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The Pain of Rejection

Christ the King : 24 November 2013  : Luke 23: 35-43

Public fascination with Diana, former Princess of Wales, received a further boost this year with the release of a film about the last two years of her life. She was someone whom people had passionate feelings about – they either loved her or loathed her. My sister and mother were in the latter camp. At the height of the fall out from the royal marriage break up my mother threatened to launch the Christchurch chapter of the Camilla Parker Bowles support group.

This year the Queen and Prince Phillip will be celebrating their 66th wedding anniversary. No doubt, amidst their own private celebration, they will be relieved at and giving thanks for the good news which has attended the marital affairs of the wider royal family in recent years.

When weighing up whether to attend the Diana film my mind turned to the film "Queen" starring Helen Mirren that screened some years back. It tells the story of the Royal Family’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana. On holiday in Scotland with the royal grandchildren, they are shocked by the sudden news from Paris, and revert to their keep it private, stiff upper lip, characteristic response as a way of coping. This puts them off side with a public who are craving for a cathartic response to their deep well of grief. The newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair has the job of coaxing them down to London to join in a celebrity style of mourning that they loathe. The Queen is obliged to make a speech, somewhat through clenched teeth, speaking well of a former daughter in law, whom she privately believes to have been a manipulative, self dramatising, narcissistic trouble maker.

The Royal Family, like many of ours, has had to live with the duality of celebrating long-lived stable unions, while mourning the premature end of other unions through the desolating plague of divorce. We live in an age when people’s emotional and relational expectations of their intimate relationships have risen, while at the same time the casualty rate of failed relationships has dramatically escalated, leaving in its wake a trail of acute disappointment, broken hearts, and hurt and angry people. When someone who once admired us, desired us, and ardently sought out our company, decides to call it quits, and includes in their exit speech a few well-chosen critical observations about our character and behaviour, the emotional pain of rejection is great. At such times we have to wrestle against the temptation to give in to self-pity, recrimination and vindictive behaviour. Being able to meet the pain of rejection with magnanimity, largeness of heart, and the humility that uses this tragic dose of reality as an opportunity for spiritual growth, is truly a God-like task. That is what is going on in today’s lessons that are full of rejection agendas directed at God.

The invitation to David to reign in the place of dead King Saul sounds like a good news story, but recall that less than a generation before there has been a tragic confrontation between the Prophet Samuel and the people about the legitimacy of founding the institution of monarchy. Up until then the children of Israel have been a loose confederation of tribes with occasional emergency military leaders called the Judges raised up to meet specific situations. This is the way God likes it, says the prophet Samuel, because your ability to live without hereditary monarchs shows that God is in charge of you. No, no, we want to be like everyone else, say the people – we can live with becoming royal servants, indentured labourers, and taxed subjects. Don’t take it personally, God tells Samuel. They are rejecting me not you – I can live with it – give them what they want. And so the tragic reign of King Saul begins.

On the cross Jesus calls down a Divine forgiveness on his executioners, judges and mockers who do not want to receive it, and who scorn his gift. Only one person, and that perhaps the least likely, has some inkling of what is on offer, and in appropriating it receives a truly astounding outcome.

In his reaching out to us in the Incarnation God has emptied himself of all but love in three movements, at three different levels.

First of all he generates the Son and the Spirit to be with him in the Divine interrelationships. God is not alone in his inner being.

Then in the creation God gives of himself to allow the free emergence of what is other to himself. Now there is a world, perhaps worlds, that is free to get on with being itself, and is free also to love or to reject its creator.

That latter option is exactly what it does as creations turns away from its creator, thereby initiating the third level of self emptying as the Son enters the world and goes to the cross, to take on himself the pain of the world’s rejection. Of course that is not the end of the story as the Son absorbs the pain of the world’s rejection, neutralises it, and in the raising of Christ in glory to the right hand of God, opens up the way of homecoming for the human race to return to its creator.

Today as we celebrate the feast of Christ the King we are acknowledging a very ironic style of Kingship. What the Royal family had to put up with for a time as they struggled with their ambivalent feelings about what Diana had done to them and the institution of the Monarchy for good or ill, God puts up with from us all the time until the end of time. Just as he did with the children of Israel’s not so bright idea about making themselves royal doormats, he flexibly adjusts himself to the details of our lives, our refusals, and procrastinations, and wrong turnings, like the master weaver he is, working it all in to the final design so that our rejections become part of the beautiful pattern of Divine love and of human homecoming return to him. Just as Jesus had the largeness of spirit to call down peace and forgiveness on those deadly oppositional creatures, the wayward people of God of his time, so he takes it on the chin from us in our day.

We of course hurt his body the church in our day with our betrayals and fights and power plays. But as the wonderful reading from Colossians explains to us - that mighty power by which Christ holds the creation together, is its organising principle, is at work in the life of the Church to hold it together as its organising principle of unity, no matter what human folly is afoot in Church affairs.

This is a King who rules by absorbing into himself our jejune temper tantrums, who is patient, and forbearing and forgiving with our rejection agendas. He does not make his Kingly authority felt by settling our hash, though God knows we sometimes deserve it.

That in turn might persuade us to be a bit braver, and kinder, and more mature about dealing with the pain of personal rejection when it comes our way. Instead of retreating into smaller and smaller worlds where no one can ever hurt us again, we could turn away from that empty, lonely space, and be prepared, with all the hard won wisdom and prudence that has come our way from expensive mistakes, to be kinder, wiser people in the way we relate to others.