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Our Lord Jesus Christ the King
The air waves this past week were all a-twitter with talk about a royal wedding in the coming year. I don’t know about you but I find it a little ironic that, in this emphatically egalitarian land of ours that resolutely overthrew the British monarchy back in the eighteenth century, there is excitement, curiosity and fascination at the prospect of another storybook royal wedding. In any case, thoughts about royalty got me thinking about today’s feast and about how seductive this whole business of royalty can be. Christ is our king, but the triumphal trappings of kingship can make us lose sight of just what kind of king he is. It’s important to remember that Jesus refused the title of king: fled from the very possibility of it. When the people wanted to make him their king, he escaped and vanished from their midst. Later, at his trial, when Pilate asked him if he was a king, Jesus turned the question around, “You say that I am a king,” he told Pilate, but “my kingdom is not of this world.” So we need to be careful when we call Christ king. It’s worth observing that the Church got by for nearly two millennia without this feast of Christ the King. In fact, it wasn’t until the period between the First and Second World Wars that Pope Pius XI added this feast to the Church’s calendar. Various forms of totalitarianism were on the rise at the time: Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Communism in the Soviet Union and beyond. As a counterpoint to those godless grabs for power that denied basic human rights and trampled human dignity, the Pope raised up the figure of Christ the King, a most unlikely king – a humble king with no wealth or riches, no armies and no weapons other than truth and love, and no territorial ambitions other than human hearts. It is this servant Christ, the suffering, crucified Christ of today’s gospel whom we honor today and every day as King. But it is risky, this business of kingship, isn’t it? At its worst, throughout its long history, whenever the Church has lost sight of what sort of king Christ is, it has gotten seduced by the pretensions of power and the trappings of royalty, become overly concerned about its own power, prestige, and prerogatives. And we don’t have to go all the way back to the scandals and excesses of the Renaissance papacy to find examples of this! The awful abuse scandals of our own time, along with their cover-up, are sorry evidence of this, and so are the unholy alliances the Church has sometimes made with corrupt power elites -- repressive military dictatorships in places like Central and South America. Sadly, there have been times when, in carrying out its sacred mission, the Church has turned from the humble ways of Jesus and taken on the ways of those very authoritarian movements this feast was meant to counteract. The challenge for the Church and for anyone with authority or a leadership position in the Church – and I include myself – will always be to remember that Jesus redefined kingship. Jesus demonstrated his authority by kneeling before his friends and washing their dirty feet. Never did he let them wash his feet. My friends, all this says that we need to be clear what we mean – and what we don’t mean – when we call Christ our king. Over the Sundays of this past year we have been moving, chapter by chapter, through Luke’s gospel and we have met there a Christ who is really quite surprising – not only for what he said but, more importantly, for what he did. Surprising, too, for the company he kept. In fact, if we would follow this Christ, this king, I suggest that a good place to start would be to look at the company he kept. Here’s a rundown of some of those people – taken right from the pages of Luke’s gospel. They are quite a bunch, I think you will agree: the lowly shepherds at the manger; the poor, the hungry and the mourning of the Beatitudes; the sinful woman who crashed a dinner party to wash and anoint Jesus’ feet; the poor woman with the hemorrhage who only wanted to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment; the humble tax collector who would only stand at the back of the temple and beat his breast; the ten lepers who kept calling after Jesus, “Master, have pity on us!”; the cheating tax collector, Zacchaeus, with whom Jesus insisted on having dinner; the good thief of today’s gospel who stole heaven with his prayer. These, my friends, are the company of Jesus the king -- his royal retinue, if you will. We have met them all this past year Sunday after Sunday, and each of them should be a reminder to us, a powerful reminder, that if Jesus is a king, he’s a king like no other. For what king worth his salt would waste his time with that long list of losers?\ May our celebration of this wonderful, but
potentially misleading, feast, remind us not only of what sort of King Christ
is, but also of what his kind of kingship means for us – and for the company we
keep! Father Michael G. Ryan |
