Mary of Teck, the wife of King George the Fifth, was the Queen of the United Kingdom from 1910 to 1936. She lived just long enough to see her granddaughter accede to the throne in February 1952. Mary is portrayed by the actor Eileen Atkins in the popular Netflix drama, “The Crown.” Reclining in her bedroom, ailing from lung disease, Queen Mary teaches Queen Elizabeth the fundamentals of monarchy: what it is, what it is not, and what the young queen must do as she begins her long reign.
Elizabeth is concerned about her new role and her duties (or lack thereof) as the nation responds to a major crisis — a toxic smog that paralyzed London in December of 1952, leading to thousands of deaths. She wonders if, as sovereign, she is entitled to interfere politically to direct or contradict the elected government, which initially appears to be woefully unresponsive to the challenge. If the crisis is mishandled, isn’t she answerable to the public, just like her ministers? Shouldn’t she do something? And if she fails to act, shouldn’t she have to answer to her subjects for that failure? Queen Mary’s advice is to remain quiet, to do nothing, to simply stand stoically as an icon of divinely-ordained monarchy. Here is what this dramatic television show imagines that Queen Mary said to her granddaughter:
“Monarchy is God's sacred mission to grace and dignify the earth. To give ordinary people an ideal to strive towards, an example of nobility and duty to raise them in their wretched lives. Monarchy is a calling from God. That is why you are crowned in an abbey, not a government building. Why you are anointed, not appointed. It's an archbishop that puts the crown on your head, not a minister or public servant. Which means that you are answerable to God in your duty, not the public.”
In this imagined conversation, Mary is dry-witted and more than a little delightful. She wickedly disparages Prince Philip’s unimpressive royal pedigree, and generally comes off as someone with whom you’d love to ‘spill the tea.’ Who in human history would you want to meet, living or dead, if you could pick anyone? If this television show is anything close to accurate, I might sign up for a hilariously fun and naughty dinner with Queen Mary.
But, alas, the joke is on her. Her definition of monarchy as a sacred mission of God to benefit poor, ordinary, humble commoners falls apart when we actually take a good look at what God is really like. If the British sovereign truly is answerable to God (and, for that matter, if the American president, when taking the oath of office, asks for God’s help), they might be in for a shock. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not an impassive sovereign preening grandly above the “ordinary people” who are leading what Mary calls “wretched lives.” If human monarchs really answered to God, and if their understanding of God is Christian, then they would have to grapple with the person of Jesus Christ, whom we praise as God the Son. They would have to face the fact that Jesus comes among us not as a blue-blood monarch, but as one of Queen Mary’s common wretches.
And yet we close every liturgical year by praising Christ the King, in a feast created just a century ago to remind everyone in post-World-War-I Christendom that their true king is not the emperors they just defeated in war, not the crowned heads of Europe, and not the presidents and prime ministers of other victorious nations: their true king — our true King, the King of the whole universe — is Jesus Christ.
But Christ the King eternally eludes our understanding. He surprises us. He may also frustrate and even disappoint us. This King does not ride in the horse-drawn Gold State Coach with a proud and dry-witted queen by his side; he is a victim of state-sponsored execution. This King does not control all branches of government and shape the rule of law in his own image; he says nothing in his own defense when subjected to a sham trial. This King dominates by submitting, rises by dying. This King subverts the concept of kingship itself.
Meanwhile, a hundred years on, human history hasn’t changed much since the Roman Catholic Church dreamt up this feast. Authoritarianism is once again on the rise, worldwide, and incumbent political leaders are being voted out because they have failed to save people from economic upheaval, contagious disease, chronic warfare, cultural malaise, malevolent misinformation, and climate disasters. The people want a leader; they want a savior; they want a king.
But Christ the King won’t save the people from the perils of life on this planet; he endures those perils himself. Christ the King doesn’t take command; he comes among us as one who serves. Christ the King doesn’t behave like an inscrutable, remote British figurehead, but neither does he rush in to solve all of our problems. Christ the King is found among the ordinary people. Our Mighty Lord is an itinerant preacher, a countryside healer, a companion, a friend.
