A Kingdom of Priests
Christ the King 22 November 2009
Revelation 1, 4-8
It is about time for me to read JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy again—I don’t think I have done it since the movies came out several years ago and all the Tolkien fans wore themselves out arguing over the faithfulness of the movies to the great books. One of the characters that I find most appealing out of many excellent people in the books is Aragorn, known as the Strider. In the first part of the story he appears as a mysterious person always on the move, going and coming like a spy on some secret mission. As it turns out, Aragorn is the last of a line of ancient kings about whom many prophecies have been written and whose valor against evil is going to be very important in the unfolding of the story. He is an ordinary looking man, but is actually a king, waiting to come into his kingdom. Meanwhile he has his work to do—which involves keeping a constant watch out for the dark powers at work in the world and coming to the help of those of good heart who are living true and faithful lives.
It is only a story, of course, but I think of Aragorn when I read our lessons for today, especially the lesson from the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation. Our translation says: “To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” The New Jerusalem Bible puts it this way: “He loves us and has washed away our sins with his blood, and made us a Kingdom of priests to serve his God and Father.” The note on this passage is particularly lovely. It says: “Those who turn to the Messiah and whose sins he forgives will be a royal line of priests; kings because they will rule over the nations; priests because in union with Jesus the Messianic Priest they will consecrate the universe to God in a sacrifice of praise.”
You may have a hard time wrapping your mind around that, but this is one of the great secrets of our Christian life: our true identity is not that of the ordinary people we most often appear to be. Our true identity has yet to be completely revealed but we bear in ourselves the royal blood of Kings, making us Priests to our God and Father, through the one Great High Priest and Messianic King, Jesus our Lord and Saviour. One of the moving moments of the Tolkien trilogy comes when Aragorn is finally revealed for who he is: Aragorn son of Arathorn, the descendant of Elendil and Heir of Isildur, last of the great kings of Numenor, for whom is re-forged the great sword that only he can wield. I realize that you either like that kind of thing or you don’t, and I don’t say you ought to. But I am saying that our royal lineage is ever so much more awesome than anything Aragorn possessed. We, whose sins have been forgiven by the blood of Christ, have been made by him into a kingly order of priests, priest-kings, as it were. And the nature of our true identity has a lot to do with our vocation in this world. About all of this I have three points to make: First, our priestly and kingly identity exists in our relation to the one true King and Priest. Second, our discipline during the conditions of our present life is to qualify us to exercise our kingly role in the age to come. And, third, it is only the priestly quality of our work in the present time that makes sense of the Christian life.
First, then, the priestly Kingship of Christ: A priest is someone who does something on behalf of others that they cannot do for themselves. Traditionally priests stood between God and Man—offering to God the lives and worship of their people and offering to the people the oracles and teachings of God. Only Christ has adequately done this work—all other priests, before and after Him, have served only to draw attention to the need for a true priest or have pointed to Jesus as the only adequate One. In His Incarnation, life, death and resurrection, Jesus gathered up all that we are in order to offer it to the Father, to consecrate us and the whole world, undoing the effect of the sin and evil into which we had fallen. This is the great priestly work, done once and for all, that makes Christ the central figure of our whole human history. From the other side of the equation, He also brought to us the full and complete revelation of who God is and what He wants of us. We know now that God is like Jesus and that His sole desire for us is to reproduce the life of Jesus in our lives and in this world. This is the truth which Christ came to bring, of which He was the witness, as He told Pilate.
The Kingly role of Christ is seen in the fact that in His resurrection His priestly work was perfected and His revelation about the character and identity of God was verified as correct and filled with power. To make the world the kind of place where the mercy and love and compassion of Christ will be paramount and authoritative is the intention of God, that which He is working to accomplish and which Christ will bring to pass with all of the authority and power of the Omnipotent God Himself.
This is what we call the Kingdom of God. At this moment the Kingdom exists and is powerful in heaven, that dimension of reality in which God dwells with all his saints and angels. But it is possible even now for those of us who live as yet in this world to enter into that Kingdom. Christ has made it possible for us to live now as those who are under the obedience and authority of his Kingly Power. His is the sole and final authority in this universe, even though at present we do not see that power effectively in control. The range of Christ’s effective power is still limited—not by evil or by any external power, but by the will of God the Father Himself, who still allows this world to have its freedom. He does not wish to impose his rule but to have it freely welcomed and accepted by all. And so the order of time runs its course—until He shall have determined that all that delay can accomplish has been accomplished and Christ returns again in power to judge both the living and the dead, to renew and recreate this fallen world and restore all things to the condition that God has chosen for them.
When Christ comes to reign in this world fully and completely, He has promised that we shall reign with Him. There are many tantalizing obscurities in this promise. Does that mean that there will still be pockets of resistance after His return where we will have to exercise our kingly status? What kind of work shall we have to do in the renewed world? We don’t know. But one thing we do know: our present spiritual disciplines are meant to prepare us for reigning with Christ. We have to learn in this life to exercise the power of Christ so that we will be fit to reign with him in the new world. Of course we shall not appear to be great kings and queens in our present life: we shall look more like Jesus Himself when He was living His earthly life—humble, lowly, friend of sinners and the poor, misunderstood, falsely accused, unjustly punished, perhaps—but radiant with the power of a love which attracted people to Himself and worked God’s own good in their lives.
This does not come easily to us, for although we might be hidden kings we are also recovering sinners. The rule of love through us is still often impeded and so our own personal disciplines as Christians are for the purpose of allowing the love of Christ to operate more easily and completely through us. We are at the front lines of the interface between the Kingdom of God and the realities of this sinful world, attempting to show to those with whom we interact that the love of Christ in all its richness can be applied to the conditions of this world. In fact the work we have to do is a kingly one: to overcome evil with good, in the way Christ did. As Jesus Himself put it in John’s vision: “Those who prove victorious I will allow to share my throne, just as I was victorious myself and took my place with my Father on his throne.” One of the things that makes this so difficult sometimes is that it doesn’t look to us as if Christ is really the King of this world. It often appears that so many other powers are stronger—especially in hard times like the ones we are living through now. And so, we secret kings must undertake the kinds of disciplines that will nurture our true identity: especially silence and solitude where we allow Christ to speak to our hearts; fidelity to corporate worship in which we meet Christ anew in word and sacrament; and in service to others, where we encounter Christ in those who need our loving help.
And as we pursue our training in the life of Christ that will equip us one day to reign with Him, we are conscious that we are engaging in a priestly ministry on behalf of a world that doesn’t even know our God and Father and His Son, our Lord and King. I don’t understand all of this to the degree I wish I did, but it seems clear to me that most of our work and effort in this world is for the sake of others. Of course, we are becoming the kind of persons we are creating as we live in faithfulness to Christ—we are, to some extent, our own projects—but when we consider the vastness of the world around us and the paucity of those who seem to understand what the real issues are, it can get discouraging, until we realize that as priests it is our job to bear the burdens of others, whether they understand what we are doing or not.
Our praying is on behalf of a world that doesn’t pray or doesn’t do it intelligently as to the only true God. Our silence is on behalf of a world that is noisy and cannot be quiet and refuses to stop and consider its actions. Our worship is on behalf of a world that doesn’t know God and that can only worship the idols of its own making. Our peacemaking is on behalf of a world that is in constant struggle and conflict and war. Our compassion is on behalf of those who only look out for themselves. And of course our witnessing is to a world that doesn’t know what it is or where it is going—we have the truth to tell and our evangelism is our testimony to the truth of Christ, in all humility and compassion. And the effect of it all is largely out of our own control, for we are not our own priests, we are God’s priests, carrying on the priestly work of Christ on behalf of a world that is largely still alienated from Him, including sometimes those within the churches whose lives seem so unlike the Christ whom they profess to serve.
We live for the day in which the Kingdoms of this world shall have become the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ and He shall reign forever. Until then, we are a hidden line of kings and priests, serving the God and Father of our Lord Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. A little later in the revelation which came to him, St John sees a scene in heaven in which a scroll symbolizing this world and its destiny appears but cannot be opened because no one has authority to unseal it—until, that is, there is found one like a Lamb, as if it had been slain, who was found worthy. The Lamb, that is, holds the key to the destiny of this whole created world. And John sees then an amazing sight: “When he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. They sing a new song: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth.” Then I looked,” says John, “and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, singing with full voice, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!”
This is the reality so often obscured by the conditions of our mortal existence. This is the vision which gives the only sense possible to the calling we have in Christ—to be now as He was in this world.
Let us pray. O God, by whose command the order of time runs its course: forgive our impatience, perfect our faith and, while we await the fulfillment of your promises, grant to us a good hope because of your Word, even Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.