The eternal kingdom of God in Christ
This Sunday we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. Although a relatively new waypoint in the liturgical year, this picks up on the ancient image of Christ as King. However, as with any earthly image, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of just writing large the human image, rather than thinking about how the heavenly image of Christ as King might shape (or even radically change) our view of human authority. This same problem is found when we take the statement that we are ‘made in the image of God’ and start to think of God as some superhuman being rather than as the source of all that is and the point to which we are called. In short, we all too often lose the wonder, mystery and glory of how different from us God is and relax into a view that God is just ‘like us – only better’.
So what does it mean to be a part of the ‘eternal kingdom of Christ’? For me the starting point to this is my understanding of the saints who surround us as ‘a great cloud of witnesses’ – that they are not just figures of the past, but they are present alongside us as we pray and worship…
