This week the curates of the Edmonton Area went on a trip. As their leader I was only half-jokingly asked whether I was going to supply hi-vis jackets and get them to walk in pairs to the Tube. We spent time at the South Hampstead Synagogue and with the Muslim World League London Office. Quite brilliantly this was in Interfaith Week, though the brilliance was all to the glory of God as it was a complete accident to me.
At the Synagogue, with Rabbi Shlomo Levin, we were given a lesson in authority and humility. It is a remarkable place, newly built in 2019. The community had demolished their existing building and planned a new one from scratch. The assembled clergy marvelled at the opportunity to start with a blank sheet of paper and create something which expressed the vision and values of the faith. If you had to design a church building to express your faith and belief, what would you do?
The architecture of many synagogues, like churches, can be all about transcendence and awe, and things are arranged so that ministers and officials are given prominence and honour. In synagogues there is always a rabbinical seat, set apart from the congregation. Not so with Rabbi Shlomo, who sits in and with the congregation. The space is designed to enable the youngest to be closest, and for no one to be excluded. Even when men and women are segregated as the law requires, it is hardly physically noticeable. Rabbi Shlomo told us that where worship can work in either intimacy or grandeur, he went for intimacy. All belong. God is close. All gather round.
These were useful insights in readiness for this Sunday. For nearly a hundred years the church has designated the Sunday before Advent as Christ the King. This could have prioritised transcendence and grandeur and authority. Wasn’t it last September’s Prime Minister who had wanted to be “world king”? Many have aspired to a position of total power, have worked to preserve that power by being declared leader for life, and have sought to preserve their legacy with their descendants ruling after them.
This Sunday was declared as a Feast of Christ the King in the 1920s, in a time of immense world uncertainty. After a cataclysmic war and an even more cataclysmic pandemic there was economic and political turmoil. Human institutions had clearly failed. Far from being a proclamation of God’s blessing on human power structures, Christ the King Sunday held up a mirror to human institutions and worldly power structures and found them massively wanting. What power on earth could think it right to massacre the flower of its youth at the Somme and Gallipoli? What power on earth could cope with the death of 50 million people from a virus which targetted the youth who were left? How on earth could economics alone solve the injustices worked by some humans upon others? There had to be something else.
A criminal, justly punished for his offence, turns to the person next to him, as helpless and as condemned as him, and asks for help. What was he thinking? Surely the person to save him was the centurion who had put him there, the judge who had passed the sentence, the Governor who could transmute the sentence, or even proclaim an amnesty. The last person who could save him was the person in exactly the same situation, with no power, no authority, utterly weak, completely broken, about to die. “The King of the Jews” was not written above that man as a place card for a monarch, but the worst form of mockery. They even had a raffle for his cloak.
“Jesus”, says the thief, “remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” Earthly power runs out, turns to dust, has feet of clay, quakes before viruses, tends to destruction. The thief recognises that there is an authority and citizenship which both transcends this earth and is intimately at its very heart, if we could but see it.
Watching the latest series of The Crown, I have been drawn in by Peter Morgan’s own fascination with “the system” which enables the monarchy to continue, and with its relationship to God, even its blessing by God. In the “Annus Horribilis” episode her mother is horrified that Queen Elizabeth might want to indicate that she’s had a bad year. She tells her daughter that “Monarchy is the only part of the constitution with an element of the divine” (discuss!) and says that God’s reputation will be sullied if Elizabeth admits weakness.
The Queen has none of it, but rather welcomes the thought that people will know that she knows life is dreadful sometimes and that people get things wrong. That brings a necessary examination of how power is exercised, and by whom. As she said in the subsequent speech, almost exactly thirty years ago, “No institution – City, Monarchy, whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t.” She quotes the Book of Common Prayer, reflecting that every institution, every person, has to adapt to “the changes and chances of this mortal life”.
The Sunday of Christ the King is a good time to scrutinise those who hold roles and exercise power, not because we can do it better, but because we know we will get it wrong too, because that’s what human beings do. In a world no less turbulent than in the 1920s or the 1990s, in our own version of an annus horribilis, in a cost of living crisis, in a country which has got all self righteous about migrant workers and the World Cup, yet criminalises immigrants seeking their own new home, in the face of a winter where people will die through cold in one of the richest countries in the world, we have to look to the King who gave all and whose kingdom was proclaimed though utter and complete oneness with the weakest and poorest and most despised.
Today I am with Rabbi Shlomo who has no special seat. Today I am with the Christ who washes feet and feeds the poor and sits in the lowest, not the highest place. Today I am with those who will speak from this place and say that governments get it wrong, and applaud when they somehow exercise righteousness. There will be, must be politics in this pulpit. Today I am for a kingdom which recognises that there is authority but only with humility, that there is power but only exercised through service. Today I am with the Christ who spoke truth to power, and who was truth before power. Today I am with the one who speaks of the glories of paradise from the depths of devastation. Today I am with Christ the King.