After a ceremony in the British Houses of Parliament in London the splendidly robed Lord Hailsham entered a corridor crowded with tourists and spotted his friend the Member of Parliament Neil Marten. ‘Neil’ he shouted and every tourist in the corridor dropped to their knees!
The story captures how intimacy and awe can come together with amusing consequences.
A couple of years ago I solemnly consecrated a vessel containing altar bread that turned out to be empty. Under the old COVID rules in the UK priests were not allowed to breathe over vessels containing the host so they stayed covered until Communion. I wrongly assumed the covered ciborium placed on the altar by the warden was filled. What a surprise when I genuflected before it, took off the lid ready to distribute Holy Communion and found it empty. I had to say Jesus’ words ‘This is my body’ again over the bread box so we could share Communion.
Merriment is a hallmark of Christ’s kingdom. Archbishop Ramsey described a characteristic of hell as being the absence of laughter. Where there’s laughter there’s lack of self-importance. One imagines hell as being an array of tragically disconnected self important beings unable to reach out to God or one another.
We kneel to no British Lord Chancellor this morning - and Barbados kneels no longer to a British Monarch - but we kneel today to the Blessed Sacrament, to Our Lord on this great Feast of Jesus Christ the Universal King.
The Lord Chancellor incidentally is the one who still walks backwards before the King having presented him with the text of his Speech at the opening of our Parliament. We saw that ancient ceremony only a fortnight ago. As you may know the King’s Speech is read but not written by him. You could almost see his teeth gritted as he read that his Government ‘will support the future licensing of new oil and gas fields’. Like your Prime Minister Mia Mottley, King Charles has an international reputation as an environmental spokesperson.
Outward ceremonies can lose their meaning and eventually fall out of use. My stories about kneeling recall a controversial diocesan news in my Diocese in which an assistant Bishop berated the lack of kneeling in Church nowadays questioning whether Chichester Diocese was going Methodist in that the only time many kneel is for Communion! He forgot that as we get older kneeling has to be more from the heart.
This morning we kneel in our hearts before Christ the King. As a beautiful eucharistic preface used today within the Church of England affirms: ‘As king [Christ] claims dominion over all your creatures, that he may bring before your infinite majesty a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace’. Truth, life, holiness, grace, justice, love and peace, all these are fully found in God. Through his Son and his Spirit our almighty Father is establishing those qualities upon earth so that ‘the kingdom of this world may become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ’ Revelation 11:15. Our Gospel reading reminds us how care for the hungry and thirsty, the sick and those in prison extends Christ’s rule towards the day when, in the words of the Collect, ‘the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under [Christ’s] most gracious rule’.
In the last fortnight the Church of England General Synod made a move, to my mind unfortunate, towards blessing same sex unions paving the way to changing age-old belief in marriage as heterosexual. G.K.Chesterton remarked that only belonging to the Church sets one free from the slavery of being a child of one’s time. As Christians we kneel before God in Christ and not before majority opinion in a post-Christian culture. It isn’t easy for Christians in the west though we are still far from the reality in the east where Crosses are being taken from church roofs.
The Feast of Christ the King is no feast of an idea. It is the feast of a reality we kneel before, the reality of Christ’s kingship - that Jesus is Lord.
Jesus is Lord – three words sum up our Creed.
Jesus is Lord. The carpenter born in Nazareth who shows the world the love, truth and power of God – he is Lord. It is his name that brings heaven to earth and earth to heaven.
Secondly Jesus is Lord. A human life of 33 years lived at the start of our era continues the same yesterday, today and for ever through the power of an indestructible life (Hebrews 7v16b).
Thirdly Jesus is Lord which means he is right above all that is or has been or will be. Jesus is God’s final word to humankind. He is also to be the very last word over all each one of us as we shall contemplate next week on Advent Sunday.
In Jesus a human being lives over all things in God. Nothing gives us more hope for the human race than this. Here is the place heaven and earth come together. As Pascal said Jesus Christ is the centre of all, and the goal to which all tends.
So we kneel before him this morning.
This Sunday Mass is the hour of Jesus, a time given to him by us together that reminds us all our time belongs to him.
Our daily prayer is submission to him as Lord of our life, as is the private confession to him of ours sins.
Our reading of the Bible teaches us to put faith in the constancy of God’s word and not in the multitude of human words that make up public opinion.
Our service given to other people is a submission to Christ present in all people and things.
Worship, prayer, bible study, service - these are our kneeling before Christ the King as individual members of his body to be underlined and refreshed this morning.
Christ is King, Jesus is Lord - and he is our king, our Lord, with the Father and the Holy Spirit to whom be all might, majesty, dominion and power henceforth and for evermore. Amen.
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