But Jesus as preacher, healer, companion, friend — that doesn’t quite describe him, either. It gets us closer, but it’s not quite right. Who is Christ the King? If he’s just a humble shepherd, I don’t think he will help us much in these hard times. He’s clearly not strutting above the clouds, crushing our enemies, putting everything right; but he’s not just our buddy. Christ the King is not our pal.
My friend Susan Cherwien (may her memory be a blessing) can help us understand Christ the King, understand him in a way that can be more useful to us, and in a way that can form us, and then send us to minister to our neighbors. If we truly understand Christ the King, we could go from here and actually make the world a little bit better.
Susan wrote a poem about Christ the King, concluding every stanza with the image of Christ “reigning from the cross.” You can see it on your bulletin cover, and you can sing the poem a bit later in the service, at the Offertory. Christ the King reigns from the cross. But the cross is not a gleaming wall hanging or a glittering piece of jewelry. The cross is an instrument of execution. This idea might be more powerful if we imagine Christ the King reigning from a lethal-injection bed. Christ the King is found not comfortably seated in a plush throne room, but held painfully in a position of abject humiliation and defeat. Christ the King is the Lord of the universe, yet he can’t overpower a nurse in a white lab coat, preparing a lethal, heart-stopping sedative. And yet … Christ rules from that lethal-injection bed. Christ reigns from that cross.
A death-row inmate reigns as King; an executed criminal is our monarch. For this to make any sense, we have to let go of just one idea about kingship. We have to hold at least two ideas together. Christ the King does not solve all our problems or defeat all our enemies, nor does he reign as a serene head of state, holding court in a palace. But he is also not just our good friend. Christ looms over all creation, yet dwells humbly beneath everything and everyone. Both, and.
Susan Cherwien offers two pairs of contrasting, both/and images. She sings of Christ as our “heavenly foundation,” neatly joining an airy, ethereal image to an earthy, concrete one. But my favorite phrase in Susan’s poem is this: Christ the King is our “wounded intercessor.”
Wounded intercessor: this King does not sit serenely on a gilded chair, orb in hand; no, his hands are marked with the humiliation of a violent execution. And yet he intercedes for us, goes before us; he carries our own wounds, our own grief, into God’s heart. When we in turn pray for the whole world — which is something we always do whenever we proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ — we too are wounded intercessors.
We are not mighty lords or warriors able to slay the dragons of Sin and Death, yet in our wounded vulnerability we rise up, together, to stand alongside all who are wounded, all who are vulnerable, all who are cut down and defeated. We take our SPiN wagons around the neighborhood to hand out protein bars and blankets not because we are pampered bluebloods living in palaces, but because we all get hungry, we all feel cold, we all are anxious about food and health care and shelter.
The royal road of Christ the King is traveled by people who know themselves what it’s like to be hungry; to be huddling unprotected in a rainstorm; to hear the doctor say, “I have something difficult I need to tell you.” Because we know what it’s like, we can draw alongside others who are suffering. The throne room of Christ the King is filled with comfortable chairs not for the haughty Queen Mary, but for people who are on their feet all day, tending the sick and keeping vigil with the dying, people who know all along that they will one day need tending, and need their own deathbed prayers. When you intercede for the world, a few moments from now, praying for the church, the nations, this community, those who are sick, and those who have died, you can only say these prayers as one for whom we also pray. You can only pray for the world from your vulnerable place inside this world.
When we baptize, as we will do yet again next Sunday, we anoint the newly baptized with fragrant oil, a ritual borrowed from the coronation liturgy for kings and queens. But we apply the oil in the shape of the cross — we trace the shape of an instrument of execution on the foreheads of the baptized. This anointing is echoed every year, in the springtime, when we are all marked on the forehead with a cross of ashes, a reminder of mortality. Healing and illness; nourishment and hunger; shelter and homelessness; companionship and solitude; power and weakness; virtue and vice; success and failure; life and death.
Such is the Way of our King. Such is the Way of the Cross. Such is our life in the realm of our Sovereign, where we reach out to one another to share God’s Peace, embracing one another with wounded hands.
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Preached on the Last Sunday after Pentecost (Christ the King, Year B), November 24, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
2 Samuel 23:1-7
Psalm 132:1-13
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37