Christ the King: Comfort and Subversion
This coming Sunday many churches will observe the feast of Christ the King. The image of Christ as a king is a source of both comfort and radical challenge, contrasting majestic power with the subversive sacrificial reality of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels, particularly in John 18.
The image of Christ as a glorious and powerful ruler is often more appealing than the helpless infant or the tortured crucified figure on the cross. However, the celebration of Christ the King must be understood through the lens of Jesus’ passion, because it fundamentally challenges our conceptions of power and privilege. Christ the King stands in contrast to and questions earthly power, triumphalism, and abuse of status. The Church’s glorification of Christ the King must be dissociated from historical and current expressions of oppressive power.
If we turn to the Johannine narrative from John 18, the arrest and trial before Pilate depicts Jesus as a criminal, not an opulent king, highlighting his apparent powerlessness and eventual condemnation. Pilate on the other hand represents imperial power and its delusion. When he asks Jesus, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?,’ Pilate politicises Jesus’ life and ministry. But his subsequent question: ‘What is Truth?’ shows his failure to recognize the Incarnate Truth standing before him. This timeless question lingers down the ages and needs to be asked again in our contemporary age of misinformation. Jesus asserts that his incarnational purpose ‘is to testify to the truth.’ Jesus subverts and transforms our limited understanding of power through his life, death, and resurrection. His kingship is found in his humility, sacrifice, and as a victim of violence, despised and rejected. Throughout the gospels, Christ our saviour and king is found among the marginalized, the rejected, and the victims of political violence. Jesus uses the image of the throne not for self-aggrandizement, but for service, a seat from which to pursue justice and love.
Jesus’ power, unlike Pilate’s, is rooted in generous hospitality and freedom, offering everyone the ‘power to become the children of God.’ The core challenge of embodying the subversive Christ the King in our recent conversations on immigration, asylum seekers and nationalism, is to testify to the truth. We must actively resist the language of worldly powers that dehumanises and scapegoats vulnerable people. This requires a fundamental shift from viewing people as economic commodities and burdens to one of safeguarding everyone’s inherent God-given dignity.
Our social fragmentation is rooted in our ‘othering’ of people different from ourselves, when we talk about statistics rather than people with families, histories, and stories. The humility of Christ the King provides a fundamental reframing of our worldview, inviting us to dismantle our own perceptions and exercises of power.
Every nation has the right to debate and establish legal processes for the safe movement of people and the complexities surrounding immigration. The Feast of Christ the King offers a challenge to resist the politicisation and commodification of people in order to prioritise dignity over political expediency.
Embodying Christ’s kingship means focusing our critique not on the marginalised, but on the failures of the powerful. Our moral obligation is to abandon the wholesale scapegoating of the most vulnerable (immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and minorities) for our national social ills. Instead, those in power must be held accountable to address the true sources of crisis and fragmentation: fundamental economic issues, deep-seated wealth and health disparities, the unrelenting cost of living crisis, the decay of public infrastructure.
Christ the King sheds light on these gaping wounds, recognizing them as the fertile soil where hate and fear take root and flourish. This feast is a call to resist dominant perceptions of power, greed, and falsity by emulating the vision of a sacrificial, transformatory Christ of forgiveness, love and mercy. As Christians, we hold the view that all share in the image of God, and this includes those we are tempted to stereotype and other. We are called to follow the subversive Christ, the true King of Kings, who himself was the victim of the powerful, the lamb whose blood ‘ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation’ (Revelation 5.9).
