ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

A non-rivalrous kingdom

Sermon preached by Bishop Basil of Amphipolis, Sunday after Nativity/Sunday before Theophany, Church of the Holy Trinity and Annunciation, Oxford, 11 January 2009 (the Oxford church is shared by two parishes, one of which observes the New Calendar, and the other the Old Calendar).

Mt 2:13-23; Mt 4: 12-17

Each year at this time we have in Oxford a strange combination of feasts, in that the Sunday after the Nativity on the Old Calendar coincides with the Sunday after Theophany on the New, and we have heard the Gospels for both of these Feasts. Rather than lamenting this overlapping of the feasts, it is worth remembering that at the earliest stages of the development of the Church’s liturgy, the Nativity of Christ and the Baptism of Christ were celebrated together on 6 January, along with the coming of the Wise Men from the East. It was a single feast of Theophany, the ‘self-revelation of God’ to the world. Only at a later stage was the Nativity separated out and celebrated on 25 December.

In a sense, then, both of today’s Gospels refer to the ‘post-theophany’ world, and in fact it is very helpful to look at them both together.

From the first reading, the passage for the Sunday after the Nativity, we catch a glimpse of what life was like in first-century Palestine: we find a puppet state with a puppet king, put in place by the all-powerful Roman emperor. This puppet king is a man with grandiose ambitions, someone who could spend forty years rebuilding the Second Temple on a scale hitherto not seen, a man attached to his own opinions, extremely sensitive to any possible rival – and violent.

We see from the Gospel that Herod ‘the Great’ lives in fear, fear that someone might appear who could threaten his position on the throne. This is why he orders that all children in the region of Bethlehem under the age of two should be killed. What the Wise Men have told him suggests that one of these children might claim his throne. Our usual understanding of what is sometimes called ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ tends to stress just that – their innocence – and also, of course, the cruelty of Herod. But this keeps us from looking at the underlying motivation of his action: his fear that a serious rival to his power might appear.

From the second passage, that read for the Sunday after Theophany, we learn that Herod the Great’s successor, Herod Antipas, has just put John the Baptism into prison. Why? For declaring publicly that this Herod should not have married the wife of his brother. In the Palestine of his day, this was enough to challenge Herod’s legitimacy: John is therefore turned into a rival, a threat, and in the end must be eliminated. What is important is that in both passages the motive behind the violence is rivalry or the fear of rivalry.

And how does Christ respond to this world? He sets out to preach the coming of the Kingdom of heaven – not a kingdom of this world, where rivalry is found everywhere, but a ‘non-rivalrous’ kingdom, the kingdom of God. After all, who can rival God?

In this kingdom – though we do not learn this at once – Christ himself is king, a position he succeeds to, however, only after his death and resurrection. Even Christ’s death, like John’s before him, is brought about by fear of rivalry. Pilate is concerned for his position at the top of the pile and does not want to see his position shaken by popular unrest in a situation of constant revolt against Rome. The story of Christ tells us, from beginning to end, that rivalry is everywhere.

So what kind of kingdom is it that Christ proclaims? It is not a traditional theocracy, where rivalry and violence are carried out in God’s name. It is the kingdom of God himself, a kingdom without rivalry, where God as the Ruler of All cannot be challenged. Indeed, rivalry is meaningless where God is king.
Christ himself, as man, is determined to show us, by example, what it means to lead a non-rivalrous life, and he teaches his disciples to do the same.

This is the deepest content of his three ‘temptations’ in the desert. He is offered a chance to become the greatest of miracle workers, outdoing all others, and to seek political power and the leadership of his people by turning stones into bread. He refuses. He is encouraged to challenge his Father by throwing himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, thereby forcing God to save him. He refuses. He is offered the chance to set himself up as an earthly king throughout the world, though to do this would mean challenging other kings and forcing them from their thrones. He refuses.

Christ refuses all these temptations to rivalry. And when he goes on to preach the ‘Sermon of the Mount’ shortly afterwards, he describes to his disciples what it means to live in a non-rivalrous kingdom, to pursue a non-rivalrous way of life, to pursue a non-covetous and therefore non-rivalrous ‘mode of being’.

This is the message with which he comes to all of us. He tells us to live the life that God has given us, just as he lives the life that God has given him. To use the ‘talent’ that God has given us, just as he uses the ‘talent’ that God has given him. This is all that is asked – nothing more, but nothing less as well. Do this, he says, and you will find your place in God’s non-rivalrous kingdom.

When we speak of Christ as the ‘king of peace’, this is what we mean. Christ is – and can only be – the king of a non-rivalrous kingdom, where we, his disciples, follow him in his non-rivalrous relationship with his Father – and with all his fellow human beings.

You might be tempted to say that Christ, as Son of God, was in a privileged position. After all, he was the ‘only-begotten’ and knew that he had no rivals. But we need to accept that Christ was also Man, the Son of man. As such he also lived without rivalry. Brought before Pilate, he made no attempt to challenge Pilate’s position as governor and left him in place to live his life as best he could. Christ accepted the life trajectory that was given him by the Father and looked for nothing else.

We, too, have been born into a violent and deeply rivalrous world. Let us, then, try to follow Christ in the midst of it, and to become true sons and daughters of God – and of his kingdom. Amen.