Christ the King

The Messiah in the Jewish Festivals

Shirley Lucass

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532632273
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

"How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. (Luke 24:25-27)There's a selfish part of me that wanted to write everything that I know at this point, and the amateur in me wanted to write it all in one book, on the definitive way of understanding Jesus through the Jewish Festivals and through the themes that emerge, but I felt the Lord had commissioned me to sing a new song--not a whole opera, just one song that told the story, a royal ballad. If we understand kingship as the background and framework into which all the other stories fit, then we will be a good way along the path of understanding what it was that Jesus was trying to explain to the disciples. This road to Emmaus won't tell us everything, but it will have started us off on a journey with signposts we can continue to follow all our lives.

Chapter 1

Understanding Jesus as King

Problem No. 1—Who is he?

Jesus is announced as King at his birth and proclaimed (at least in writing) as King at his death and yet in-between those two events, apart from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, there appears to be very little that associates him with kingship. Despite the fact that there is actually a Sunday dedicated to Christ the King and more generalized use of kingship motifs in songs and the liturgy—Jesus as King doesn’t seem to take up a lot of space in most Christians heads—particularly if those heads only made their first appearance post-millennium. The idea of Jesus as Messiah doesn’t appear to figure massively in most Christians’ thinking either and if it does, it also has the unfortunate tendency to make us feel uncomfortable, because as “well-informed Christians” we’re aware that this is a Jewish term and despite the fact that we know that Jesus was Jewish, (although I’ve met a surprising number of exceptions to this), we also know that the Jewish people (Messianic Jews excepted) don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah. For most Christians then, Jesus is Son of God, or Jesus Christ—the Christ almost serving as a surname (as in the expletive “Jesus H Christ”). However, in reality, Christ is his title, and of course, the source of our own title ‘Christian.’ It simply means “Anointed”—the Greek form of the Hebrew Mashiah which we translate as Messiah. Although there were a number of people who were anointed prior to Jesus—most usually Priests and Prophets, there was only ever one person who was called “the Anointed” (ha-Mashiah) and that was either the King or post-Exile the High Priest.1 Nonetheless this connection between kingship and Messianism receives very little air time.

Of course, it could be argued, that the lack of knowledge may not be representative of the majority of Christians and certainly isn’t the case when it comes to clergy. However, as part of my own search into where God was calling me, I was invited along to a number of training evenings by one of the ordinands from my Church. During the break, the lecturer, who also happened to lead the ordinand training program, was mentioning that she had a sermon to deliver on Sunday and as it was “Christ the King” week she was struggling to find anything in the New Testament to do with kingship. I suggested that it all depended on whether you knew what you were looking for. Rather than inquiring what I meant, she proceeded to hold forth on totally unrelated areas of kingship and with a metaphorical wave of the hand, the whole wealth of symbolism, the whole framework on which Messianism depends, the whole set of interconnections were dismissed, sadly not just from her conceptual framework, but also from that of the whole cohort of ordinands, that year and perhaps for years to come.

So straight away we have a problem—kingship—that is sacral kingship—the very concept upon which the whole Bible, Old and New Testaments stands, is either marginalized or misunderstood. One example of this misunderstanding is evident in the work of N T Wright, who whilst acknowledging the centrality of kingship, fails to trace it back to its roots at the very beginning of the whole story, back to Genesis 1, and also fails to acknowledge its reliance on sacral kingship. He states:

You see, the reason Jesus wasn’t the sort of King people had wanted in his own day is—to anticipate our conclusion—that he was the true King, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort. They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within a quite new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the King, all right but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate.2

In some respects Wright is right (pardon the pun), but he makes the same mistake that even Mowinckel, the great Norwegian scholar made in his appraisal of Jesus’ role in Hans Son Kommer (He who Comes), in suggesting that Jesus redefined the role he had come to play, only in Mowinckel’s case he is talking about Jesus’ role as Servant which we will see below is in fact a “type” of the King, that is a literary “replacement” for the King in the period of the Exile when there was no monarchy.

