Sermon for Sunday, November 26, 2023 || Reign of Christ A || Ezekiel:11-16, 20-24; Matthew 25:31-46
Next Sunday we begin again – another new year in our cycle of celebrations of God’s presence in our midst. But as the 90s band Semisonic reminds us, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” That end happens today. Today we end the current church year with the feast that marks this ending. For years now, I’ve been calling it “Reign of Christ” Sunday instead of its more common name, “Christ the King” Sunday. This morning, I’d like to explain why I made that shift because its theological implications are important for our walks of faith. My apologies ahead of time since this sermon is going to be pretty heavy on history. Hopefully, I have risen far enough from my tryptophan coma to make the next ten minutes make sense.
Here goes. “Christ the King” Sunday is not, technically, an official feast of the church. It appears nowhere in the Book of Common Prayer – not in the calendar of feasts at the beginning, nor in the list of special prayers in the middle, nor even in the list of readings at the end.* The Episcopal Church started celebrating this feast unofficially in 1970 and it has become a custom since then, but it’s still not an official feast of the church. “Christ the King” is also not a particularly old feast. It was first promulgated in 1925 in the Roman Catholic Church in response to the increasing secularization of society following the utter devastation of the Great War. Pope Pius XI wanted to assure people that Christ was still king in the aftermath of the most horrific years in history to date.
And while this was a good intention, I think the pope was misguided by his cultural times and chose the wrong image of Christ to celebrate. Not once, not a single time, in the Gospel does Jesus refer to himself as king. Other people do – sometimes genuinely, like the crowds who hail him during the parade into Jerusalem; sometimes mockingly, like the soldiers who flog him before the crucifixion. Pontius Pilate wonders if he is the King of the Jews, but Jesus won’t give a straight answer to that question. The absolute closest we get to Jesus calling himself king comes from our Gospel reading today. In the last of his parables of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus paints a picture of a king sitting on his throne and passing judgment. We’ll get back to that in a minute.
So, Jesus never calls himself a king. And for the first three hundred plus years of Christian history no one else really did either. It wasn’t until Christianity took over the Roman Empire in the mid-fourth century that images of Jesus as an imperial sovereign began cropping up. Once Christianity and empire became intertwined, Jesus began being depicted as a king. But what about the three centuries before that? What was the main image of Jesus?
The main image of Jesus was the shepherd. Some of the earliest frescos that survive in catacombs where the first generations of Christian met in secret – these paintings – depict Jesus carrying the lost sheep on his shoulders, just as he narrates in his parable in Luke Chapter 15. Nowhere in those catacombs is there an image of Jesus sitting on a throne with a crown on his head and an orb and scepter in his hands. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Jesus was, very specifically, not born into the halls of power, but into the humblest of circumstances, to parents who had to beg for a place to stay. And who were the first witnesses to his birth? A group of shepherds who listened to the angels’ song of peace.
Now, we don’t need to romanticize the shepherds and their professions. Sheep are not the smartest creatures, nor the cleanest, nor the most interesting. Mostly, they walk around and eat grass. And the shepherds themselves – they were not the most trusted of people; they lived on the outskirts and wandered from place to place. They corralled their sheep using fairly fierce tactics with their hooked staves. And yet, this is the image the Prophet Ezekiel uses for God.
Ezekiel is writing to a people scattered by war, occupation, and exile. But instead of using violent, martial imagery; instead of calling down God’s wrath upon his enemies, Ezekiel reaches for a different image. Listen to this. This is the image we should be celebrating today. The prophet says, “Thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak.”
Surely Jesus was influenced by Ezekiel when he spun his parable of the lost sheep. And for those earlier Christians, who banded together in secret to hide from persecution, they must have taken great comfort in knowing that their shepherd continued to seek them out and bring them back to the flock and make them lie down in safety. When we celebrate Christ’s presence in our midst, I invite us to celebrate like those early Christians – not praising an imperial Christ who lords over them, but praising a shepherding Christ who feeds the sheep and calls them each by name.
Even in his story about the sheep and the goats that we heard this morning, Jesus uses shepherding language, not kingly words. And the very king in the story doesn’t just sit on a throne, but moves through the lives of those pushed far from the center of society – those who are hungry and thirsty and unclothed and unhoused and unwell and imprisoned. To claim that a “king” could ever have such as these as members of his family might be Jesus’ most radical statement of the Gospel. But it’s only radical when we judge the world as humanity has made it and not how God intended it.
As we celebrate the Reign of Christ this morning, imagine not a king on a throne but a shepherd in a field. All we like sheep have gone astray, each to their own way, but Christ keeps calling our names, calling us back to green pastures and still waters, calling us to spread the abundance of God’s reign to all we meet.
* Updated versions of the BCP 1979 that include the Revised Common Lectionary do refer to “Christ the King” Sunday.
Banner art: “The Good Shepherd” by Thomas Cole (1848)
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