This coming Sunday is the last Sunday of ordinary time that we call the succession of the Sundays after Pentecost. It is the longest season of the year and deals mostly with Jesus’ life, ministry and teaching amid a world in which such “Good News” is either rejected or misunderstood. Indeed, Jesus meets an horrific end to his earthly life being executed in the most dark and undignified fashion the Roman authorities could muster, a tragic tale…..and yet we finish the church year this Sunday, proclaiming this Sunday “Christ the King.” We call the one who gave his life, risked abasement and death for the good of the cause, which is the good of all…we dare call him king. The next Sunday we begin Advent, a season in which we hope that the tragedy of life, the dark, is not the last word.
During this past lectionary cycle in which we have been reading Matthew, we have heard a great deal about the dark that pervades our world…Matthew’s phrase, “the outer darkness in which there is weeping and gnashing of teeth” appears quite regularly in his gospel; but I believe Matthew is not condemning the faithless (although to not follow the way of Christ bearing mercy and hope to the abased of our world would certainly render one bereft of the joy found in a life of faith) no, I believe Matthew is describing the world as it is, a world in which there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth (Koine Greek trans: rage); He is describing a world shrouded with the dark of indignity.
There is an important book written by Deidra Goode of General Theological Seminary, in which she describes the requisite attributes of a king in the ancient Greco-Roman world, the world that occupies and influences Palestine, the world of the Bible. She does not describe a king as all powerful, ruling aloof from the realm, empowering an elite few, but she describes the king as meek, which doesn’t mean what our modern connotation of meek means(passive, shy, unassertive, etc.), but meek in the world she describes, means mindful, quietly and discerningly courageous, and mainly self-giving… serving the realm above self …serving the greater good of all subjects, even the ones cast out into the dark……that takes courage and discernment and imagination.
We are the legates of the meek king, we are the meek king’s embodiment….we are sent into the dark with courage and compassion and discernment to reclaim the lost, the cast out, in order to make the kingdom whole again. This Sunday in Matthew’s gospel, we are given a glance into the land of the dark into which we must go, where there is weeping and rage: the hungry, the naked, the sick and infirm, the prisoner, the poor…all markers, symbols of the indignity of the dark and they are with us, cast out from us still, in Mobile, in our nation, in the world…As God’s faithful we are to claim our kingly and queenly heritage and go find the cast out of our world and reclaim them…to search out indignity in whatever form it is manifest, and banish it. The sad denizens of Mathew 25 are the ones that must be saved lest the king himself languishes in dispossession as well, an intimate symbiosis, king and subject… Serving our wounded neighbor then is the means of healing for ourselves, healing for the world entire… the realm set right and whole.
In our post-modern fractured and nihilistic world today, it is time to live into our royal legacies, to step up to assume our true personhood, our Christlikeness…be the Christ in whose image we are made….kings and queens for the world’s sake… Until the outer dark is aglow with light.
