Reign of Christ?

Reflections on the Lectionary for November 20th

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This Sunday is the final Sunday of the church year—the last day before the calendar flips over to the new year, to Advent, and to a new cycle of seasons and readings. Traditionally, this final Sunday of the church year has been called Christ the King Sunday, or more recently and less patriarchally, Reign of Christ Sunday. It’s a telling way to conclude the church year: with an assertion of monarchical power for Jesus. There is a lot embedded in the claim that the whole of the Christian year and the Christian story leads up to a coronation. Of all the ways of speaking about Jesus and all the metaphors and symbols associated with him, I have always found it strange that we use kingship as the decisive one. Why not have a Christ the Healer Sunday? Or a Christ the Teacher Sunday? What about Christ the Traveler, Christ the Table-Turner, Christ the Disputer or Christ the Friend?

It's telling that the scriptures collected in the lectionary for Christ the King or Reign of Christ Sunday seem equally ambivalent. By my count, we could just as easily have a Christ the Shepherd (Jeremiah 23:4), a Christ the Righteous Branch (Jeremiah 23:5), a Christ the Savior (Luke 1:69), Christ the Prophet (Luke 1:76), Christ the Refuge (Psalm 46:1), Christ the Peace (Psalm 46:9), Christ the Firstborn (Colossians 1:15, 18), Christ the Head (Colossians 1:18), Christ the Reconciler (Colossians 1:20). Certainly, Christ the King is in there; though the passage from Luke 23 has others say that Jesus is messiah or king, sometimes derisively, instead of having Jesus claim it for himself. The inscription on Jesus’ cross in 23:38, “This is the King of the Jews,” was meant sarcastically by the Romans, and it is explicit in its reference to a geopolitical kingship, not a spiritual one.

The language of kingship is very old, and very rooted in human experience. It’s part of the Christian tradition because it’s part of the human experience; people have known and had kings for millennia, so for the writers of the bible, kings were a natural point of comparison to Jesus and a natural metaphor for the divine. The gospels (and especially the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are always talking about the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, with the kingdom-ness resting on the idea that a better, more just, and more righteous kingdom would be inaugurated. This is implicitly a criticism of the earthly kingdoms that they knew, but explicitly a hope for something more to come. This is why Jesus is described as a king, tried and executed as a king, and proclaimed by a king in Christian texts and traditions. Perhaps if we were writing scripture today we would speak of Jesus as a President, a Governor, a Pastor, a Principal, or some other kind of leader. Or maybe we would choose some other kind of comparison, based on qualities instead of role. I have a hard time imagining that we would choose “king.”

What would that language do for us in 2022? Sometimes our language has unintended consequences, and this is one of those times. The shift from “Christ the King” to “Reign of Christ” already signals that we understand how gendered the word “king” is, and how that can be a problem. Over the past several decades, many churches have done a good job of rooting out language that’s exclusionary on the basis of gender. But when we shift from “King” to “Reign,” we lose the gender but keep the hierarchy, and all the associations of empire and power that come with it. So what’s at stake in keeping that language? Do we really think of Jesus as a monarch, and if so, is that the best language to use, and if not, what else might we say?

It's possible that monarchic metaphors are simply too deeply embedded in Christian theological language to replace. Maybe there isn’t a way to talk about Jesus, and the trajectory of his story, without talking about ruling, reigning, and authority. Or maybe we keep it because we could imagine a redemption of power that could be undertaken by reclaiming that language; I think that’s something close to what the synoptic gospels had in mind. The “kingdom of God” in the gospels is always its own kind of criticism of earthly kingdoms, setting up a better option against the status quo. Perhaps that’s why we hang on to this power-laden language, in hopes that we will see it as the critique of earthly power that the gospel writers intended.

Next week begins the new church year, with Advent, and I have always thought that Advent is the perfect way to begin: humble, desperately hopeful, contingent, and fraught. It’s a great way to introduce the story of Jesus, because it doesn’t skip the line to triumph and glory; it makes us pay attention, right away, to the very real difficulty into which Jesus was born. But this week, Christ the King/Reign of Christ does the opposite, in my opinion. It concludes the story with the wrong message, like a song that ends on the wrong note. What would happen if we held the kingship at arm’s length, and forestalled the glory just a bit? What would happen if we embraced one of those other metaphors for Jesus, like healer, teacher, friend, or prophet, instead of king? Our language matters, and our metaphors matter, because they describe and frame our ideas. If kingship doesn’t seem to be the right language anymore, and the metaphor doesn’t ring true for us in the 21st century, perhaps there is a better one. What would happen if we experimented, tried on some new ones, and thought about the trajectory of Jesus’ story as ending somewhere other than kingship? How would that feel?