Christ the King

Kalamazoo Mennonite Fellowship
November 22, 2009
Will Fitzgerald

Christ as King

According to the liturgical calendar, this is the last Sunday of the year. It is the celebration of “Christ the King.” Next week, we begin the new year with our celebration of Advent.

I have been thinking a lot about Christ as King this week, and what I have to offer is more of a meditation than a teaching. Partly this is because I have a somewhat difficult time in thinking about kings being a good thing. Kings represent to me much of what is bad about the world’s system: powerful men forcing others to do what is in the powers’ best interest, rather than what is good and useful for those they oppress. So to call Christ a king … is this an outmoded or even evil way to talk about Jesus?

I am immediately confronted, though, with the gospel message that Jesus brings. At the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus declared, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:14) Jesus’s good news was that God’s kingdom was arriving, even as he spoke.

Furthermore, when the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom was coming, Jesus replied:

The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is amongyou. (Luke 17:20b-21)

So, by this time, the kingdom of God had come, not in the way that kings and kingdoms come—through military victory and oppressive force—but in some, less strident and obvious way.

Contagious Impurity

This week, I have been reading a book, Rabbi Jesus, by Bruce Chilton. Although I have a lot of issues with this Chilton’s overuse of conjecture upon conjecture, there are several things that I found stimulating and useful. There has been a bit of a cottage industry in understanding Jesus as a first century Jew, and Chilton’s book helped me navigate some current theories of Jesus in light of his Jewishness and the Judaisms of his time. And here are some ideas that were prompted by my reading of Chilton as I was thinking about the Jesus and the kingdom.

We know that a lot of Jewish practice of the day was driven by a desire to be “clean” or “pure,” and that certain things and actions were unclean and impure, and that coming into contact with them would make oneself unclean and impure. Mark 7, for example, describes how some Pharisees and scribes notice that Jesus and his disciples ate their food without ritually washing their hands or their food, thereby making themselves ritually impure, “For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it;and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles, and beds.”

In other words, these impurities were spread a bit like a contagious disease: touch something unclean, and you become unclean, too. Without commenting on whether these rules were good or bad (and both Jesus and Paul distinguished between good Torah and bad application of Torah), it’s clear that these rules were hard on lots of kinds of people, especially those who were constantly in an unclean state, such as those with skin diseases, or bleeding—to say nothing of Gentiles! Not only were they unclean, they also could make others catch their impurity.

Contagious Health

Jesus’s kingdom is opposite of this. The power and the purity of the kingdom spreads out, contagiously purifying and releasing people.

It is a useful spiritual exercise, and I recommend it to you, that you go through the book of Mark and look at the people who receive release or wholeness or purity or healing from Jesus, and see how the kingdom of God was spreading, for example:

Fishermen like Simon and Andrew, and James and John. These are devout Jewish men, but poor; and Jesus’s gospel is spread to these poor, and the kingdom spreads.
Levi, a Jewish tax collector, but who is ‘tainted’ by his interactions with the Roman powers, is called and the kingdom spreads.
People with skin diseases—who are often called lepers in the scriptures, but their diseases were mostly likely different from what is now called Hansen’s disease—are cured and declared clean by Jesus, and the kingdom spreads.
Jairus’s daughter is declared dead, yet Jesus takes her by the hand, and, rather than Jesus’s becoming unclean by touching, she is brought back from her ‘sleep,’ and the kingdom spreads..
The woman with a constant issue of blood, and who is therefore always contagiously unclean, touches Jesus’s clothes, and his power releases her, and the kingdom spreads.
A Gentile woman, the Syrophoenician woman, talks Jesus into healing her daughter, and Jesus heals both the daughter, and commends the woman for her faith, and the kingdom spreads.
And think about the demon-possessed man! He has everything against him: he’s bloody from his own self-mutilation, he lives in a graveyard in Gentile lands near pigs. It’s a perfect storm of impurity; yet Jesus releases him, and he sits clothed and in his right mind, and he is sent as an emissary of God’s kingdom to spread it further.

This is the kind of king our King Jesus is. His Kingdom contagiously spreads, by his power and Spirit, releasing and healing more and more people; and those in the kingdom, he heals and releases more and more.

So, I ask: what makes you feel unclean? From what external or internal forces do you need release? George Fox used to say, “Christ has come to teach His people.” What power of Christ do you need today?