Sermon
given by The Archbishop of Canterbury
on the Patronal Feast of Christ the King
in the Church of Christ the King, Gordon Square, London
Saturday 19th November 2005

Now that means a number of things, and one of the most obvious things is exactly what we’re doing here and now. Here we are with our faces turned, mostly, in one direction, that is, focused on the table of the Lord where the king comes to share his feast with us. The simple fact of a great crowd of people with their eyes and, we hope, their hearts and minds focused in one direction: that’s ‘playing the king’, a human community drawn together around the altar of our Lord, held in one, their hearts fixed upon him. And, as we approach that table, to receive the bread of life, the way we walk and look and hold our hands, the way we kneel, ought to ‘play the king’. It ought to tell the world who it is that we expect to meet at this table, and when after Mass the Blessed Sacrament is carried around this church, and then held on high to be adored, as we kneel we bend and bow before him, we ‘play the king’, we show the world his kingship.

When Christian worship is truly itself it is worship that shows the world the lordship of Christ. And when our worship is casual, over-familiar, thoughtless, and lazy, we are not ‘playing’. So, as we worship, we speak of Christ as king, we ‘play’ the part with Christ of his kingly rule. What we do is also in our attitude to what it is that we have received from Christ. We need in our speaking and thinking about our faith to show our belief in Christ’s kingship as well. There are ways of talking about God and of talking about our Lord Jesus Christ which fail to reveal any sense that here is another, a glorious other, a mysterious world-changing stranger, who comes to us so that our universe may be transfigured. We fail to show that humility, that gratitude, in our speaking and thinking that alone will tell the world: this is the king, this is the Lord. So it is crucial that in the Church there should always be faithful witnesses to what has been given by the Lord, whose thinking and speaking should always remind the whole Church that what we believe in is not of our own devising or to suit our own convenience. It is the gift of a new creation, and another world. And in both our worship and our thinking we ‘play the king’; we show what it is for Christ to be Lord.

But there is yet more, and that more is what the Lord says to us in the gospel we have just heard read [S. Matthew 25.31-46] when, as you might say, the whole concept is turned on its head. Look around in the world and you will see that there are some human beings whose service and attention, and humility, before the needs of others, is such that we might almost say they are treating them as kings: the person who bows down to wash the feet of another, the person who takes a risk to visit someone in prison in a country where that can bring real danger, the person who puts themselves at risk to make another safe, who empties themselves in order that another may live. Such a person is treating the one that they serve as king – they are ‘playing the king’. When we as believers engage in that kind of service we say “the needy”, “the prisoner”, “the sick”, “the suffering”, “the lonely”. These are our “lords”, these are the ones who have a claim on our love and attention and compassion, these are the ones who have a claim on our lives. We are treating them, whether we know it or not, as if they were Jesus Christ; and – so our Lord seems to say to us in the gospel – if in our discipleship we ‘play the king’ by treating the needy and the suffering, the hungry and the lonely in this way, we are once again ‘playing his kingship’; we are showing ‘his lordship’, the lordship of the one who made himself poor for our sake, who make himself vulnerable, the lordship of the one who did not think equality with God a thing to be clung to but humbled himself. This is the kingship that has the authority to shape the whole world and to shape every corner of our behaviour. He it is, therefore, whom we honour when we honour the needy in his name.

So, on this feast of Christ the King we ask ourselves: “how do we play his kingship?” We worship aright, we bow down in reverence, and enjoy. We show to the world hearts, minds, energy, directed like iron filings through a magnet towards the great magnetic centre of beauty, authority, love, power, pain and triumph: our Lord Jesus Christ crucified and risen, the Lord of all. We ‘play the king’ when we speak with reverence and love and humility of what we have received from our Lord Jesus Christ, and we strengthen our resolve to be faithful to the gift he has given. And then we turn in reverence, in humility, to those most deeply in need, and those most easily forgotten, and we recognise that in Christ they are the kings and queens who demand our service. We go to them as our king does, girded with a towel, ready to do the most menial service. So, please God, in worship, in word and thought and in action, we shall show who is Lord and what his lordship means. St Augustine said in his great book The City of God that the kingdom of God was what was seen in holy lives; where a life was lived that spoke of Christ’s kingship, there was the kingdom. The saints, those holy people whose worship and word and action showed the lordship of Christ, are those to whom we look to seek what Christ’s kingship means. And it’s very appropriate that during this month of November there is a kind of cycle that takes us from the celebration of All Saints to the celebration (just before Advent) of the kingship of Christ. It’s all one vision, a vision of the kingdom, of the lives of holy people, those who ‘play the king’ by how they live in the world. St Augustine is quite careful not to say that the Church is the same as the kingdom. (He was nothing if not a realist!) And yet the kingdom lives in the Church because it lives in holy people.

And one last reflection may be in order in the life of a Church that is not always what you might call harmonious by human standards, not always a place where it’s easy to find hope or confidence, except in the gospel and the sacraments that never change. In this Church do we treat one another as bearers of the kingship of Christ? Do we bow down in veneration before each other, remembering that the baptised person next to us is anointed with Christ’s prophetic and priestly and royal power? Do we above all else make our Church a place where we joyfully recognise the dignity of Jesus in one another? Because it may be also that, as we treat one another with due reverence in our Church, we proclaim what it is for Christ to be king.

Our Church is vulnerable to the fashions of a society in which conflict, and winning and losing dictate everything. Minorities face difficulties. There are all kinds of triumphalisms on the loose, liberal no less than conservative. And what the feast of Christ the King should tell us is that triumphalism at the expense of other members of Christ’s body is the least effective way of showing that Christ is king. In our tensions and our anxieties let us at the very least bow down to one another, recognising the dignity of our Lord in each other. Let us ‘play the king’ by how we treat one another in prayer and patience, so that not only in worship but in word, and action and service to those outside, that in the very fabric of our relations with one another as believers, let us hold Christ up as king, and let us show a community of hearts and minds, energy and intelligence, drawn towards him so strongly and straightly and powerfully that the world may begin to ask “Who is it who can so powerfully draw the hearts of human creatures?” And we say on this feast with all the joy and conviction we can muster: “Who but our Lord? Who else but Jesus?” Looking up, they saw no one else but Jesus alone. Can we do that? Can we play his kingship? Can we honour his lordship? Can we show him to the world as the centre of all things, the desire and judge of all the nations, to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be all might and majesty, dominion and glory, now and for ever. Amen.