No king but Jesus

Christ the King/Reign of Christ – Proper 29 (34)
23 November 2025

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Luke 1:68-79
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43

In the spring of 1980 my friend Thorsten and I, we were 16 years old, went on a three day kayaking trip down the Böhme, a tributary of the Aller, then down the Aller, a tributary of the Weser, then the Weser to our home town. The Weser meets the North Sea about another 60 km downstream. It was an idyllic trip down small rivers of the Northern German plain.

We spent our last night tenting on the triangle where the Aller meets the Weser, a beautiful quiet spot, surrounded by water on two sides and hard to get to by vehicle. On our trip, we carried with us a description of the route. It told in great detail where we’d encounter weirs and rapids and how to navigate them. It also told us where to find good resting areas, which required beaches where it’d be easy to take your kayak out of the water. It also told about the camping spot on our last night. Historians believe it to be the location of the Massacre of Verden, where Charlemagne in 782 AD had ordered the slaughter 4500 Saxons who were created in God’s image.

This changed our bucolic camping spot into a memorial site and it changed our prayers that night, even though the slaughter had been committed 1200 years earlier.

If you were to travel Germany, you would find that the Roman empire extended through Bavaria, parts of Hesse, and westward along the Rhine River. Christianity had travelled through the Roman Empire, and especially following Constantine. But although St Boniface had evangelized northern Germany, where I was raised, about 150 years before Charlemagne subdued the Saxons, the region had remained pagan. Growing up in secular northern Germany we quipped that Christianity had come late and had not stuck.

Charlemagne is remembered for having united most of Western and Central Europe and as the first emperor after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and for the political and social changes that his reign had brought. Yet Charlemagne is also remembered for his wars against the Saxons, accompanied by forced mass baptisms which the church deemed insufficient if only for the lack of instruction preceding the baptisms.

And yet, while Charlemagne christianized formerly pagan parts of Europe, there is no day on which the Church commemorates Charlemagne. The Nazis liked Charlemagne and built a memorial at another massacre site¹ of the Saxon Wars but the Church venerates not emperors but saints.

For people of faith kingship has always been a fraught commodity. When Israel desired a king – rejecting its election as God’s own people – it wanted to be like other nations. Before Israel is given a king Samuel warns the people what kingship looks like. He says, ¹¹‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; ¹²and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. ¹⁵He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’ (1 Samuel 8)
In other words: Israel was to be different from Egypt, it was not to be like the hierarchical societies of its neighbours, with a few select at the top reigning over the impoverished masses, but having a king was going to make Israel like the Egypt they had left.

A few verses earlier the Lord comforts Samuel and says, they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them (v.7), and so it is clear that Israel’s true king is God. God’s kingship had protected Israel from becoming like Egypt despite the flaws of the tribal confederacy and the system of judges that had existed up to this point.
It is consistent then that biblical writers judge Israel’s kings according to their faithfulness to God on one hand and their administration of justice on the other. And the two belong together because you cannot be faithful to God without exercising justice for the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. And it suggest that true authority is born of moral integrity.

Later Ezekiel and Jeremiah² hold the kings of Israel responsible for the catastrophe of the exile.

The Church venerates not kings and emperors but saints.

Beyond the egalitarian understanding of the New Testament that declares every follower of Jesus to be a saint by virtue of their belonging to Christ and of the Holy Spirit dwelling within them, we know that there is such a thing as holiness, and we know when we are in the presence of holiness. All of us know that. Holiness is that which is of God and therefore belongs to God and so all created things are holy because they belong to God. Holy are the scriptures and the sacraments because they are the means by which God comes to us which is why we call them the means of grace. And yet a life lived with God is also marked by holiness and those the church venerates as saints are those whose lives show signs of being Christ-like. They are no longer marked by the power they possess, the things that they are good at, or the things that they have, but by the presence of God. Like Jesus they have emptied themselves, for the power of God is the inversion of worldy of power. This is not something that happens all of a sudden but something we practice our whole life long. I am weak but he is strong, sings the hymn.³

Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians by proclaiming Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. He says that ²⁵(…) God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Jesus reigns from the cross: [W]hen I am lifted up from the earth, [I] will draw all people to myself. (John 12:32)
Jesus turns our notions of kingship on its head and on the cross reveals to us the true nature of God. By revealing to us the true nature of God, he also reveals to us the true nature of ourselves for we are created in God’s image.

We may consider this weakness, but if you do you have to consider the cross weakness, and you will reject the Sermon on the Mount as Russell Moore tells that some have come to consider Jesus’s exhortation to turn the other cheek a liberal talking point and something that just doesn’t work.⁴ Such rejection is a rejection of the economy of God and thus a rejection of God’s power over my life.
Addressing the desire for power my friend Doug Lee warns, “[m]erely touting ‘our God is bigger’ buys into the false narrative that all power is alike and the difference between Christ and all pretenders is merely one of magnitude.”⁵

Far from it being weak to claim the crucified as our king, the kingship of Jesus sets us free to belong not to empire or nation, market or ideology, but to God. Claiming Christ as our king means to deny the right of powers and principalities to lay claim on us. Far from it being weak, claiming Christ as our king has empowered liberation movements throughout the life of the Church.
Claiming Christ as our King, who first claimed us, frees our imagination for a world not driven by markets or power but by love. A world in which our king says, Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. (Mt 25)

This is the power of Christ as our king.

Amen.