Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. As humans we have a tendency to look at our world or our lives and lament the way things were. We look back into our past with affection and wish that things today could be more like the way we remember them. Because the world has changed from how we remember it, we come to resist change; we see it as something that makes our lives worse. We are especially bad for this in the church when we think of how big our Sunday schools used to be; how many services we had on a Sunday because our congregations were so big back then.
Those in Israel had a bad case of nostalgia too. They were the chosen people living in the Promised Land but they were under occupation by the Roman Army. They thought that when the Messiah arrived, He’d be their king, and things would go back to how they were in the golden period of Israel that existed in their memory. Now Jesus had come to change things, but not in the way they wanted. Jesus wanted to change the world into the kingdom of God where the poor are looked after, the hungry fed, the stranger welcomed, and where no one is excluded from society. Israel wanted change, but not this change. While Jesus was the King, He was not the king they wanted, so He was rejected and executed.
When we accept our world is not the world that Jesus modelled; we accept there has to be change to bring that about. The church is the body of Jesus and we are the agents of this change. We have to point this world to the way life is going to be one day so the world has hope that how things are, is not how things are always going to be. But if we in the church are only ever looking at our past we are not looking towards this future. If we only think about how good things used to be, we miss how good things are going to be. When we confess Christ is King, we put our preferences, our wills and our desires subject to His. We claim to be subjects of His kingdom and the King’s call is that the church continues to proclaim the good news to those around us. If this means we have to change our methods to meet the challenges of our future ministry, then we must embrace this. To stick to how we like to do things is be rebellious subjects of our king.