I’m in San Antonio for this long weekend, attending the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. I got into town Friday afternoon, and I’m leaving Tuesday afternoon, and in between I’ve been perusing the latest publications in religion and biblical studies, catching up with old friends, doing some networking, and of course attending the marathon sessions of scholarly presentations that make up the backbone of the conference. I presented a paper on Saturday afternoon—a queer futurity reading of Luke’s parable of the prodigal son—but other than that, I’ve been ducking in and out of sessions to hear papers and panels from other scholars. This is one of the most reliably efficient ways to keep one’s scholarly energy going, and to stay current in the field. There’s so much to be learned from the thousands of colleagues who are gathered here for the conference.
Because my days here are packed, with 12 straight hours or more of sessions and meetings and receptions planned every day, I don’t have much space or time for writing the kind of full-fledged, thematically-consistent post that I try to put up about the lectionary every Monday. Instead, I’ll do what I have done once or twice before during busy times, and offer a bullet-point-style overview of the lectionary texts for next Sunday, November 26th.
· For churches that follow the patterns and rhythms of ecclesiastical time through the lectionary, this Sunday the 26th is the last Sunday of the church year. That means that the cycle that began with the first Sunday of Advent in late 2022 is coming to a conclusion this week. Next week, with the first Sunday of Advent 2023, the new year will begin.
The final day of the church year is traditionally called “Christ the King” Sunday, or sometimes “Reign of Christ” Sunday by those who want to avoid gendered language. I am not sure how beneficial it is, to my mind, to remove the gendered language while keeping the language of kingship intact. I’ve written here before about the notion of kyriarchy, which is Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza’s way of describing the intersecting and overlapping structures of oppression that show up in the New Testament. Moving from “Christ the King” to “Reign of Christ” strikes me as a way to ameliorate one thing we might find troubling about the name, while leaving another thing untouched.
Why might someone (like me) have an issue with the language of kingship for Jesus? For me, it’s because a “king” can never be the solely benevolent kind of figure that some people (including the gospel writers) imagine when they use the word to describe Jesus. For me, a king is the personification of unearned power and privilege, a figure who rules by fiat over people who are trapped under his power. The gospel writers came from a time and place where kings were plentiful and well-known, and they were using the word “king” to describe Jesus because it signified things like power, regality, protection, supremacy, and triumph. It obviously made sense for them to use that kind of language for Jesus—and in claiming that Jesus was king, they were making a soft and implicit claim that other people (Caesar, for example) were not king. I can get on board with that. What’s less compelling to me is the idea that the endpoint of Jesus’ life and ministry was some kind of enduring and triumphant rule. I don’t read the stories about his life and come to the conclusion that his proper place was on a throne; I read stories about Jesus and conclude that he belonged to the margins and the outside of power. It doesn’t make sense to me to imagine Jesus reigning over anything. Your mileage may vary!
The passage from Matthew 25 in the lectionary this Sunday is one of the places where Jesus is spoken about as a king in explicit terms. (Notice the slippage between verses 31 and 34…the passage begins by discussing the Son of Man, but by verse 34 the main character is “the king”). What is the role of Jesus, as king, in this passage? Judgement. He sits in judgement of “all the nations.” (The Greek here is using the very common term ethne, which is the word that’s usually behind the translations “gentiles,” “pagans,” “heathens,” or “nations” when we read the New Testament in English). The text introduces a different metaphor that doesn’t seem very much at home in a royal court; suddenly this judgement over the nations presided at by a king takes on the form of a shepherd separating sheep from goats.
I can remember being a teenager, hearing this story, and trying to remember which ones were supposed to be better—sheep or goats—and wondering why they both can’t be useful or valuable.
The passage from Matthew takes another turn; suddenly, this king-who-is-also-a-shepherd is making his decisions based on ethics. Did you give the king food? Did you clothe him when he was naked? Did you welcome him when he was a stranger? And more than that, the king is asking, did you do these things for anyone else? That’s the upshot of his questioning; the king-shepherd is pointing out that the way you treat everyday people is the way you treat the king. And—this is implicit in the passage—you don’t want to mistreat the king.
Why not? Why wouldn’t you mistreat the king? Because he has the power to hurt you?
It turns out, in 25:46, that yes, that is indeed the reason. “And these will go away into eternal punishment,” it reads. See? I am not sure kingship language serves us well here, theologically speaking.
I can remember one of my favorite professors of all time, a religion and philosophy professor in my undergraduate years, Kathy Meacham, pointing to this passage. It was the height of the “What Would Jesus Do” era, when someone had made a fortune making bracelets and t-shirts and water bottles with that question on them. WWJD, you probably remember seeing everywhere. Meacham pointed out to us then that if you want to do biblical ethics, the question is not really WWJD, but JAYDNDITTLOTYDNDITM—“just as you did not do it to the least of these, you did not do it to me.” That’s a starkly different biblical ethics than the WWJD crowd was pushing. It probably doesn’t fit as well on a bracelet. Instead of centering Jesus as the perfect avatar of right behavior in every moment, Matthew 25 is centering right treatment of others as the ultimate guide to behavior. That’s a much better ethics, in my opinion.
BUT, I am still not all that comfortable with the implication that treating others justly and rightly is only important because that treatment transfers, by proxy, to the king, Jesus. Can we not treat each other justly because it is the right thing to do? I would hope so.
For me, Reign of Christ or Christ the King Sunday is more about the anticipation of Advent (my favorite season of the church year) than it is about anything else. Kingship doesn’t work for me very well, as a theological category. Reigning isn’t much better. But it’s a wide tradition, with many ways of understanding things, so perhaps it does work for you. If so, I wish you a joyous Reign of Christ. As for me, I’m getting excited for the new year, where we start again in expectation, longing, and senseless hope. What I like about Advent is that it points to the largeness of the world’s suffering, and that its solution (a pregnancy, basically) is so absurdly unsuited to the task of making anything better, compared to things like kings and armies and international politics. Advent takes stock of the depths of the world’s chaotic despair and offers a response that is so everyday, so long-term, so tiny, and so insignificant that it doesn’t possibly feel adequate to the task. That feels pretty well suited to the mood of the world right now. Things are messed up and they don’t show any signs of getting better. Now as ever, the world is on fire, innocent people suffer, and everyone wonders where God might have wandered off to. Advent comes along and asks us to sit with it, and look away from the kings and toward something about to be born. I’m here for it.
A couple of things:
1. I like that phrase "a senseless hope". We keep waiting for something we don't think will happen, but because we - senselessly - chose to believe it, we bring it a little closer.
2. I don't remember who, but one of the ancient Chinese sages said something like, "Do not do the right thing because you will be rewarded by the ruler, or to avoid punishment. Do not do the right thing because you will be rewarded by Heaven. Do the right thing because it is the right thing."
Can we not treat each other justly because it is the right thing to do? I would hope so.
BINGO!