Christ the King

Jeremiah 23: 1-6. Jeremiah prophesies a future King of Israel called "The Lord is our righteousness". Christians (the new Israel) identify this as Jesus Christ of course.

Colossians 1: 11-20. Paul tells us that the Father has "delivered us from darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son". He then tells us what qualifies Jesus for this role as king of this kingdom that is very close to reading John 1: 1-18. In Jesus all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and all things will be reconciled to Jesus in the end

Luke 23: 33-43. Jesus' kingship is mocked and his reign is misunderstood. He is tempted to avoid the cross (his very mission) and save both himself and his taunters. His kingship (kingdom) is misunderstood as essentially of this world only and with consequences for Palestine alone, rather than being eternal and universal.   

Who do you look to for leadership, moral guidance, direction or inspiration. A political figure (less and less common), a celebrity (very common nowadays), some spiritual guru perhaps?

But for a Christian that question should be absolutely simple.

We look to our king, Jesus. That term might be problematic if you are a republican perhaps but we are not talking about political systems here, we are making clear to whom we owe our loyalty, who we follow and who inspires us so ”King” fits the Bill more than any other description. “Christ the President” doesn’t really cut it and actually the kind of king that the Bible yearned for and often described was more like a shepherd who looked after his sheep.

Jeremiah rails against the imperfect shepherds that had beset Israel and looked forward to a future perfect king of Israel and his name will be “The Lord is our righteousness”.

The Christian church is the new Israel and Jesus is that perfect shepherd, our righteous king. Unlike the failed shepherds, Jesus is also divine and so is perfectly just, perfectly loving and also sees through all our pretence. He can’t be fooled and will also rebuke us when we go astray.

His power though at his crucifixion is mocked and misunderstood. In Luke he is tempted to misuse his power for his own ends, to save himself from the cross, but he refuses. He has bigger fish to fry. His mission is to serve and die for the whole world. He proves his steadfastness and trustworthiness in looking past his own needs and fulfilling God’s will. We have a sacrificial king, the suffering servant prophesied in Isaiah, who was willing to die for us.

In a strange irony, the reason Jesus was killed was nailed to his cross and the charge against him read “The King of the Jews”. But the scope of Jesus’ kingdom had been misjudged. They thought his kingdom was a worldly one and his aim was to simply remove the Romans from power.

In fact his kingdom was universal and everlasting and the kingdoms he challenged went far beyond the Roman empire and included all the temporal powers of this world, past, present and future.  

And although it is only Christians in this world that recognise his divine rule, actually Christ is king over all creation. As Paul writes “for in him all things in heaven and earth were created” We are the lucky ones, we are blessed because we have seen and recognised his rule. One day everyone will bow the knee regardless when the truth is revealed to them. Paul says that one day, everything in all creation will be reconciled to this fact, both on earth and in heaven – so every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and King.

So we have privileged knowledge. We already have been transferred to the kingdom of God. We are already children of God because we are privy to the truth. We are presented holy and blameless and above reproach to the Father through Jesus.

We need a new boldness and a new confidence in this fact. We need to let that fact empower us.

Our kingdom is forever. Our king is forever.

We have God himself on our side, so we have nothing to fear. In God’s grace we have the ultimate assurance, comfort and safety net. We have a freedom to be bold and try new things. Even if we fail we still have God’s blessing. If we sometimes trip and fall God will still pick us up again.

Our shepherd king will always hold us in his grasp and never let us go. He went so far as to die for us – why do we think he’d let us down now?

Christ is our leader, our moral guide, our inspiration, our servant, brother, shepherd and KING.

 

For all the saints

All Saints Patronal festival

Hebrews 12:18-24. This soaring prose paints a picture of what awaits believers and is reminiscent of the west door of a gothic cathedral, with the angels, saints and prophets welcoming into heaven the church on earth. In the midst is God himself but with Jesus, not Moses as the mediator. A mediator whose blood calls for forgiveness unlike Abel’s blood which called for judgement. Lastly the author uses the phrase “we have come” to indicate that this vision is an experience of the present. 

Matthew 5: 1-12. The beatitudes have two halves; the statement that certain people are blessed, and the promise of their reward. In effect, all the promises are one promise, you receive all these gifts in the Kingdom of God. Likewise, the first halves refer to everyone who is entering the kingdom of God. All of us are poor, meek, mourning for the way things are in the world, longing for God to rule, abandoning status and privilege, peacemakers and inevitably persecuted by those who oppose God’s rule. We can’t choose which ones we accept or reject.  

Hebrews makes a distinction between the God presented to Moses in Exodus 20 as a dangerous, frightening and inaccessible presence with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. The author invites his readers to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem. For in Christ we now have access to the true God and the great community surrounding Him.

The imagery that the author of Hebrews uses is reminiscent of what greets you at the grand entrance of a Gothic cathedral, a cavalcade of saints and angels and the spirits of the righteous made perfect, with Christ at the centre leading us into the presence of God.

This is not just a vision of a future hope, but Hebrews states that “you have come” to this. This is our present not just the future. This is the reality for all the saints.

And what is a Saint? Well that depends on whether you understand that term in its original Biblical meaning or the meaning it accrued later on when the church needed examples to inspire the faithful.

Whenever you read the word saint in the New Testament, that means you, any Christian from the first disciple to this present time.

Because a Saint means literally a witness, a witness to the fact that Jesus is the Son of God who died on a cross for our sins and was raised from the dead. This is what a Christian is; a witness to the gospel.

In early Christianity, a saint started to mean someone who died for the faith because the Greek word for saint is Martyrios from where we get the term – a Martyr.

That started a chain of events where saints began to be understood as a breed of super-Christians, a tradition we all recognise when we speak about saint this or saint that, but when you hear of the Saints in the Bible that is every single Christian witness – including every single one of us.

When we sing “For all the saints” or sing about the saints going marching in, we are a part of that crowd of witnesses.

When we accept that God loves us so much He died for us, and was raised for us, we accept the responsibility to change our ways and grow into a more perfect image of our creator. What that looks like is given to us by Jesus in the part of the sermon on the mount we call the beatitudes or the blessings.

Every saint, which is what we are, is characterised by being poor in spirit, meek, mourning for the state of the world, longing for God to rule, abandoning status and privilege and to be peace-makers, for which as a whole we should expect persecution. 

We can’t choose one over another. They are the characteristics of a saint we must strive to nurture.

In a similar fashion, the promises are all one – the promises are all characteristics of the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of heaven as Matthew calls it.

God will comfort, fill, be merciful, and declare to us all that we are his children.

The eight main blessings are sandwiched between the same promise delivered twice in verses 3 & 10 – for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And in this kingdom, God is still judge, but with Jesus, not Moses as the mediator.

Again, contrasting and comparing the old testament with the new covenant,

Hebrews compares the sacrifices of the temple with the blood of Abel, murdered by Cain, the blood that demanded vengeance from God and contrasts that with the shed blood of Jesus which demands forgiveness and mercy.

As in some other parts of the new testament, Christians are seen to stand between the times, already receiving the kingdom, but in expectation of its future revelation.

We stand at the great west door of that awe inspiring gothic cathedral, able to see and touch and marvel at the glory of it and know that we can go inside and one day we will forever.