We Want a King

Text: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Psalm 46

The people wanted a king.

Some time after the Israelites had settled into the promised land, they began to long for a king. You can read about this in the first book of Samuel. God sees this as an issue, and God says to the prophet Samuel, “they have rejected me [God], from being king over them.” Samuel speaks the word of God to the people and tells them all the bad things that kings do. Raise taxes from you, send your children off to war, abuse their power, favor their cronies. The usual list. But the people want a king. “We are determined to have a king over us so that we might be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” And so in the end they get what they want, and Saul, the first king of Israel, is crowned.

In time Saul gives way to David, Israel’s greatest king, loved and feared. Solomon follows David. And shortly thereafter Israel splits into two nations, and a series of kings rule them, each king worse than the last. The final king is Zedekiah—ending a long line of poor and ineffective leaders—who the Bible says “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord,” as his predecessors before him did. It was just as Samuel had told them it would be. But the lesson the Israelites learned from this was not, as you might think, to get rid of kings and rulers. Instead, they longed not for no king, but for a better king. They longed for a king, in particular, who was like David. Wise and powerful.

Today is the feast of Christ the King. Recently some have started to call it the Realm of Christ Sunday. I’m sympathetic with that. Kings are a little monarchical, anti-democratic, paternalistic, and old fashioned. Plus sometimes abusive, corrupt, and war-loving. That’s not how we want to see Jesus. Maybe “realm” is better. We would like Jesus to be more modern. “The reign of Christ is a reign of peace,” as one commentator wrote. Jesus, this guy goes on, “is a model of radical inclusivity. Someone who sees the value God has bestowed on every human being.” Now you know I think all that is mostly true. But that it is not the whole story. And it is not what the people of the Gospels thought when they thought of Jesus as a king. And it is not what many Christians in history have thought. What they wanted from Jesus is what the Israelites wanted. A powerful king like David, strong, good, and mighty. Christ the King.

People want a leader. That’s because our world seems always to be unraveling. Things fall apart. Martin Luther took today’s psalm, Psalm 46, as his inspiration for the fight song of the Reformation, A Mighty Fortress. In the translation we sing, it says that the forces of the world threaten to devour us. Another version, which seems to me to be more like it feels, says that those forces threaten to undo us. It is the struggle of life over death, meaning over chaos, growth over decay. Information over entropy, if you like.

John Calvin, a reformer like Luther, but a lot more gloomy, thought that in his time the cosmos was disintegrating. It does feel like that sometimes. It is the unfortunate way of things. The psalm compares the wobbliness of nations and kingdoms to the upheaval of earthquakes and hurricanes. The verbs it uses are the same for both. In times like his, in times like ours: What can we count on? To whom do we turn?

People want peace and prosperity. And justice. We hope for those things from our leaders, and when we go without those things it is the leaders that we blame. A leader is supposed to be like a shepherd to us. In the time of prophets like Jeremiah, that is what being a king meant. A shepherd guardian.

Leaders—any leader, in the church, commerce, politics, the academy—leaders are not supposed to be in it for themselves. They are not supposed to line their own pockets. They are not supposed to own everything. They are not supposed to disdain the sheep. They are not supposed to favor their buddies. They are not supposed to risk the lives of the sheep recklessly.

Yet that is what they too often do. Jeremiah’s rant in today’s reading is about bad shepherds, bad leaders. Jeremiah condemns Zedekiah and his predecessors. Under their so-called leadership, the nation falters and the people are aimless. You have not attended to my sheep, God says in the reading. I’ll do it myself, God says.

God in Jeremiah promises a king like David, from David’s line, wise and just.Those who heard Jeremiah prophesy imagined a forceful, fine-looking, valiant king as they imagined David to be. A king of all Israel who would restore it and its people.

And a few centuries later there were those who hoped Jesus might be that king. But it did not turn out the way they hoped. They were disappointed.

When Christians speak of Christ the King, they see in Jesus a hint of Jeremiah’s promise. But our hope is no longer for a new and redeeming king of Israel but of a king for the world.

We expect that kings of our nations will be good (not corrupt, cowardly, and so forth). But we do not want our own kings to be nice. Or rather, we want them to be nice to us sheep, but not nice to the wolves. We are not all one flock, we are scattered into nations, and we see other nations as wolves in disguise. As they no doubt see us. So it will not be by our own devices that the realm of Christ will happen. Not by kings of nations.

Nations make much ado, it says in the psalm. God seems uninterested in all that. God in the psalm brings desolations on the earth—[that’s how the pew Bibles put it]—but what gets dissolved are things long overdue for it. Arrows and spears and shields. War. And weapons. All gone.

Luther, writing A Mighty Fortress, saw a battle, a struggle between forces. But for Luther, the enemy was not us, other sheep. For Luther, the enemy was Satan, or evil, or “this world’s tyrant.” The devil and all his empty promises. Luther, who always spoke in earthy terms, was said to wish to spit in the Devil’s eye, and said that the Lord’s Supper gave us sustenance to fight the Devil. He gave evil personality. That feeling we have that the world is coming unravelled, Luther described as the result of a divine agent.

The people want a king. But not for the same reasons that the Israelites badgered Samuel. We want a king to heal the world, to knit up the unravelling. To fight the evil one. To redo what chaos undoes. To lead us. To teach us and to guide us and to make us courageous. To be a model for us. We want peace and prosperity and justice for all of us. We want protection against the corrosion that fear creates. We cannot do this ourselves. We turn to Christ to be our king.

By honoring Christ as King this day, we remind, comfort, and encourage ourselves that the future of the world is not finally in our hands. That God continues to be intimately concerned with the world and us. We are not alone. God is in the midst of us. The lord of hosts is with us.