Treachery and Obedience on the Feast of Christ the King

It’s the Feast of Christ the King again. You, like me, might not have been paying attention, having lots of other things to think about. The church year might not have been the first and most pressing consideration of your week.

And maybe you also didn’t know that there was a massive terrorist attack in Egypt a day or two ago. The death toll is up to three hundred and something. Someone, claiming of be with ISIS, blew up Friday prayers.

In all the bustle of thanksgiving stupor I completely missed what was going on a world away. But that’s the way it is. The thing that’s right in front of me has to be the most important thing. I can’t hold all the anxieties of the world together in myself. I am so limited, blind even, looking out of the narrow scope of my own self justifying vision.

Christ the King Sunday is so awkward for the modern person. The biggest problem with it is that I must surely be king, or even queen. I am the mistress of my world and myself. I rule the tiny cosmos of own sphere. Whatever needs to be measured, weighed, and judged, I can be the one to do it.

Waking up to the reality that someone else is the ruler, the master of all, is a shock to the system. It overturns the proper order of oneself. It is a usurpation, an upsetting of the way things are supposed to be.

And it’s even more awkward that the gentle, mild mannered, shepherding, dying Jesus would have to be the one to climb out of his still tomb and claim to be king, to ascend to the heights of heaven on a cloud, promising to come back in power and glory to judge everyone. Don’t you know that’s the one thing you must never do? Judge others. Lest ye be judged, Jesus.

It’s ok for me to measure everything against myself, to weigh it all in the balances and find everything lacking but my own importance. But it’s not ok for God to be king, for Jesus to lay claim to the universe that he holds together in himself. It’s not ok because it’s not benign.

If I individually am the ruler of myself, I am able to live out the dictum of the age–to follow my heart, to obey my feelings, to fulfill myself and my own sense of calling and purpose. This is the highest good, the greatest glory I can posses–to obey and worship myself.

The idea that I might not be the ruler, that God might have a rightful claim not only to who I am, but how I behave and who I worship is an appallingly treasonous idea. And yet he does. He claims that I actually owe him obedience, that if I don’t keep his commandments, I don’t even really love him.

If I am a Christian I might acknowledge this reality with my mouth. Obeying God might be something I can nod towards and agree to intellectually. But it’s too dangerous a proposition. If I were to obey God I would be admitting my own fundamental wrongness as a person and as a judge. I would have to reorient myself in a direction I am sure I don’t want to go.

And so I am inclined, both when I lie down and when I rise, when I go out and when I come in, to subvert my professed allegiance to God my king by conflating my temporal and troubled desires with the divine decrees of my Sovereign. Rather than taking him at his face, reading his own revelation on the stark page, I will cast about within myself for his voice and will. And this is wonderful because he won’t ever emerge enough from the shadows to contradict me. I proclaim he is king, but I go on in devoted obedience to myself, and am never faced with my own treacherous character. It’s the best.

But it’s got to be the downfall of western evangelical Christianity. If Jesus is king and we are not, but we go on pretending that he is while refusing to obey him, to take him seriously, always elevating the broken desires of the malformed will into the place and purposes of God, we’re eventually going to be shocked out of all happiness.

Only the one who really stumbles onto the fleshy knee of surrender, who waves the white flag of defeat, who capitulates to the cosmic order of God’s divine love–he is God and King, you are his indebted and helpless subject–only that one can be happy now, not to mention rejoicing and satisfied later. And what a curious happiness–obedient trust lightened by casting off the terrible burden of self worship, tipping it off your back, throwing it down, walking away from it forever.

Maybe this Sunday would be a good moment to make a start.