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Christ the King
This feast of Christ the King is full of paradox as the readings make clear. In the reading from Revelation, we see Jesus Christ, “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth,” grand and glorious, transfigured and triumphant, “coming amid the clouds, receiving dominion, glory, and kingship,” with people of all nations bowing down before him. That’s the first picture we get. In the gospel we get quite a different picture: Jesus, a prisoner before Pontius Pilate, strong, serene, but scarcely king-like: a witness to the truth but not to power, or perhaps to power of a very different sort. And therein lies the paradox. For the Jesus who stood bound before Pilate was powerful but not with the usual trappings that kings like to flaunt. No, the only power that Jesus had was the power of truth, the power of love. No crown, no court, no scepter, no wealth, no weapons, no standing army. None of that. Only truth. Only love. Sometimes I wonder how we in the Church could have gotten this so wrong so many times down through the ages. How in one breath we could claim to follow the humble servant king and at the same time act like the power-wielding, power-hungry kings of this world. How do we reconcile a Church that once had vast land holdings and wielded immense secular power, complete with armies and weapons of war, with the humble Christ who stood defenseless before Pontius Pilate, who insisted that his kingdom was not here? And how do we reconcile a Church that at one time used its power to force people to believe with the gentle Christ whose only weapon was the truth? How is it that the Church could have gotten it so wrong so often, playing the power-broker instead of the powerless servant? Not easy questions to answer. Happily, in more recent time we have learned some lessons and have rediscovered the kingly Christ who is like no other king, but the temptation to seek or to abuse power or to make a display of it is never far away. I thought of that recently when I saw a photograph of a curial cardinal in Rome wrapped in yards and yards of red crimson silk with a train that was long enough to reach clear out to Terry Avenue (I’m not making this up!). He was surrounded by a troop of clerical attendants dripping in lace and brocades and looking for all the world like Renaissance princes. If it hadn’t been a photograph I would have been certain I was looking at a 16th century portrait of one of the Borgias! How to reconcile such things with the Christ of today’s gospel, the Christ before Pilate, a king in fact but certainly not in appearance! How to reconcile it with the Second Vatican Council that pointedly shunned the triumphal church and championed the humble servant Church? In a homily on this feast several years ago I told you about an etching of Christ on the wall of my living room. In black and white strokes, stripped and brutally exposed, is a likeness of the suffering Christ, head bowed, eyes closed, arms hanging at his side -- the very picture of vulnerability. This engraving of Christ is the work of the great twentieth-century French artist, Georges Rouault, who once wrote about his work (and I quote), “My only ambition in life is to be able some day to paint a Christ so moving that those who see him will be converted.” I think he succeeded. When I look at Rouault's Christ I experience conversion because it makes me look inward and face the truth about myself and the truth about Christ. The Christ in today’s gospel who stands mute before Pontius Pilate, a human failure by almost any reckoning, is the king I am called to follow, the king you are called to follow, the king the Church and every one of its leaders is called to follow. We are reminded of this every time we pray in this cathedral. The words written high above this altar are a gospel definition of kingship. “I am in your midst as one who serves. Jesus spoke the words to settle a silly dispute among his disciples – a dispute as to who among them was the greatest, the most important. He spoke them during his last supper with them, on the eve of the day when he would both define and claim a whole new kind of kingship. “Among the pagans,” he told his followers, “kings lord it over people. Their great ones make their authority felt. It cannot be that way with you. No the greatest among you must behave as if he were the least, and the leader as if he were the servant… I am in your midst as one who serves….” My friends, Georges Rouault's great ambition in life was to paint a Christ so moving that those who saw him would be converted. Now, as far as I know, the only Christ that Rouault ever painted was the suffering Christ, similar to the one on my living room wall. Never a Christ in glory. Interesting, isn’t it? But maybe not surprising. After all, it was the suffering Christ, the Christ without an ounce of power or a hint of majesty in him, who converted the wretched thief who hung alongside him on the cross and turned the centurion into a believer. He has been doing this ever since. He can do the same for you and me. Father Michael G. Ryan |
