The reign of Christ
The recurring image of Christ’s Reign in the Bible is often wrapped in grand language like this passage from the book of Revelation:
…Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
Revelation 1:5–8, NRSV
Many have relied on the Bible’s use of royal language to justify their own positions of power and privilege on social and economic hierarchies. Secular society has done much the same with its appeals to individual merit.
In contrast, the sovereign god of the Christian faith is none other than Jesus: a willfully poor human, a victim of state and religious violence, and one deeply connected with the everyday person. The divine is revealed as completely human in a way that subverts all notions of sovereignty to the point that any human claim to superiority or authority seems absurd. To justify hierarchies in the image of God’s sovereignty is to miss the point entirely.
The reign of Christ is the reign of the people at “the bottom.” This is not merely the inversion of the social and economic ladders; it is the abolition of them. There can be no legitimate claim to hierarchical authority in the light of God’s revelation of herself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. While kings of old claimed to rule on God’s behalf, and elites of our own time claim their authority on individual merit, but we find the true vicars of Christ on earth to be ourselves when we let go of the illusions of wealth, power, and privilege.
Close to the heart of the Christian faith is the proclamation that Christ is King. This is a roundabout way of saying that in a world of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, we believe that there is another world without these things just waiting to be born.