If you happen to be home a lot these days—and I know you are—you may be watching Netflix as much as we have been. Maybe at your house, as at ours, season four of The Crown has been eagerly anticipated. Maybe you are consuming episodes at a rapid clip like we are. If you don’t watch the series, please accept my congratulations. Honestly, I don’t know why the royal family is so compelling. It’s mostly not the clothes, right? And it’s certainly not the personal relationships, which after all are marked, episode after episode, season after season, by grim silence and a habit of shunning anyone who represents the future. On paper it lacks the spark that would seem to ignite a hit series, but many of us find it impossible not to watch.
Which means that some of us are buzzing about something called “the Balmoral test.” An episode from Season Four depicts the royal family at Balmoral, their Scottish retreat, entertaining first the newly-elected Margaret Thatcher and then Charles’s newly-discovered potential spouse, Lady Diana Spencer. “Entertaining” is actually far too generous a term for what the royals do to their guests. If you haven’t seen the episode, suffice it to say that an invitation to Balmoral is something like junior high with tiaras and hunting rifles. Apparently (I can’t testify to this first-hand, because I haven’t received my invitation yet) a weekend at Balmoral is a sink-or-swim experience in which you either guess the rigid social rules known only to the family or you face an endless round of humiliating snubs. Margaret Thatcher’s husband finally diagnoses the whole thing as a “half-Scottish half-Germanic cuckoo land,” hitting it right on the nose. And yes, that’s probably the last time I quote Margaret Thatcher or any of her close associates, even in fictional form. Diana, on the other hand, manages to carry herself with aristocratic nonchalance, agreeing to a muddy hunting trip alone with Prince Philip as though that were the most normal way for a girl in her late teens to pass the time. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that Diana passes the test with flying colors. I mean, she nailed the footwear competition. You know all about how she was rewarded.
We could be forgiven, especially we sorry Americans whose only exposure to monarchy is on Netflix, for wondering whether, when the Son of Man arrives at the last day to sit on his throne of glory and separate the sheep from the goats, it’s going to feel like the Balmoral test. After all, life here on earth is full of experiences that feel like junior high, and for most of us there are no tiaras in the offing no matter how masterful our performance of nonchalance. And judging from Matthew’s gospel as we’ve been hearing it read in recent weeks, the kingdom of heaven is also a place where obscure tests are passed or failed by the unsuspecting. Last Sunday we heard all about the wealthy man who inexplicably gave his servants a bunch of money, apparently just for the pleasure of watching them succeed or fail at investing. The week before we had those poor bridesmaids who ran out of oil without ever suspecting that the bridegroom would lock them out for failing to keep their lamps lit. What a snub! And now this week, another set of unspoken expectations will culminate in harsh judgements. Neither those who gain eternal life nor those who are sent to eternal punishment know what the rules are. Suddenly presented with a list of their acceptable or unacceptable deeds, all are stunned, asking when it was that they performed the acts in question.
The uneasiness is palpable, even among those who are placed in favor at the Lord’s right hand: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food?” It’s as though the joy of being rewarded by God is temporarily displaced by a sense of shock that comes with learning that you have no idea what the standards for your success have been.
If this were Balmoral, we might be ashamed and angry, knowing that our best efforts to earn entrance into the royal family were thwarted by a perverse cliquishness. But did you notice? The rules we don’t know about in the kingdom of heaven are wonderfully, lavishly, unlike the rules of earthly aristocrats. It turns out that heaven is not hung up on the faded glory of empire, not defensive about whether its ways are still relevant, and not anxious about status of any kind. Your shoes are just fine.
Christ the King operates in a different way. The signs of membership in this elite society are all acts of reversal. When you are out, you are in. When you are poor, hungry, alone, imprisoned, when you thirst, you become part of the royal house of David. When you are able to get past your own comfort and care for others, performing works of love, those works shine like jewels in a crown. You are privileged to care for Jesus himself when you care for one who needs you, especially when you are unable to see signs of nobility in that neighbor who must depend upon your mercy. Jesus himself has come to you in the person of the downtrodden.
For a long time I thought that the Feast of Christ the King was some medieval legacy that we were kind of stuck with, another one of those possibly-dead metaphors that we heard explicated so richly last week. What a surprise, then, to learn that Pope Pius XI instituted this feast day in 1925, the same year Benito Mussolini became the fascist dictator of Italy. Monarchy may not be the first answer you and I come up with in response to fascism, but let’s go ahead and accept the church’s challenge.
Celebrating the Reign of Christ, it turns out, is a sharp rebuke to the kingdoms of this world. Jesus identifies with the poor, and that’s the core of what we need to understand if we want to follow him. In fact, this passage from Matthew’s gospel that we are reading this morning is a direct invitation to follow him to the cross. Immediately after giving us this description of his identification with the poor, Jesus tells the disciples that it is time for the Son of Man to be betrayed and crucified. If they can’t love him as the downtrodden outsider now, they will have another opportunity in two days, when the Feast of the Passover commences and the events we identify with Holy Week take place.
So Christ the King, Christ the Crucified, rebukes the kingdoms of this world: all of them, ancient ones, modern ones, and the strange new forms of celebrity rule that are taking shape even as we speak this morning. Loving this King requires no nostalgia, no garbled populism or people’s princesses, no strongman at the helm of a military nation. No need for charisma here, no strategy for winning, no war chest or social media.
Jesus rebukes our kingdoms not by challenging them to a contest of legitimacy or relevance or superiority, but by appearing before all of us as the disgraced outsider with whom we are desperate not to identify. If we want access to this King we have abundant opportunities to be with him. He keeps no one away. He offers no defense. He requires our mercy.
We may find him, you and I. We may reach him this morning or later in the afternoon. There may be traces of his magnificence in our own hearts, or wherever shame is lodged. Shame and poverty are his invitations. Loneliness is his royal seal. Unknowing is a mark of his favor.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
November 22, 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia