The Politics of the Christian Calendar: Thoughts on Christ the King Sunday

Christ the King Sunday is probably the most political Sunday of the year (with the possible exceptions of Easter, Epiphany, Christmas, Ascension, and Pentecost).  Being the last Sunday of the Church calendar, it concludes the church’s story.  The baby born in Bethlehem, the man that died on the cross, the one that rose from the dead is the King of the Universe.

Christ the King Sunday is the newest major feast of the church founded in 1925 to combat the forces of materialistic secularism and the rising tide of communism and capitalism.  These forces are still alive today and seek dominion in our lives.  Therefore, Christ the King is a great opportunity to talk about what it means to say ‘Jesus is Lord’.

When I was in high school, I responded to lots of altar-calls for Jesus to be my savior.  I have always wanted a savior to get me out of the mess that I am in.  Asking Jesus to be your ‘savior’ is easy, but asking Jesus to be your ‘lord’ is something completely different.  Christians are people who believe that you don’t have to ask Jesus to be the ‘lord of your life’, he already is Lord of Everything.  Christian are people who work hard daily to figure out what it means to live in such a kingdom.

I thought this quote from N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham and New Testament scholar was helpful for this Sunday:

[Caesar Augustus] proclaimed that he had brought justice and peace to the whole world; and, declaring his adoptive father to be divine, stylized himself as ‘son of God.’  Poets wrote songs about the new era that had begun; historians told the long story of Rome’s rise to greatness, reaching its climax 9obviously with Augustus himself.  Augustus, people said was the ‘saviour’ of the world.  He was its king, its ‘lord.’  Increasingly, in the eastern part of his empire, people worshipped him, too, as a god.

Meanwhile, far away, on that same eastern frontier, a boy was born who would within a generation he hailed as ‘son of God’; whose followers would speak of him as ‘saviour’ and ‘lord’; whose arrival, they thought, had brought true justice and peace to the world(Tome Wright, Luke for Everyone, S.P.C.K., 2001, p.23).

In does give new meaning to the beginning of the Christmas story in Luke doesn’t it?  “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered”– little did he know he would set in motion a world changing birth in Bethlehem.  There the King of Kings would be born and the future of Rome would be in great danger.