I was preaching at the college Eucharist on Sunday; it was bashed out in a bit of a hurry, due to pressure of work, and it's not the greatest sermon I've ever written. It also illustrates my tendency to resort to the Middle Ages when looking for inspiration... But Elisabeth of Thuringia is a Good Thing, so I am less apologetic than I might be!
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Today is Christ the King, when we celebrate… yes, you guessed it, Christ’s kingship. But what does that actually mean? Well, the Gospel focuses on the idea of Jesus as king, and how that’s understood – or misunderstood – by those around him, and I’ll come back to those in a moment. But I want to start somewhere slightly different.
Last Thursday, the church calendar commemorated Elisabeth of Thuringia, or of Hungary, as she’s sometimes called, a thirteenth century German noblewoman. It struck me that it’s appropriate that she’s usually celebrated round about Christ the King, because Elisabeth’s an interesting figure to help us think about the idea of what royalty means in terms of God’s kingdom. Elizabeth was the daughter of the king of Hungary, but was sent at a young age to Thuringia, to marry the heir to the dukedom. And she was very pious, and very charitable – and so far, she doesn’t sound very different from any number of interchangeable mediaeval women saints. But there are a couple of things that make Elizabeth different. One thing is that she had an unusually strong sense of justice and awareness of the wider ramifications of political power. She refused to eat any food which had been produced by unfairly exploiting the poor – I suppose you could call her the patron saint of Fair Trade.
But the other is that she simply didn’t have any patience with the strict rules of precedence and proper behaviour of the power structures of her day if it conflicted with the loving thing to do. You can see it in the stories about her spending her dress allowance on food for the poor – which is a fairly standard thing for a mediaeval female saint to do – but you can also see it in less clichéd ways, like the way she disturbed the members of court by actually insisting on sitting next to her husband at dinner, so that they could talk. And it’s shown, above all, by what happened after her husband died. Royal widows often went off to found monasteries in the middle ages – it was a respectable retirement job, I suppose, but Elizabeth, to the disgust of her family, and in the face of very considerable opposition, went off to found a hospital. And she disconcerted everyone by joining in with all the nursing and the chores. The evidence available, incidentally, suggests her cooking was really dreadful…
Elizabeth’s life turned the conventions of what royalty was supposed to do on its head, and she did this because she was trying to live the life of Christ. Elizaebth’s ‘royalty’, her power and influence, was only significant to her because she could give it away, and in doing this she was following the example of Jesus, who though, as Paul put it ‘the image of the invisible God’ emptied himself of all his power, to the point of painful and humiliating death, so that there would be nothing in human life, however broken and horrible, where God was not present. “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”
The gospel reading does some interesting things with this concept of Jesus as king. The people mock Jesus for claiming kingship, when he’s powerless, betrayed, and abandoned. Yet the joke is really on them. Jesus is the king, the lord of all, the only person who can rightfully be called a king. But the kind of king he is is not what humanity – who think that power exists to be held on to and used over people – expects. He is a king who gives up his power for the sake of others. In a final irony, the only person who manages to recognise this is the ‘good thief’. Luke leaves it totally unclear what prompts him to ask to be remembered ‘when you come into your kingdom.’ Dorothy L Sayers, who as well as writing detective stories wrote a very good series of radio plays based on the gospels, actually suggests that the thief was just being kind and humouring a harmless lunatic – which might explain why he’s the only person in the gospels to call Jesus by his first name, without any sort of title. But that act of kindness is enough for Jesus, who with the generosity of God, responds to all our attempts at goodness, however inadequate they are. Jesus’ kingship is about self-giving love, and one of the forms that self-giving takes is God’s willingness to treat us as better than we are – and thus make us into the better people God wants us to be.
It’s hard for us to grasp the sheer goodness of God, of the depths of the love of God which makes him become a human being, and live and die to bring us from death to life. The world couldn’t cope with Jesus – they couldn’t stand the challenge to the structures of power and authority we all build up in an attempt to protect ourselves. It’s why they killed him. And we, too, find it hard to cope with God’s love. We’re a bit like Elizabeth’s courtiers, unable to grasp why she couldn’t just stick to the rules of proper behaviour. But she didn’t because it was the loving thing to do; it wasn’t proper behaviour for a mediaeval noblewoman, but it fitted the kingdom of God.
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