The Anti-King

Propers: Christ the King, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We are all monarchists. That for me is one of the inescapable lessons of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Oh, we say we aren’t. We protest that we aren’t. We point bemusedly to atavistic constitutional monarchs like Charles III or Harald V or Naruhito, and we say, “Well, isn’t that just the quaintest thing? How cute.”

Meanwhile, Russia has a president more powerful than any Tsar, China has a president more powerful than any Emperor, and the United States sports an executive branch that would have been both envy and horror to old King George III. No king of old could ever vaporize the world with but the push of a button, the twist of a key. No emperor was ever able to spy into the souls of their subjects by filtering every single communication they’d ever writ or sent.

We call our system democracy, republicanism, but we’re still human. And we still gravitate toward strong men and women, to protect us, to lead us, to inspire us, and to send us off to wars in foreign lands of which we know not. You don’t think we have a king? God, I wish we had a king—someone cute and quaint and harmless like Charles III, an affable buffoon, rather than celebrity strongmen.

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.” There are always kings, you see, just as there are always gods.

There’s a reason why we all love King Arthur, or T’Challa, or Aragorn. “I would have followed you, my brother, my captain, my king.” And I think it’s telling that these idealized examples are literary characters, fictional characters. We all want to love and follow a king, but he must be a good one, strong and true. And few live up to that demand, especially today. Give a man power, and out comes the monster. What we need is a truly worthy king, but has one ever existed?

Jesus was killed for being a king. I feel like we gloss over that a lot—especially given that such was the charge nailed to the Cross over His head in three different languages: “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews.” Rome didn’t care if He was a rabbi. Rome didn’t care if He was a god; Rome had lots of gods. But they cared about the claim that He was king. There could be many gods, but only one Caesar, right? Worship what you will, but worship the state first.

We call Jesus the Christ and Messiah, which both mean “anointed,” and whom did the Judeans anoint? Their kings; their priests and their kings. He was proclaimed as Son of David, the greatest king of old, so what does that make Him? Well, if the son of a duck is a duck, if the Son of God is God, then the Son of a King must be—? You get the picture.

We called Jesus Lord, and Savior, and Son of God, and do you know who else claimed all of those titles? Caesar Augustus, Son of the Divine Julius, Savior of Rome. In calling Him Christ and Lord and King and Son of David, we were setting Him up to be our Caesar, to rival the Emperor, in an alternate Empire, a Kingdom of God. That’s what got Him killed, not obscure religious debates. Who cares about that, a bunch of desert fanatics? Rome kills kings. “We have no king but Caesar!” they cried.

See, that’s the thing about the Church. She’s always political. She mustn’t be partisan, but must be political. That’s why she’s oppressed in China and North Korea, why she’s coöpted by the state in Russia, why she’s incessantly mocked in America. Because she makes a claim on us, as an alternate Empire, the Kingdom of Christ. No matter how powerful the strongman is, no matter how absolutist and monolithic the government, they will never be God. They will never be infinite.

And that’s the truth they cannot stand. The principalities and powers of this world cannot stomach any limits on ambition, any constraints on freedom’s militant march. Because if there is a God, that means that they are not. That means that there are greater things than flags and bombs in this world, greater loves than blood and soil, greater truths than consumption and lust. The Spirit can’t be killed. And so the flesh hates it, hates to imagine that it could not live without it.

To say that Christ is King is to have a claim put upon you, an invisible mark inscribed on your brow. It grants a higher calling than worldly life, a citizenship in things above. Nineteen hundred years ago, the Epistle to Diognetus put it thusly:

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life … With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives. 

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory.

Now, how does that sound to you? Because it sounds pretty darn good to me. See, this is what the empires have never understood. Being a Christian, holding a faith that universalizes the love of God in our love of neighbor, doesn’t make us seditious or disloyal. It doesn’t make us fifth columnists or bad citizens. Rather, the higher loyalties raise up the lower. We are better neighbors, better citizens, because we have a loyalty that transcends the nation and the state.

Remember that old poem of Lovelace, when a man’s about to go off to war, and his lover tells him, in effect, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t go.” And what does he say to her? “I could not love thee (Dear) so much, / Lov’d I not Honour more.” His honor is the whole reason that she loves him. Were he less than what he is, she could not love him as she does, nor he her. Loving Christ above all frees us to love others, to love everyone, in ways we never could never imagine without Him.

What kind of a king is Christ? An anti-king, almost. An upside-down king. So different from the rulers of our paltry nations that He shocks us in His truth. Thus we slowly come to realize that the reason why He seems so strange is that He is in fact the only real King whom we have ever seen, who ever was or ever could be. His throne, mind you, is a Cross. His crown is a twist of thorns. And He doesn’t rule by sending others to die for Him. No, He rules by dying for them, dying for all—by literally going to hell for people who hate Him, spat on Him, murdered Him.

God, the power of that! That alone should make every unjust ruler fall on their knees and weep. He hasn’t conquered lands, nations, peoples. He has conquered sin and hell and death. He has conquered hatred, and lies, and violence itself. How do you fight that? How can you stop that? A torrent of love that cannot cease, a fountain of life that cannot die, a fire that burns the whole damn world and raises all the dead? Kings, emperors, presidents, they are nothing compared to that.

The power of God is a man being crucified, turning to another man being crucified, and saying, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom”—and then hearing Jesus say, from that Cross, “Today you will be with Me in paradise.” Paradise, from a Cross! Spear and nails and lash and thorns, all impotent, all powerless. Christ is incorruptible. Christ is unstoppable. Christ is inexorable. His mercy floods the cosmos in a tidal wave that sweeps all worlds aside until there is nothing left but you and the unfettered all-consuming white-hot grace of God.

You can take from me my money, my dignity, my house, my things. You can crush me under your boots and rend the flesh from my bones. And none of it will stop Him. None of it can take me from Him. I can be patient. I can hope. I can endure. For Christ is my King. And He is coming for us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.