-filled liberation for many, for others the present moment is a threat to previous ways of organizing power and has inspired an equally intense resistance that seeks to preserve racial, gender, sexual, and other barriers and prejudices. Those empowered by the ways of denial are not happy about this reckoning.
In her book, The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle describes this reckoning as a once every five hundred year rummage sale during which the political and religious foundations shift and crack and institutions go from chaos to realignment in ways that are both hopeful and dangerous, exciting and disorienting. She writes that the central question during the transition is, “Who is in charge?” Who has power and how is it being used? The deepening levels of political and religious polarization and partisan strife in our culture points back to Tickle’s question. In his last book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes about this phenomenon; “Something new is happening: the sense that the other side is less than fully human, that its supporters are not part of the same moral community as us, that somehow their sensibilities are alien and threatening, as if they were not the opposition within a political arena, but the enemy, full stop.” We are in the midst of the cracking and do not know the extent or the duration. The desire after the worst of the pandemic to “return to normal” has confronted the undeniable reality that whatever that “normal” was way back in February 2020 is not coming back while what will be is not yet fully known. As old structures of power are questioned and critiqued, but before new ones have coalesced, we are at an impasse that invites careful reflection and mindful discernment as to the faithful response of word and deed.
If we are paying attention, we come around to the seasons of the Church year and her feasts over and over again yet as if meeting them for the first time. The collects and readings are the same, but the moment, the “now” of each feast and season is unrepeatable. The reckoning of Christ’s life and work among us takes on ever more urgent importance and is an ever more vital source of unshakable hope amidst the disorientation. It is good to celebrate Christ the King. Necessary to that celebration is to take seriously the claim of Christ the King for today, among us, within the changes and chances that 2023 have brought us.
Christ the King disorients and reorients, evokes frustration and hope. Perhaps only Trinity Sunday is a rival in the admonition to the preacher - “just don’t say anything heretical!” It is a truth claim and title that by itself evokes a range of reactions about spiritual power and authority. Can the eternal identity of Christ meet our present honest struggles and longings, our unknowing and fear, and still be affirmed? Christian disorientation is creating two main reactions: on one hand when theology is doubted, just double down - vigorously preserve the tribal dogma against its critics and enemies. On the other side are those who have been harmed by abuse in the name of Christ and who struggle to preserve faith when the voices and models have acted contrary to the Christ they proclaim. They see no way to integrate the claims of faith with their emotional experience.
I suggest Christ the King gives us a third way - not a Christ who is tyrannically demanding conformity, yet a Christ whose rule is necessary to fulfill my human dignity and freedom. Let’s start with the obvious. Christ is King. I am not king. You are not king. The judgment scene in St. Matthew gives sole rule and reign to the one who gathers and knows and who pronounces what might be called a verdict on our behavior’s compassion or lack thereof. Note carefully how nowhere does Christ the king ask my opinion, solicit my help, or seek my advice about how to be king - there is no committee. The only thing that humans do in the scene is ask “when did we see…?” Christ, we may affirm from the text, is not a mascot for my side over the other. Christ is not King in such a way that aligns him with those who believe they are right, who hold power, who claim superiority simply by the fact of those beliefs or powers. No persons or groups get a free pass, special status, or exemption from the standard of judgment. Christ is not a means to gaining power for myself. Christ is not available to be weaponized into a sword with which I smite the infidels. What we would need to know if we were going to construct a theology of power based on knowing, exclusion, absolute answers, and fixed boundaries is missing. Such as…
When will the final judgment come? We don’t know because the story does not say when the final judgment will come.
How can we know with certainty who are sheep and goats? We cannot. The story identifies what sheep and goats do, not who they are. Christ knows.
Do we help Christ execute judgment against our enemies? We do not.
Has much energy been spent by Christians seeking to answer these questions and who believe that answers are attainable? Yes. Are the answers any of our business? No.
I find I would much rather be a helper than a subject. I would like to serve on Christ’s staff. Wise understanding is not rightly oriented toward inventing what the text does not provide, but first taking as given that we are not mini-kings who must rule over those in error, but limited and imperfect humans in fellowship with other equally limited and imperfect humans. The story purely distilled is reinforcing the differences between the divine vocation and the human vocation and pointing toward how these separate powers interact. When we aspire to divine acts, Christ is giving us back the gift of our human creatureliness with all its glory and honor, all its passing-breath mortality. Part of the gift and glory of being human is what we do not know, cannot know, what is hidden from us, what is of an altogether different order of reality from our ways of understanding. Our vocation is to let the unknowns be unknown so that we can attend to the human quest of love for our neighbor.
Christ the King asks us to awaken to being human not as a problem to be overcome, but as a gift to be received and shared. What is not said, what is kept in God’s own being, what is missing, is information that also makes the story formative in that our attention is pointed toward seeing and doing what we can, not what we cannot - that is where our power resides. Our deepest search is for Christ, but Christ the King himself declares that our search is not fulfilled in esoteric theories and speculation, not in power over others, but presence with and service to others. The place to find Christ is in the other. There is a theme in scripture of God appearing in the stranger. Christ is always coming to me in the other person. By grace I am Christ going to my brother or sister. To locate Christ as the One encountered in the other puts me in an open, expectant, and generous posture - in other words, makes me human.
Aware of what we do not know, but on the last day will know because we will be fully known, our power is liberated toward human flourishing in this our waiting-time before the setting right of the world. In our care of the least of these, we discover a reality bigger than our unknowing - that Christ the King is present to us through them and that we are present as Christ to them. That is the reckoning to which we are called. In the moments of seeing and responding, we are choosing to be counted among the blessed inheritors of the kingdom. That compassion participates in and adds to what foretells the end of violence and exploitation, the end of greed and idolatry, the end of division and ingratitude. Amen.
