Yesterday, of course, was Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we head into Advent. The pastor at our church delivered an excellent sermon on the different aspects of Christ’s kingship and how we can become aware of them in our lives. Jesus reigns over all things, but he reigns as the crucified one – the one who transfigures the symbols of kingship and is present to us as the one who forgives our sins (the gospel text speaks to this with special power).

This ambiguity in Christ’s lordship is one that I think we’re often tempted to eliminate in one direction or the other. The more common is to see Christ as an earthly ruler writ large, and to downplay, or ignore, the way he transfigures our ideas of kingship. On the other hand, in some recent theology, the emphasis has been laid so heavily on Christ’s weakness and his solidarity in suffering that the Resurrection and his triumphant reign seems to get lost.

It doesn’t seem right to say that the Resurrection simply undoes the crucifixion, as though it didn’t reveal anything special or new about God. But it does imply that self-giving love is also backed up with ultimate power. The death of Christ isn’t simply a case of a beautiful soul ground under the wheels of an unforgiving universe: it reveals what the universe, at bottom, rests upon and what will ultimately triumph.

Holding these two aspects of Christ’s sovereignty – power revealed in weakness and his status as the one for whom “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers” – isn’t easily done. Maybe this is another facet of living in between the times, but it’s hard not to chafe at what looks for all the world like Christ’s failure to exercise his rule over our world. I don’t think it’s sufficient to say that Christ doesn’t exercise his power that way, since we believe that he will, in some mysterious and unimaginable way, end creation’s rebellion against his rule.

Believing in Christ’s kingship means that we believe in both his present and future reigns, and yet those reigns are different, at least in the way things appear to us. In this age his reign appears partial at best, while creation groans for its redemption. And it’s hard for us (or at least for me) to believe in that reign, and to experience it, as a concrete reality. This is one more reason, I guess, why hope is a Christian virtue: we believe not merely in an unseen reality, but that this unseen reality will – someday – manifest itself in a final and definitive way.