It’s Good to Be the King
Isaiah 9:1-7
January 23, 2011
Our scripture today is one that we read in abbreviated form in the run-up to Christmas.
It’s Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah, the One who will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty
God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Isaiah goes further and shows that Jesus is heir to a
throne – the throne of David, the first and greatest of Israel’s mighty kings. “Authority rests upon
his shoulders,” the prophet writes, and “his authority shall grow continually.” The Christ Child,
the infant of Bethlehem, will be the king of his people and will come to be known as the king of
the world.
It’s good to be the king.
But we don’t always like to admit that. After all, didn’t our forefathers fight a bloody
revolution so that we wouldn’t have to bow before any king? To heck with royal blood – we’ll
pick our own leaders, thank you, and we’ll throw them out when we get tired of them. The king
rules until he dies; the politician rules until we vote him into retirement. We like it that way.
And so to acknowledge Christ as king of the world requires first of all giving over to God
our impulse to want to be in control. Where democracy says “Power to the people,” serving a
king means accepting that ultimately we’re not in charge of our lives. That’s something I know I
need to work at; maybe you do, too. But to place that ultimate trust in the ultimately trustworthy
God – it’s the only reasonable response to God’s creative power and God’s grace and God’s care
for us.
But today I want to talk about how we might claim that spirit of Christ the king in our
lives. I take as a starting point Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in which he says, “I have been
crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” That is,
through our baptism as Christians we allow our old self to die, and are resurrected into a new and
different life, right here on earth, that is animated by the Spirit of Christ. Christ who lives in us.
Which means, among other things, claiming the kingly authority of Christ. You and I are
called to be kings.
Now, before you start bellowing for a cup of mead and your fiddlers three, we need to
examine just what that means. To do that, we need to revisit an old friend from your college
Psychology 101 class – Carl Jung.
Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of the school called analytical psychology.
He was born in 1875 and died in 1961, not all that long ago. He was also, I learned, the first
modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is “by nature religious.”
But Jung is best-known for his theory of the collective unconscious. He said that simply
by virtue of being human beings, we all share, deep in our brains, a set of assumptions that he
called archetypes. For example, all human beings have a mental image of the archetype called
mother. In men, he identified an archetype called anima that represents a man’s unconscious
feminine component; and in women, an archetype called animus that represents a woman’s
unconscious male component. Jung said that the main psychological work that we do over the
course of our lives is to explore and integrate these archetypes into our conscious personality, a
process called self-realization.
One of the most important of these archetypes is called king. This archetype is in all of
us, but it may be most important for men to claim the kingly energy.
This is not self-aggrandizing look-at-me energy. It’s the energy that we see in Christ.
Jesus didn’t showboat in order to meet his own needs for recognition and significance. He didn’t
need to. But he also didn’t shy away from exercising his power, God’s power, when the work
needed to get done. He spoke with authority, he healed and taught, he jousted with the Pharisees.
He fully claimed that king energy, and we, as followers of Christ, are called to do the same.
In Jungian terms, that energy takes two major forms. Ordering is one, and fertility and
blessing is the other.
The ordering energy of the king reflects God’s actions that we read about in Genesis,
when God took the formless chaos and shaped it into oceans and land, redwood trees and geckos
and human beings. This is God’s powerful creative spirit at work, but it’s not the reckless energy
of a 2-year-old throwing a tantrum; instead it’s the generative energy that orders the world in a
way that promotes growth and balance. This aspect of the kingly energy is at its best when it
conforms itself to God’s original ordering principle, the one God refers to when God looks at
creation and sees that it is good.
The second vital thing that the king energy manifests is fertility and blessing. This is a
double gift that we see in Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the great Hebrew kings and patriarchs. God
anoints them to the throne of Israel and makes two demands of them: They are to walk in the
ways of Yahweh, the God of Israel, and they are to “be fruitful and multiply.” So we get the
stories that will scandalize the Sunday school, where if one wife is not able to bear children, she
will find another wife or a concubine to bear the king’s heirs. This is an image of the king’s deep
investment in the future of the land; the kingdom would be expected to mirror the fertility of the
royal household. The mortal king was the embodiment of the divine king energy, and the land,
his kingdom, embodied the feminine energies. So the king was symbolically married to his land.
I got interested in these ideas when I read a book about how these archetypes play out in
human life, specifically the life of men. And I think it will help to quote a little piece of that
book, which is called King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, about how the kingly energy can show
itself in practical ways. The authors say it this way:
“This is the energy that expresses itself through a man when he takes the necessary
financial and psychological steps to ensure that his wife and children prosper. This is the energy
that encourages his wife when she decides she wants to go back to school to become a lawyer.
This is the energy that expresses itself through a father when he takes time off from work to
attend his son’s piano recital. This is the energy that, through the boss, confronts the rebellious
subordinates at the office without firing them. This is the energy that expresses itself through the
assembly line foreman when he is able to work with the recovering alcoholics and drug abusers
in his charge to support their sobriety and to give them empowering masculine guidance and
nurturing.
“This is the energy that expresses itself through you when you are able to keep your cool
when everybody else in the meeting is losing theirs. This is the voice of calm and reassurance,
the encouraging word at a time of chaos and struggle. This is the clear decision, after careful
deliberation, that cuts through the mess in the family, at work, in the nation, in the world. This is
the energy that seeks peace and stability, orderly growth and nurturing for all people – and not
only for all people, but for the environment, the natural world. The king cares for the whole
realm and is the steward of nature as well as of human society.”
Now, I recognize that this is couched in particularly masculine language. But the king
energy is there for all of us. It is the voice from the divine center in each of us, the place where
Christ lives and reigns. And we can live it out deliberately and with passion. We can be an
ordering and blessing force in the world, in all the places we touch.
For me, the best part of Psychology 101 was when the professor told stories, and so as an
antidote to the heavy intellectual work you all have done this morning, I want to offer just a little
story in closing. It’s a parable, and it has been told in many forms in many cultures.
The story goes that there was an infant lion cub that got separated from his family and
found his way into a flock of sheep. The sheep raised the cub as one of their own, and the cub
did not know he was a lion. He ate grass along with the sheep, and he followed the flock.
One day a male lion pounced on the little flock. The sheep instinctively scattered in
terror, but the little cub was not a sheep. He felt no instinct to run. He just stood there. The adult
lion saw the cub standing there and asked, “What are you doing living among the sheep and the
lambs?”
“Baaaa,” said the little lion cub, and he went back to nibbling the grass as he had learned
to do.
The male lion was furious. It took the cub by the scruff of the neck and carried him to a
pond. “Look into the water,” he said. “What do you see?”
In the past, the lion cub had only drunk from the pond. He had never really looked to see
who he was. For the first time, now, he looked at his reflection in the pond. He was surprised to
discover that he did not look like the sheep. He was deeply confused. “Who am I,” he said, “if I
am not one of the sheep?”
The adult lion looked at him and let out a loud roar. “You are like me, a lion,” he said.
“You are a king of the jungle.”
The cub asked, “What is a king?”
The lion looked at the cub and said, “Roar!”
The little cub tried to roar, but all that came out was a pitiful “Baaaa.”
The lion took the cub again by the neck and carried him off to its den. There lay the
remains of a recently slaughtered kill.
The lion took a piece of the bloody meat and told the cub to eat it.
“I don’t eat that stuff, whatever it is,” the cub said. “I eat grass.”
“Eat it,” insisted the lion.
The cub opened his mouth and, for the first time, chewed and swallowed raw, bloody
meat. And for the first time in his life, from somewhere deep within his body, came the sound of
a fierce and powerful roar.