No thrones. No crowns. One King

Sermon by The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos

Colossians 1:11-20

Luke 22:33-43

‘The power belongs to the people… on October 18 more than seven million of us rose up at more than 2,700 events in all fifty states… to say: America has no kings.  Our task is to stay united, stay vigilant, and continue to push back.  No thrones.  No crowns.  No kings.’

The Gospel returns us to the upper room.  Jesus has broken bread and shared the cup.  Now, he and his disciples are about to leave for the Mount of Olives.  He gives them a few last instructions.  Readers with long memories of St Luke will notice a sharp change in what Jesus says.  He performs the manoeuvre dreaded above all others by our politicians – a U-turn.  Earlier in their time together, he sends them out to proclaim the kingdom and to heal, telling them to take nothing for the journey: no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, and not even an extra tunic.  Now he has a very different message.  ‘The one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag.  And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one’.  The time for travelling light, dependent on the kindness of strangers, is over.

The instruction to buy swords jars: gentle Jesus appears to endorse an arms race.  There have always been muscular Christians only too willing to take up the cudgels on behalf of the faith, metaphorically or literally.  But Jesus is not weaponizing the fledgling Church, which will perhaps disappoint our Christian nationalist siblings.  The sufficiency of two swords in the face of the entire Roman occupation force makes that clear.  And when the High Priest’s thugs come to arrest Jesus and a sword is drawn against one of them Jesus is quick to act.  ‘No more of this’ he says, healing the injured man.  No: Jesus knows that the times have changed; that those who follow him must understand that the times have changed; and that they must therefore change.

Change how?  What lies ahead is perilous.  The villages, seashores, and byways of rural Galilee are behind the Eleven. Instead, Jesus applies the words of the prophet Isaiah to himself.  ‘He was counted among the lawless’.  He is about to be given into the hands of the mighty and the unscrupulous.  Those who would follow him must understand that the changed environment makes changed demands.  The bag perhaps reminds them that they have no home; the purse that they must scavenge to survive; the sword that they will be hunted.

A changed environment: this is what those seven million Americans claim.  They sense that they inhabit an increasingly authoritarian era, where the norms and values with which they have lived are losing their grip on their country’s culture.  What they sense, we perhaps sense when we study the world as the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws to a close.  In Russia, in China, in Israel, in Turkey, in Sudan… the list goes on… the trajectory towards freedom which had seemed irresistible twenty-five years ago appears to have been successfully resisted.  Brutal wars are prosecuted; international bodies are discredited; independent institutions (including media organizations) are attacked.  The slogan of the American resistance seems apt:  ‘No thrones.  No crowns.  No kings’.  Apt because in global geopolitics the rules-based order appears to have been usurped by an unending Game of Thrones.

No kings.  As the exercise of unchecked power grows around us – and it’s unchecked power that is the concern, not the thoroughly checked power of constitutional monarchs such as our own – we celebrate the last Sunday of the liturgical year with a feast.  Christ the King was instituted by the Pope in the mid-1920s.  As fascism loomed in Italy the Holy Father was determined to assert the universal authority of Jesus Christ.  The nations of Christian Europe might run after the Duce and the Fuhrer, but Christians could acknowledge only one Lord.  It’s that history that has always made me slightly nervous about today’s feast.  To assign to Christ a label that – as it were – pits him against those who exercise unchecked earthly power, including men who epitomize the very worst about humanity, is to do Christ a disservice (which is probably the understatement of the year).

Because if Christ is King then we are required radically to change every expectation we have of what kingship means for who those who bear that title and wield that power.  He is crowned with thorns; he is served sour wine; soldiers throw dice for his sweat-stained rags; his throne is a roughly-hewn cross; when we acclaim him our King we read of his agony in the garden as he awaits his coronation.  And when in Baptism we become citizens of his kingdom then we die with him, in the deep waters of the font.  It’s kingship of a sort that has the tyrants of our world running for the hills.  If Christ is King, then Christians must read the signs of their times as did the Eleven when they left the upper room, and they must study the exercise of power as it is being experienced today.  Kyiv.  Khan Younis.  El Fasher.

In my first sermon as Dean of Salisbury I quoted WB Yeats.  That was seven years ago, and five Prime Ministers ago.  It was in the days before Brexit, before Covid, before Ukraine, before Gaza:

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…’
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

I said then that here the centre must hold.  I believe it now as I believed it then.  The centre must hold because the centre is Christ.  ‘In him’ writes St Paul, ‘all things hold together’.  The ultimate truth of who we are and whose we are is revealed not in drone strikes and ground offensives, not in the smearing of opponents, not in the manipulation of wealth, not in the concentration of power in a few pairs of hands or in one pair of hands.  It is revealed in ‘… the blood of the cross’, the sign and seal of God’s love for the world, of Christ’s kingdom in the world.

No thrones.  No crowns.  One King.  But, sisters and brothers, the kingdom is under siege.  The one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag.  And the one who has no sword must sell her cloak and buy one.  The mighty and the unscrupulous grow in confidence.  In these days, you and I are counted among the lawless.