Jesus didn’t redefine the role, he fulfilled it and this is what we will see when we consider just how he was prefigured in the Jewish festivals and how his death and resurrection were the second Exodus that fulfilled the first, just as the Rabbis had predicted, “as the first Redeemer, so shall the second redeemer be,” that is Jesus was a “second Moses” just as Matthew is at pains to point out. This is not a redefinition, this is fulfillment. Jesus was singing a new song, but it was the song that had been written into Jewish tradition, written into the very songs that spoke of the Messiah,3 from the very beginning, into the cosmos itself—not a reworking of it. The reworking, as Margaret Barker has suggested, took place at the time of the “reforms” of Josiah.4 It is not just the New Testament that the lack of kingship is applied to, Fletcher-Louis also states: “The Pentateuch is almost devoid of royalty”5 Again, on the face of it, this could be considered to be true, but I believe that it will become clear, that sacral kingship runs throughout the Bible. All the more reason therefore to understand what sacral kingship is so that we can see for ourselves just how it underpins the Old and the New Testaments.

The question we hope to answer here then and in particular for this new generation, is “Who do you say I am?” This is the question Jesus poses for every generation and it has been answered in numerous ways, some of them helpful, some of them less so. The other “gods” have their witnesses “who have eyes but are blind, who have ears but are deaf.”6 Secularism and humanism are on the rise and have very vocal advocates in increasingly influential places—but the LORD says to his people, to us:

You are my witnesses and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand, that I am he. Before me no god was formed nor will there be one after me. I, even I, am the LORD and apart from me there is no savior. I have revealed and saved and proclaimed—I and not some foreign god among you. You are my witnesses declares the LORD—that I am God. Yes, and from ancient days I am he.7

He is the God from ancient days but in so many ways now, the LORD is being defiled inside and outside the Church and if we are to be his witnesses, we need to know who he is in order to proclaim him. The problem then is how can we proclaim him King and pray for his kingdom to come if we don’t understand kingship. If we did, we would understand that it underpins the biblical narrative and provides the framework into which all the different titles of Jesus and different paradigms of his death (Passover lamb, Servant and, High Priest) fit. This lack of understanding therefore leads us to overlook the multiple layers of symbolism that would further enhance and enrich our understanding of Jesus and the kingdom.

It is my belief that if we did understand this, and all that it entails, we would not only sing a new song, but all of the songs that we currently sing, would come alive to us. We would realize that when we sing about God as King, it’s not just a title that speaks about majesty and rule, but one that is woven throughout the Old Testament, the Jewish festivals, the New Testament, the liturgy and, our festivals. It is no coincidence, that in the established Church, the week that culminates the liturgical year and precedes Advent, the beginning of the new liturgical cycle, is entitled Christ the King, because this is the lens through which the whole cycle of the year and the festivals should be viewed. It is the church’s new year when we acknowledge Jesus as King. Therefore it shouldn’t be a struggle to talk about Jesus as King in a sermon, it should be at the centre of every sermon. Just as the symbolism that represents this should be part of our intellectual furniture, but again often, this is not the case. Let me illustrate.

In a recent service I attended, the sermon started off really well; although it was part of the main service, it was predominantly intended for the ears of the baptismal party. The preacher made the connection between birth and new-birth, about being born in the flesh and in the spirit, but then went on about the need for Jesus to die, about God’s punishment and, about sin and death; equating sin with smoking and drinking and, by the end of it, even I didn’t want to be a Christian! It was part of that Church’s tradition to preach the Gospel at a baptism service, in the belief that for the majority of the party, even those taking the vows, it may be one of the few times they would hear the Gospel. I very much doubt however that having heard this version of the “good news,” the individuals in this party would be asking Jesus into their lives anytime soon.

I also wondered if the alienation of the baptismal party, was further exacerbated by the background displayed on the overhead sc...