Christ the King

Sermon

Christ the King

26 November 2023

The Reverend Dr James Gardom 

Matthew 25.31-46

You should have received on the way in one of the small prayer cards of the Cross of Migrants in Pembroke College Chapel. I want to talk about the Cross of Migrants as a way of helping us focus our thoughts on what it means to have Christ as our King.

In 2016 in Pembroke College, we were thinking a lot at all levels, from the Master, the Fellows, the Students and the Staff. We were trying to respond constructively to the migration crisis that was unfolding in the Mediterranean. You may remember that our news feeds were full of stories of small boats, often filled with Syrian refugees, with stories of drownings, of desperate Groups coming ashore.

I was strongly encouraging different parts of the college, from the Gardeners to the Fellowship Committee to think of ways appropriate for them to respond. For the Chapel I was very keen that as well as sermons, collections, anthems and concerts we should have a cross that could symbolise to us the vulnerability and humanity of the refugees in transit. I was aware that some had been produced in Lampedusa. It took a little while, but eventually I remembered that Italy is a place of personal connections, and when I asked our Italian Fellow he was able to put me in touch, within hours, with Francesco Tuccio, the carpenter of Lampedusa. He had been making crosses out of the timbers of boats to commemorate refugees who had died en route to Lampedusa. I was able to ask him to make one for us.

I have vivid memories of the arrival of the cross in the Chapel.  It arrived by courier on the morning of Ash Wednesday 2017. I called together a group of students to collect it, and to take it to the chapel, so that it could be in place for the evening Ash Wednesday service. The bundle was about 7 foot long, quite large, wrapped in brown paper, and swathed in parcel tape. It took two of us to carry it into chapel, and it felt strangely like bringing in a body. Together we started to unwrap the parcel. I had a very strong sense of the Lazarus story as we did the unwrapping, I had forgotten that I had asked Francesco Tuccio to send us some of the rather useless lifejackets that refugees purchase from the people traffickers before they set off. Part of the shape of the bundle was these lifejackets which had been used to protect the wood of the cross as it travelled. The lifejackets were damp, and they carried with them the smell of the sea, and the smell of the sweat of the refugees who had worn them. The smell connecting up the symbolism of the cross with the particular individuals who had worn and then abandoned the lifejackets. It made them very real to us.

We removed the substantial pieces of wood that compose the cross. I had asked for something clearly evocative of a boat, and the Carpenter had chosen a curved piece of wood from the bow, with obvious signs of the rubbing of ropes on wood. The cross timber wood is splintery and rough.

To assemble it we needed to push bolts through the wood, and then make it secure. This felt a little like the crucifixion. With the help of John, a member of the maintenance staff, we lashed the cross to one of the columns in the chapel, at the East end. Having it moored to the Chapel gave a strong sense of arrival, of being in harbour. Having it moored to the fine marble columns was also disruptive. Pembroke Chapel is beautiful, as fine as we can manage. The Cross is damaged, bent, out of true with the lines of the Chapel. It will not let us simply be at peace with the beauty of the Chapel. In due course the maintenance staff, who were also very moved by the cross, fabricated a mount for it to allow it to be freestanding.

Most terms, when we are reflecting on refugees the cross is, as you see it, moved to the centre of the chapel, and surrounded by the lifejackets. Visitors always notice it, and almost always take away one of the little prayer cards such as the one you have been given. The purpose of having this cross in Pembroke’s beautiful chapel is to humanise and make real and concrete the individuals in such danger as they flee oppression, poverty and climate change.

On the back of the prayer cards is a section from today’s gospel, which I always find challenging.

I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” 44 Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” 45Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

This, of the sheep and the goats, parable is a parable of kingship, it is the King who judges, and it set for today, for the feast of Christ the King. So where does Kingship fit in?

In September last year I had the privilege of attending the Royal Funeral in Westminster Abbey, on behalf of my College. It was a strange and glorious and poignant occasion. The most powerful moment, I think, was the lone piper playing as the coffin was taken out of the Abbey. It was possible, for a moment, to experience the centre of the symbolic reality of Kingship. There was, briefly, a sense of the unity of the nation focussed on this one frail body, which was beginning its final journey to Windsor. Though an admirer of our late Queen, I am afraid I’m only a tepid, faute de mieux  monarchist. But Kingship, when it is real, enables a people to think of themselves, to experience themselves as a unity.  And for that moment, with that lone piper, I could really see the point. Kingship is about unity and identity, about a kind of belonging that does not depend on merit or reward.

What is true in this earthly kingdom is far more true in the Kingdom of Christ. Kingship is about unity and identity, about a kind of belonging that does not depend on our individual merit or reward. That is the point of the Parable – at the moment of judgement it becomes clear that our link with unity and identity of the King and the Kingdom is dependent on the Unity and Identity of Christ with the poor and those in need. The judgement is based on what we do or fail to do “for one of the least of the members of the family” of King – those who are hungry or thirsty or naked or sick. This is our King, and in Christ we find our unity, our identity. It should probably be for us as Christians our primary identity. And Christ says “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

It is the feast day of Christ the King. And if Christ is our King, then the poor are our kin.