Solemnity of Christ the King – 26 November 2023
During a week, we are confronted with many different types of power. Almost daily, through different situations, we read about the power of political might, the power of wealth and the power of evil. Such power, particularly when it is displayed dramatically, shocks us – although sometimes it can act to seduce us.
On this Sunday – the last in the Church’s liturgical year, the feast of Christ the King – we come together, however, celebrating another power: the power of the Kingdom of God, the power of Jesus the Christ. And in the face of all other forms of power, we say that this alone is the power in which we put our trust and hope.
But what is this power, the power of the Kingdom of God? Is it a power which overwhelms us with its prestige, its dominance, its triumphalism, its sheer awesomeness? And where is this power to be encountered?
Four times, in repetitive fashion, Matthew drives home to us the nature and the home of this power. The glory of this power lies not in dominance or triumphalism or prestige. Rather it lies in the satisfaction of those who hunger and thirst, the hospitality enjoyed with the stranger, the attentiveness given to another’s needs, the community offered those otherwise in isolation. This is not the love of power but the power of love, as the theologian Jürgen Moltmann puts it so concisely.
We see this exercised in creative ways. I think of the Aussie Rules Football league in Melbourne where there are six teams each from a different welfare agency. One of the coaches remembers gathering the squad for training twice a week from the heroin precinct in the early rounds of the season. The team included teenagers, a 44 year old woman and even a man with one eye and one arm. There is not much glamour about this footy league. There is nothing very successful about those footballers. Most of us would term them real losers. Yet they and their football competition are also an illustration of the power which belongs to the Kingdom of God. It’s not what we have that determines our power but the quality of life, companionship, and hope that we have.
This is a new kingdom which eschews dominance, wealth or destruction, but which knows the power of community, hospitality, attentiveness and care, and which asserts that it is this power which will transform our world. In the face of all other forms of power, Jesus calls us to the exercise of this power, the power which animated his own life.
How can we deal with the ambiguity of political power? How can we resist the seduction of financial power? And how can we make sense of the power of evil? One power alone can help us. The power of the Kingdom which pushes into our world in those places where hurt and hope live together.
To the extent that we make the action of community and hospitality, attentiveness and care part of our life the power of God’s Kingdom enters and pervades our world, transforming it always from within our life together, and never apart from or beyond it.
As the Church’s liturgical year closes, and as it begins to focus on its preparation for Christmas next week beginning a new year, let us look back over this last twelve months and ask where have we helped extend community, where and how have we expressed hospitality in our hearts and at our tables, where and how have we been deeply attentive to and responded with profound care to the needs of another, where have we heard and seen the drive for life and enabled that life to live yet more?
For this is the power which each of us is called to exercise – the power which is ours in our discipleship of Jesus. And, amazingly, it is the power which each of us has no matter our position or background or personality.
The power which alone can save our world is already within us. If we dare to exercise it.