All Stirred up for Stir-up Sunday

Feast of Christ the King (Sunday next before Advent) 2025. Jeremiah 23.1-6; Colossians 1.11-20; Luke 23.33-43


The Jews have a wonderful festival called Simchat Torah, when they celebrate the final reading of the year’s fifty-two Sabbath portions of scripture, then roll the scroll back to the beginning, ready to start the cycle all over again.


I always think of this on the last Sunday of the Church year, when Christians similarly hear the final reading from that year’s gospel (it has been Luke during 2025), before beginning the next one on Advent Sunday, which is when the Church year begins.


Perhaps we contemplate this beginning-again to walk in the way of Christ with a certain trepidation, even an uncertainty as to why we bother. The Church in Britain seems so very far removed from people’s attention or concern that one could not be blamed for adding to the general exodus with one’s own retreating footsteps. Yet here we seem to stay, and on we seem to plod.


The sense of loss is nothing new after all. Even the prophet Jeremiah, five or six hundred years before Christ, complained that the shepherds of God’s flock (the prophets, priests and kings) were making such a desperately bad job of things that God himself was going to have to raise up a righteous branch of David’s line, in order to put things right.


More recently, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Church has felt itself to be under the cosh of rising secularism and a consequent loss of influence. Pope Pius IX felt himself to be a prisoner in the Vatican after the loss of papal territories in 1870. Pius XI felt similarly beleaguered after the loss of the Habsburg empire in 1918. Indeed, he identified such a significant haemorrhaging of Catholic power that in 1925 he created today’s Feast of Christ the King, which in due time the Church of England also adopted. Declaring Christ as Universal King was a way of shoring up remaining power as real political power diminished, an increasing feature of the age.


The new festival quickly came to prominence as, between 1926 and 1929, battle raged in Mexico between a government viciously opposed to the Catholic faith, and a group of brave and utterly committed Catholics known as Cristeros. Whenever they were caught and executed, they would shout Viva Cristo Rey! Long live Christ the King!


But what kind of king can Christ be said to be? We know him as a king of shepherds, born among the lowliest in a Bethlehem cave. He’s the king of misfits and dropouts, breaking bread with anyone anywhere, while having nowhere to lay his head. He is the king of slaves, as he takes on their task of washing feet. And in his final breaths he is the king of convicts, pinned to a Roman cross, with the ironic sign ‘King of the Jews’ nailed prominently above his head.


But this fails to recognise what the Letter to the Colossians calls ‘Christ’s peace-making through the blood of the cross’; or the establishment of the Kingdom of redemption and light, to which we have been transferred by God as those who belong to Christ through baptism and the confession of faith.


The bloodied lump of meat hanging from a cross on Calvary is none other than the Father’s beloved Son, in whom all the fullness of God is pleased to dwell, and through whose perfect and utterly powerful example of love the reconciliation of God and man is effected, through which Adam is restored to paradise, just as the repentant thief is promised.


This is why we roll back the gospel scroll and prepare to walk in the way of Christ for another year. We see in him a far simpler and greater power, wisdom and strength than the muscle-flexing world can ever achieve. Christ’s power is the unassailable power of love, offering us a life of such abundance and renewal that nothing can rob us of the vision shared with us by the Spirit.


This is why the Prayer-Book Collect for today is so loved and highly-prized in the church. It asks God to stir up our wills so that we may bring forth good works plenteously, and in turn be plenteously rewarded by God for doing so. It is equally true that the prayer became popular because the Sunday before Advent seemed a good time to start to prepare one’s Christmas puddings, and to give the mixture an initial stirring-up. So the day became known as ‘Stir-up Sunday’ for reasons that I hope might be at least as godly as they are culinary.


Note that our bringing-forth of good works depends on God’s initial stirring-up of grace within us. Such works are not in opposition to the faith which commends us to God. They are rather an expression of it; and one that in a modest way might number us with the Cristeros, and with all those who have ever turned the page from one year to the next, in the hope of continuing to write the story of Christ’s Church, and to walk in the Master’s footsteps for as long as he supplies the strength to do so.