We can choose between two versions of God
Pope Pius XI introduced the Feast of Christ the King in 1925 to remind Christians of their allegiance to a spiritual ruler in heaven. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Some weeks ago, Catholics celebrated (as we do every year) the Feast of Christ the King. It’s usually on the last Sunday of the Church’s calendar year – or the Sunday before the First Sunday of Advent. It usually falls around the end of November.
Christ the King is not an ancient feast so it even hasn’t age and heritage to commend it. In fact, Pope Pius XI just introduced it in 1925 to remind Christians that their allegiance was to their spiritual ruler in heaven as opposed to earthly supremacy.
However, in the 100 years since then, royalty and kingship seem to have lost their sheen. Even hereditary monarchies have fallen on hard times and those still surviving – as in the UK – are little more than a ceremonial presence on the sidelines of society with little or no political power.
Once royalty mattered. Or were respected. Or even sometimes loved. Not anymore. That brand has lost its substance, not least because of the recent antics of ’royals’.
The rise of democracy, even with all its faults and limitations, has also helped to isolate royalty as a relict of a distant past. The royal dividend now delivers whatever value it retains in attracting tourists or in children’s stories where kings and queens are part of a magic mix of palaces, dungeons, crowns and sceptres – or at least were before Harry Potter upped that particular ante.
So where am I going with this? Let me put my cards on the table here. I’m not gone on celebrating Jesus as a king or on the feast that celebrates his kingship. I think Christ the King sends absolutely the wrong message here and it may be that in present circumstances the theology that underpins it may be a bit suspect as well.
As I understand it, Jesus came among us to reveal God to us. In simple terms to show us what God was like. Philippians 2:5–8 is a key scriptural text, part of which reads:
The writer, Brian McLaren, points to an apparent discrepancy between God as a Supreme Being – meaning almighty, supreme, omnipotent (all powerful), who dominates as tradition has stereotypically represented God the Father, as in full and absolute control – and the image of God represented by Jesus whom we describe as ‘the revelation of God’.
As we know from reading the New Testament, Jesus presented a very different image of God the Father. There is no sign of the Supremacy of God, more obvious in the Old Testament.
On the other hand, the God that Jesus reveals (and exemplifies) – who we might call the God of the New Testament – is the very opposite of a king. The image Jesus puts before us seems completely at variance with the image of the God in the Old Testament – a God who dominates, controls, demands and is aggressive, even sometimes violent and warlike.
In a recent article in the Irish Dominican journal, , John Scally quotes a scripture scholar:
In comparison, the image of God that Jesus presents to us in the New Testament is very different from the image of God in the Old Testament. The God that Jesus presents is the very opposite of a violent and sometimes war-like God. Not a dominating-God even to the extent of physical violence but a servant-God who carries a basin and a towel to wash his disciples' feet; not a God who threatens hell-fire and brimstone but a gentle God weeping in compassion for his people.
It might even be said, as John Scally suggests in the article mentioned above, that the Old Testament God represents a form of aggressive masculinity that perpetuates ‘a toxic masculinity’ that is causing such devastation in our world. The corollary is that the image of God represented by Jesus in the New Testament is a gentler, kinder, more loving, more human, even more feminine God.
Whereas the Old Testament God was one who exuded fear and for whom the fires of hell were held over his people like the sword of Damocles, the New Testament God is one of gentle and loving care who is the bearer of the Good News that our God is a God of love and that we are loved by God beyond all our imagining.
The spiritual writer, the Dominican priest, Donagh O’Shea, wrote recently that, in examining the old Green Catechism many of us learned off by heart in national school, it was found that the word ‘love’ was never mentioned – even once!
Is it any wonder that so many of us have spent so much of our lives in thrall to an Old Testament God submitting us to lifetimes of terror and oppression? And missing out on our New Testament God who represented love and care. God’s love, Donagh O’Shea has written, ‘is not a bounty we have to earn, but a gift that’s offered to us that’s life-enhancing, liberating and often a sheer joy’.
So, gentle reader, as we look forward to another year, can I leave you with a question to mull over? Is your God the God of the Old Testament or the God of the new?
