This Week: Proper 29B
Gospel: John 18:33-37
We are once again arriving at the final Sunday of the church year, the lectionary cycle, with a conversation about authority, with an image of Jesus challenging authority, by the Messiah who challenged the way people understood messiahs were to be, to use the authority of God to undermine the disciples’ expectation of authority.
We cannot escape the question of authority here.
And yet, the vision we are offered is not a person with no authority, far from it. But one whose authority doesn’t match our expectations. It isn’t dressed in robes of power, but the humble garments of service and faith.
This day was named Christ the King in 1925 as a response to the Great War and the desire to go searching for authority in the hands of “great men of history”. It was the church’s attempt to reorient authority to Jesus and away from the world. In this way, the pope was attempting to use the word king in the church the way Jesus uses messiah in the gospels—to subvert it and reorient its meaning.
This was a noble endeavor.
My own response is buffeted by the fact that, after the church so greatly attempted to reorient the people of faith to Christ’s authority, we would see the rise of Naziism and fascism so soon after. That Hitler’s own Christofascist attempt to use Jesus’s authority as a vehicle for his own, that he could be seen as attempting to make the kingdom of God in the nation of Germany, blessed with greatness by God demonstrates the failure of bestowing the kingship of Christ, for this merely convinced the Nazi Party to assume they were doing the will of God.
What Christ the King or the Reign of Christ as a feast day require of us is to reflect on the way Jesus undermines that vision of authority and embodies a different vision as lord, king, and messiah. It means telling the story of authority from the bottom up. And then telling it again.