Today is the last Sunday in the calendar year of the Church which the Church of England now keeps as the Feast of Christ the King. The year that begins with the promise of the coming Messiah in Advent now culminates in the proclamation of Christ’s universal sovereignty. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is particularly strong on this theme that the Ascension of Christ has revealed him to be the Lord of earth and heaven. God “has seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet.”
But such words may strike many of us as a little difficult. The claim of universality, the claim that one view is true for everyone, has become very unfashionable. Our age is characterised more by particularity, difference and relative truth than by universality and absolutes. Claims to universality often ring in our ears as a bid at imperialism. And not without cause. Even good things like democracy and freedom have been claimed, by some quarters, in recent years to be universal principles in such a way as has been manifestly imperialist. Remember: “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”?
And if we are uneasy with claims to universalism in secular politics, we are very much more concerned about it in religion. We all have an instinctive antipathy to the kind of believer who says, either you’re with us or you’re damned. And there’s far too much of that kind of religion about in our world today.
So why should it be any different to say that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth and his name is above every other name, and God has put all things under his feet? Can we make the universalist claim that Jesus is “all in all” without ourselves becoming implicitly or explicitly imperialist towards the millions of non-Christian believers in our world, including so many of our neighbours in our community of Hampstead and in this city of London.
I want to offer three thoughts this morning about Christ and universality.
The first thing to say is that, although difference and diversity are something of the buzz words of our era, we need not be wholly negative about the Christian version of universality. A book that has had an extraordinary impact in the field of secular philosophy in recent years is a book on St Paul by the French atheist theorist Alain Badiou. As an antidote to the fragmentation of identities in post-modernity, Badiou looks historically at Paul’s idea of humanity being “one in Christ”. He points out that although there had been some earlier allusions to human universalism, Paul is the first to advance a version of universal belonging so strong that it might be possible to say that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one”. And in the Roman world where all of those divisions were very pronounced, Christian universality was a truly radical and liberating idea. We still see something of that value of universality in parts of the world today where the church challenges systems of caste and class, such as in India and Latin America. And Badiou is not alone in suggesting that it was this very Christian understanding that has in some sense given birth to the view of universal human rights that is itself, ironically, now challenging Christianity’s own claims to universal relevance.
Okay we may say, there might be a positive sense of Christian universalism that people can appropriate for themselves and that might have historically brought about some good for wider society. But what can of those who chose not to see themselves in the light of Christian identity today? Isn’t this where we are in danger of imperialism? Why should we say that Christ has any kind of significance in the lives of Jews or Hindus, let alone, in the words of Ephesians, that they are in fact “under his feet”. Here (our second point) we need to remember that universality need not be construed as exclusivism. The Christian belief that Jesus is the means of our redemption and the name above all names is not the same thing as believing that all other religions are bereft of any kind of truth. Christians believe that Jesus Christ constitutes the most complete revelation of what God is like. But that does not rule out the idea that other Faiths (particularly those with whom we share both scriptures and traditions) offer us partial perspectives on the same threefold divine energy we call the Holy Trinity. Indeed, if Christ fills “all in all”, it seems to me that we are required to give some account of how the universality of God is manifesting itself in all the particularities of different societies, cultures and faith traditions.
So it is perfectly possible to have a strong sense of the truth and universal importance of the Christian faith while engaging in a genuinely open dialogue with people of other Faiths. Indeed, it often seems to me that an uneasiness about belief in the universal truth of Christ can in fact lead people to a far more imperialist kind of universalism – the idea that all religions are essentially the same. A well-intentioned desire to take other faiths seriously inadvertently strips those religions of any kind of particularity. How patronising and closed-minded to say to a Muslim or a Buddhist, “Well, of course, we really believe the same things”, without actually listening to and engaging with one another to find out where we do agree on certain matters but also where we find ourselves in sometimes quite intractable disagreement, but no less friends for that.
So, firstly, the universality of Christ can be emancipating and, secondly, it does not need to be exclusivist. Finally, we need to challenge the sense that Christ’s universality could be in any sense imperialist. Quite simply, to believe that of the Kingship of Christ, is to not know Christ. In this Gospel passage of the judgement of the nations it is quite easy to be so taken up with this image of Christ as the all-powerful judge that we fail to notice that the people with whom Christ has in fact identified himself are the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner.
Jesus is the one who turns things on their heads. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. And in showing what that means, he led by example, going not to worldly glory but to death on a cross. To say that Christ is the King of heaven and earth is not an imperialist claim, it is to say that there is no one for whom Jesus of Nazareth does not get down on his knees and wash their feet. Shame on the history of the Church that we ever allowed ourselves to be seduced by the idea that Christianity could be spread by armies or coercive tactics. The kingdom of Christ isn’t where Christ’s flag is staked in the ground, it’s where people deny themselves, take up their cross and follow the one who is both King and servant of all.
And more than that, Christ’s kingship is made present to us among what is most tragic and broken in this world, just as Jesus himself was broken and despised. So if I ask myself where did I see the kingship of Christ this week? I would have to say it was not in the kingly splendour of St Paul’s Cathedral with all the finery of the Church, it was in the face that many of you may also have seen on the news on Thursday night of a weeping Congolese woman whose entire family had been murdered before she herself was gang raped. The paradox of the Feast of Christ the King is that since Jesus has been through the darkest experiences of our world and been raised to the glorious heights of God, so will that broken and crushed woman, and all like her, be raised at God’s right hand in the heavenly places. She is what Christ the King is all about.
So the claim for the universal kingship of Christ is not some kind of imperialist claim on the lives of others. It is the truth that Christ is permanently present to each one of us – including the most lowly and despised – healing us, redeeming us, dying for us. And his invitation to you and I in this parable of the sheep and the goats is to participate in that kind of kingship of service to those who share in Christ’s sufferings today.
Amen.