So, the meaning of the Christ the King is not something that is self-evident. Indeed, we need to look at it very closely. In a way, the Feast itself is a kind of anachronism. It is a recent feast in the Catholic Church and it is a sort of last gasp, an in-your-face thrust to the rest of the world while the political power of the Papacy waned. The Papal States had been lost in Italy, political power was diminishing all over the continent, and so now we re-assert, somewhat self-righteously it has to be said, that Jesus is still in charge and we are his people. So, one may wonder, given the provenance of the Feast what is being celebrated here? Again, it is anything but self-evident.

If we go back to this notion that "God hates fags", it would be pleasant and reassuring to say, "Well, this view is an anomaly. There are some freaks out there; there are always freaks out there" – No, no. Rather, look at the history of the Roman Church, of all the Christian Churches. "God hates fags" is not some novel idea that some loony boiled up into his own over-heated brain. It is consistent with the behaviour of much of the Christian Church over the millennia; together with the dismissal of women, a two-thousand year history of the persecution of our own religious forebears; the Jews, the extermination of millions of Indians in Latin America, Central America, the Caribbean and North America. Also, there is the number of good Christian nations that could merchandise ten million black-skinned people over a period of a few hundred years.

So, we have to be really careful about what we are doing when we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. And I would like to make an alternate proposal: the Kingdom suggests, whether we talk about it as a relationship or as a place, something finished. It was finished for Jesus and this crook who was dying with him. And we human beings, so impatient, so insecure, so desirous to be in control by having everything finished, have too readily and too often assumed that the Kingdom is here. But the evidence is overwhelming that if we take the Kingdom as is presented in Luke, and in the rest of the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures, it is not here. And so maybe, paradoxically, the best way to get to understand the Feast of Christ the King is to take a more primitive, much earlier title that was given to Jesus; that of Prophet. In the classic kind of Christology that I was taught in the Seminary a long time ago, there was this tripartite description of Jesus: Jesus as King, Priest and Prophet. Certainly the most ancient of these titles was Jesus as Prophet. And I would like to propose that it is precisely by understanding Jesus as Prophet that we can best understand what Jesus as King might conceivably mean.

Who were the Hebrew Prophets, whose line we who are Christians say Jesus was the last and the most notable? They are basically the great troublers of society. They are people who went around us saying, "The way things are, is precisely opposed to the way things ought to be according to the mind of God". The relationships that we human beings have set up among ourselves, above all between rich and poor, are simply a form of violence concretized in a social institution or pattern. And all of this is to be demolished. But first of all, it is to be pointed out. And we simply say that the relationships that we have, that we take for granted, the standard way we human beings deal with each other is precisely contrary to what God intended in making the world in the first place. And, not surprisingly, the Prophets were all killed. So that by the time Jesus showed up it was a by-word, that the only good prophet was a dead prophet.

As a fellow Jew, Jesus spoke to the Jews who too quickly wanted to draw boundaries around who was in and who was out, who was worthy and who was unworthy, who was godly and who was ungodly. That the entire New Testament testifies to Jesus as one who realized the destiny of Israel: namely, to be God’s saving agent for everybody, without exception. And so some of the Jews, and certainly the Romans who saw any kind of counter-social arrangement other than that of the imperial structures as a threat, had to get rid of him. But what Jesus died for is precisely this good Jewish belief, that God has no favourites, that God is radically impartial, more drastically impartial than we can even imagine. And so Jesus behaved that way, spoke that way and died in the name of living that way. This is why we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King with the Passion narrative. Because, if you read the New Testament, it is only precisely in the Passion Narratives of all four Gospels that the notion of kingship is even seriously raised: "Are you the King of the Jews"? The Gospel of John says, "Yes I am, but my Kingdom is not from this world". As I grew up in the Roman Church, we of course said, "Well that is good, because the Kingdom is Heaven. We are all about Heaven". No, we are not all about Heaven. The text does not mean, "it is pie in the sky when you die, bye and bye". But rather it stands as a radical criticism to the way this world works. My kingdom is not built the way kingdoms here are structured. Namely, by one form or another of institutionalized violence. And so what we are here to celebrate is what we celebrate every Sunday – the memory of this man who says, "This is my life for you. This is all I am for all of you". So, Jesus the Priest is memorialized every time we celebrate this memorial of the Last Supper. But it is Jesus the Prophet, perhaps, who most readily gives us the best entrée to understand and to be able to see that our anti-Semitism, our sexism, our homophobia, our racism, our ignoring of the poor, above all, are precisely counter-movements to the Kingship of Christ.