‘King of Kings’ is an invitation to join the story
‘King of Kings’ movie poster by Angel Studios via Wikipedia.
Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf
I’ve been told that preachers really only have a couple of sermons, and that they repeat those throughout their careers. I think this is largely true, and one of my sermons is about how the Bible is an invitation to join the story that is taking place. “King of Kings,” the latest animated feature of Jesus’ story, is not exactly the most riveting movie in the world, but it gets one thing right – it places the viewer directly in Jesus’ story.
Part of that magic comes from the fact that the story is told from the perspective of Charles Dickens’ family. Yes, you read that right. The movie is based on Dickens’ “The Story of Our Lord,” a condensed version of the Gospels that he read every year with his children. We are introduced to the Dickens family right off the bat, because their youngest son Walter is obsessed with King Arthur and interrupts a performance of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” through his shenanigans.
Walter’s imagination is a gift, however, and Dickens uses it to stir his interest in “the greatest story ever told,” by telling him that his King Arthur stories are based on Jesus’ stories, even if they lack dragons and magic swords. The result is that when the great miracles of the Bible are taking place, Walter and Willa, his pet cat, are right there with Jesus seeing it all unfold before their very eyes.
Two scenes left an indelible mark on me as I exited the theater. In the first, Jesus comes to his future disciples and gives them sound fishing advice and then offers to make them “fishers of men.” While the scene is largely biblically accurate, Willa the cat is shown to be particularly excited about all the fish. While largely played for comic relief, it also begs the question – how would you react if you were there? We know how Willa would, and that gives us something to hang our hat on in this imaginative adventure.
The Bible is many things, but I believe it is primarily a story. That story is not meant to remain firmly entrenched in the past but is instead supposed to provide us with the tools first to imagine ourselves as participating in the great story of God’s redemption, and second to allow us to structure our lives so that we tell the story that God is telling even now.
In another scene, Walter takes on the role of the boy who offers Jesus his lunch during the feeding of the multitudes. While the movie accurately portrays fish and loaves, it is actually a cookie that is handed over to Jesus for a brief moment before being magically transfigured into the biblical reality. This flickering between our context and the biblical, a kind of “thin space” into which Walter steps, is nothing short of what I try to create on Sundays.
While the Bible offers a couple of different (and conflicting) reasons that Jesus uses parables to teach, I think the one that’s most obvious is that they relate to the everyday lives of the people that were hearing them at the time. Honestly, they still relate to our everyday lives. Who hasn’t lost a precious object, been upset at unfairness, or been excluded from a social event? These and more are all used as teaching tools by the Master Storyteller himself.
The Bible is many things, but I believe it is primarily a story. That story is not meant to remain firmly entrenched in the past, but is instead supposed to provide us with the tools first to imagine ourselves as participating in the great story of God’s redemption, and second to allow us to structure our lives so that we tell the story that God is telling even now.
There were parts of “King of Kings” I didn’t like – its portrayal of Jewish characters borders on antisemitic in my opinion – but I did appreciate this invitation to imagine ourselves in the story that is the Bible. That is one thing that I will be taking with me throughout my life and into the pulpit.
Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf is senior minister, Lake Street Church of Evanston, Illinois. He currently serves as the co-associate regional minister with the American Baptist Churches Metro Chicago. His book, published in 2023 by T&T Clark, is titled “Sanctuary and Subjectivity: Thinking Theologically about Whiteness and Sanctuary Movements.” He is also the co-founder of Challenging Islamophobia Together Chicagoland, an initiative that brings together people of all faiths to counter Islamophobia from a religious perspective.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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