Colossians 1.11-20; Luke 23. 33-43
‘[T]here is a throne at the heart of every culture’. This is one of the principal arguments made by Paul Kingsnorth in his recently published book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (p. 11).
He asks his readers to imagine a whole culture that is built around the Christian story: the story of God’s creation of a world that is entirely good, its corruption by human sin and disobedience, and its liberation from death by Christ, who shows us the path of love and sacrifice by which we may return to the original beauty God intended. Imagine a culture, Kingsnorth says, which is built around this story. Now imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, and innovation – however imperfectly – upon these foundations. Finally, imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.
If you live in the West, he argues, then you do not have to imagine any of this, for we are living among those very ruins, and have been all our lives. Cathedrals such as this, Bach concertos, these are the remains of something called ‘Christendom’, a civilisation that existed for fifteen-hundred years. Every aspect of life in Christendom was informed and transformed by the sacred story which lay at its heart: the organisation of the working week; the annual cycle of holy days and days of rest; the payment of taxes; the notion of individuals and their moral duties and rights; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most fundamentally, the structure and meaning of the universe, and of the place of human beings within it.
None of this is to say that Christendom was perfect – in fact, it could be argued that it wasn’t very Christian at times – but, as Kingsnorth argues, what it does mean is that ‘the West’ simply is ‘the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a sacred order constructed around this particular religious story.’ Furthermore, the point he particularly presses is that, when a culture built around such a sacred order dies, then there will be upheaval at every level of society, all the way down to the level of the human soul. The West, he argues, was Christendom, but Christendom died, and even though we may live among its beautiful ruins, this makes ours a culture with no sacred order, which is a dangerous place to be (see Against the Machine, pp. 5-7).
The process by which Christendom died was long and complex, but that is not our immediate concern this morning. Nor do we need to make an idol of the past, and say that a return to Christendom is the solution to all of our present problems. Indeed, as Kingsnorth argues, as Christendom has slowly crumbled, one of the important things that we have learned in the West is to interrogate power and identify illegitimate authority.
However, the point remains, every culture, whether it is conscious of the fact or not, every culture is built around a sacred order, at the heart of which stands a throne. Christ was on the throne at the heart of the Western sacred order of Christendom, but the Enlightenment project of dethroning the Son of God has not led to the universal equality, liberty, and justice that it promised.
Instead, the so-called ‘Age of Reason’ has witnessed the violence of bloody revolution, fascist war-mongering and genocide, and the destruction of the sacred order of the old world. A vacuum has been created into which consumer capitalism has stepped and brought about the complete triumph of the power of money. As Kingsnorth argues, money culture has infiltrated and colonised every aspect of life, in the way that the Christendom story once did, so that we barely even notice it most of the time (see Against the Machine, pp. 10-13).
Christ has been dethroned, and now money sits on the throne of Western culture.
Of course, today we celebrate the fact that, despite the chances and changes of this fleeting world, Christ reigns triumphant upon the throne of his heavenly kingdom as the King of Glory. We rejoice that he is the Lord of Life, that death no longer has any dominion over him. And as we enter the season of Advent next weekend, we especially look forward with hope, to the day when Jesus will return and establish his kingdom of peace and justice upon the earth for ever.
In this present age, there will be cultures and societies that reflect and signify the kingdom of God to varying degrees. But today is a reminder that, as St Paul put it in his epistle to the Philippians, our citizenship is in heaven. Ultimately, the throne around which we gather is a spiritual one, not a worldly one.
But does this mean that we can simply shut our eyes to the world around us? Does it mean that whoever, or whatever, sits upon the throne at the heart of Western culture is irrelevant to us?
Well, no, and I want to offer a suggestion about what our attitude might be, in this respect, by turning to one more idea offered by Paul Kingsnorth. He argues that a culture is essentially a spiritual creation. The cult, that is, the sacred order of divine worship, is what makes a culture (see Against the Machine, p. 12).
And this brings us to a feast that is very closely connected with the one that we celebrate today, namely, the Ascension of Our Lord into heaven. Traditionally, the Ascension is associated with Christ’s enthronement, which means that some question whether it was even necessary for Pope Pius XI to establish the feast of Christ the King in 1925. However, we may look at the two feast days as two sides of the same coin. If today we celebrate Christ’s kingship, the Ascension reminds us of Christ’s high priesthood.
As the Epistle to the Hebrews makes clear, Jesus ascends into heaven as our great high priest to offer himself to the Father as a sacrifice. His resurrected humanity is the most precious gift that earth can offer to heaven, and so he ascends in order to initiate the Christian cult. He is the priest, he is the sacrifice, and he himself is the altar.
And, as the Epistle to the Hebrews equally makes clear, we can have boldness to approach the heavenly throne of grace through the body and blood of Jesus. In the liturgy we celebrate this morning, Christ has given to his Church this Eucharistic sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, so that we can ascend in heart and mind into God’s heavenly temple, and offer him worship in spirit and in truth.
What this means is that, set in the midst of our own Western culture, which continually offers worship at the throne and altar of money, the Church is a witness to a better way. For what we witness to in this liturgy is that gift lies at the heart of reality. Our culture is one of inordinate consumerism. But in the Eucharist, we witness to the fact that, yes, we receive, yes, we consume, yes, we eat and drink, but we only do so within the circle of divine love, within the circle of gift-giving. First, we offer God our gifts of bread and wine, secondly, he offers them back to us, as the body and blood of his Son, and finally, we receive these divine gifts, so that we might be sent out into the world, to offer ourselves as living sacrifices.
Christendom has died, and it is unlikely to return. But that should not trouble us. Because this morning, as on every Sunday, we gather around the throne and altar of God, to celebrate the Christian cult of sacrificial worship and joyful thanksgiving. And if the Church can do so with boldness and confidence, we can trust that those who are weary and worn-out by the hamster-wheel of consumer capitalism might see in our worship the seeds of a new kind of culture, in which the throne is occupied by the one who, on the cross, showed us what a true king looks like, as he gave everything, so that we might have life.