A friend of mine has been doing some research into the theological thought of D H Lawrence. I raised a bit of an eyebrow when he first told me because I’m afraid I hadn’t got very much beyond the more salacious novels. But this friend has introduced me to the scope of Lawrence’s writings and particularly to his poem entitled “Thought”. In it Lawrence contrasts good thinking with the kind of clever intellectual games that go around in circles. It ends:
Thought is gazing into the face of life, and reading what can be read.
Thought is pondering over experience and coming to a conclusion.
Thought is not a trick, nor an exercise, or a set of dodges,
Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.
That last line appeals to me enormously because I have long thought that “attending” and “attentiveness” are fundamental to what the Christian life is about. Growth in discipleship is, I think, the cultivation of particular kinds of “attentiveness”, attending to what is outside of ourselves, and what is beyond the immediate.
I wonder if this word is also a bit of a clue in helping us work out what this slightly odd feast of “Christ the King” might be all about. Because, low and behold, it appears in the passage we heard from Jeremiah. The shepherd’s have not attended to the sheep. Literally, Israel’s rulers have failed in their leadership because they have been inattentive to their people. So a new king is needed who will have the kind of attentive qualities that will enable him to execute the justice and righteousness that the Lord the requires.
Christ the King is a Sunday for reflection on the character of power both in the governance of the Church and of our world. Are we governed by systems of power that are sufficiently attentive to execute justice and righteousness? Or are these systems inattentive and therefore self-serving and corrupt?
I suppose we need to take a step back for a moment and ask, what is it that those in power need to be attentive to? For Jeremiah it is obviously the flock; rulers need to attend to their people. But how does it do that? The temptation in our age is to think that a democratic election (be it general, local, diocesan or parochial) every 4 or 5 years is quite enough attentiveness to allow those charged with leadership to get their heads down and get on with the job. Perhaps the odd focus group or questionnaire is a bonus in keeping that attentiveness alive. But is that enough? Particularly if electoral participation is very low, as it now is in national elections and as it usually is in our church elections too.
This isn’t just a question for politicians. We all have roles of responsibility (be they in the home, in the church, in society or in government) and I think Christ’s kingship calls all of us to a more profound attentiveness than our culture usually deems adequate. That is, of course, an attentiveness cultivated through prayer and worship. And what we do in those activities is attend not just to what is immediately before us day by day, but also to what is beyond the apparent. That kind of deep thinking is perhaps rather counter-cultural now. In our mass-media age the temptation to become fixated upon what is visible here and now – what constitutes the morning’s headlines and the evening news – has become an almost total preoccupation. Do you remember that government minister a few years ago admitting there’s a temptation to think that announcing a new initiative was the same thing as making the new initiative happen? And that is a temptation across the board. Even the Church of England noisily announced its initiative two years ago to recruit younger clergy, but, while Hampstead Parish Church is leading the way, the average age nationally has yet to drop. Our culture of leadership and governance, in many different sectors, is in danger of being reduced from what it once was into the purely visible and the visual which doesn’t have much of an impact on the unseen realities further down the line. Power is in danger of becoming disconnected because it is inattentive to what is beyond the visible.
Our passage from the letter to the Colossians tells us something extraordinary about the scope of Jesus’ kingship. Jesus, it says, is the image of the invisible. The Greek word is actually icon implying that Jesus reveals those invisible realities to us as well as represents them. Jesus has an attentiveness to the world that goes way beyond the superficial and that is because, in his divinity, he has come to us from what is beyond our current seeing and knowing. In him dwells the fullness of God, that is not just the over-arching divine sovereignty of power and might, but the quiet sovereignty of every human heart created in the divine likeness. All of that invisible glory dwells within Christ and is what he is attentive to. And as we grow in Christ, or as Colossians puts it, as we are transferred into his Kingdom, we need to seek a kingship that is attentive to the invisible things too.
So what are the invisible realities that the sovereign powers of our society neglects and to which we Christians need to attend? Do they include perhaps the scandal of the thousands of neglected elderly people in Britain today who receive poor quality care and even suffer abuse? Do they include the thousands of people in our prisons, many of whom receive little or no structured rehabilitation? Do they include the seeds of future terrorism sown in our foreign policy blunders?
The frightened, undernourished elderly lady in a care home, the young offender who was never given any chance in life, the embittered orphan in Basra – none of these feature prominently in our visible day-to-day political world. But they are there in the aching heart of the invisible God whose sovereignty has been revealed to us in the kingship of Christ.
So Christians engaged in any kind of leadership or power, have to have a wide and deep vision, because we have to look beyond the visible, into the icon of Christ in order to see to whom we need to attend. And I pray for the Church of England that we might be able to model that in two ways.
First, in the things that we say to secular power. And there are times when the Church has spoken up for the invisible poor and over the last few weeks particularly for the total invisibility of the unborn human life. But I still feel we don’t do enough to call the world to account for its failure to look beyond the visible to the kind of invisible realities I’ve just mentioned.
And second, and more importantly, we need to model that attentiveness to the invisible in our own church governance, recognising this extraordinary fact that Jesus, the icon of the invisible, is the head of the Church. At the local level, will we stay attentive to those invisible poor parishes in London that rely so much on the generosity of richer parishes through the common fund? And of course there is the global situation. And when the bishops of the Communion gather at Lambeth again next summer, will they indulge in the same superficial circus of the visible that characterised Lambeth 1998 or will they actually make good their commitment to listen to the invisible experiences of lesbian and gay people who have suffered silently at the hands of religious people for so long.
To return to D H Lawrence, one commentator has written that the genius to be found in his literature flows out of this idea of the “man in his wholeness, wholly attending”. And it is the great discovery that “other people exist”. That may sound ironic, we all surely know that don’t we? But how well do we know that? How deeply do we attend it? Perhaps good literature, such as that of Lawrence, takes us more deeply into the unknown experience of the lives of others – a world that is otherwise invisible to us. And this is a profoundly Christian insight because the constant awkwardness of Christianity in relation to power is that even invisible people exist, indeed they too, Genesis tells us, are an image and likeness of the divine. So their invisible problems and hurts need to be attended to by those in power if they are to execute justice and righteousness. Leadership is a burden, because to some degree those who govern actually have to bear those awkward invisible realities within themselves. And that, of course, is something of the action of Christ the King that we heard in today’s Gospel, the king that bears the invisible wrongs of the world in himself as he hangs upon the cross.
“Remember me when you come into your kingdom”, the criminal cries for he is soon to become an invisible victim of power. Of course he will remember him and us, for Jesus is the image of the invisible.