The
Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe (B)
Dear brothers and sisters,
On this great solemnity of Our Lord
Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, Mother Church sets before us the image
of Christ Jesus as he truly is. We see him “robed in majesty,” the one to whom
is given “dominion, glory, and kingship” because he is “the faithful witness”
who will be seen “coming amid the clouds” and before whom “all the peoples of
the earth will lament” (Psalm 93:1; Daniel 7:7; Revelation 1:5, 7). We are
presented with the image of a true king, of one with real authority and power;
as such, it is an image that does not mesh well with the way most of us today
imagine Jesus to be, but that is because we do not know him as we should.
Too often we think of Jesus simply as
a nice man who hangs around with simple people and who never says anything that
might be perceived as offensive or unkind. We think of Jesus in this way
because we have not read even one of the four Gospels from beginning to end, or
even half of one of the four Gospels; no one who has read one of the Gospels
would dare to call Jesus a simple, nice, unoffensive man. We know more about
our favorite celebrity than we know about the only Savior of mankind and we do
not bat an eye at this, to our great detriment and shame.
The image of Christ as the “ruler
of the kings of the earth” surprises us because we have largely lost the
understanding of kings “as they were conceived in the medieval imagination”
(Revelation 1:5).[1] Whereas we – basing our
notions on a falsified and distorted telling of history – view all kings as
tyrants, the medieval imagination held to the idyllic notion of a king as one
“who manages all aspects of his reign, including civil government,
infrastructure, and the church in harmony with the created natural order.”[2]
This was, at least, what a king was supposed to be, the unifier of his people,
even if, in reality, kings did not always live up to this ideal.
The very word “king” is itself telling. It comes from the old German kuning, a word related to kin and
family, and means a leader of a people. Through its etymology, “the Anglo-Saxon
"cyning" from cyn or kin, and -ing meaning "son of" evokes
images of long-gone tribes choosing as leader a favoured son who is mystically
representative of their common identity.”[3]
The Latin word for king, rex, is
likewise telling: “Rex has its roots in the common ancestor of most European
languages, associated with stretching, thus keeping straight (di-rect,
cor-rect) and then governing.”[4]
A true king, then, is a leader who comes from among a people to guide and
govern them along the straight path.
In the American consciousness, we
think of kings not as those who guide their people along the right path, but as
those who use their sovereign power to satisfy their own desires at the expense
of their people. Consequently, we at least notionally dismiss kings out of hand
because, by definition, because having a king means that I may not be able to
do everything I want to do whenever or however I want. This is why we are
hesitant to speak of Jesus as a true king, as one who, because of his
Incarnation at Bethlehem, comes from among us to guide us and govern us along
the narrow way that leads to the Father’s house.
If Jesus is king, we think, he must
be something like the kings we know, but the kings we know are often greatly
flawed. We think of King Henry VIII of England, who tore his kingdom apart to
conceive, an heir or of King Geoffrey from A
Game of Thrones, a king who knows nothing of justice or of mercy. We often forget
about kings like King Saint Louis IX of France, who told his son, “the first
thing I advise is that you fix your whole heart upon God, and love Him with all
your strength, for without this no one can be saved or be of any worth.”[5]
King Louis was not perfect, but he strove to conform his life to that of the
King of kings. We might, perhaps, think of King Arthur, who was able to uphold
justice but could not find a way to temper it with mercy. We might say that the
failure of earthly kings lies in their inability – or refusal – to rule with
both justice and mercy. In Jesus Christ, however, we find both justice and
mercy perfectly exercised, which is why “all the peoples of the earth will
lament him” (Revelation 1:7).
Here it might well be asked, if
Christ the King is the faithful witness who loves us,” why will we lament
before him when at last he comes (Revelation 1:5)? We will lament because
The
encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all
falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and
frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our
lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the
pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become
evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us
through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a
blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a
flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.[6]
The pain that we will experience is
the pain of love; standing before him, we will see the immensity of his love
and realize in how many ways we failed to respond to his love. We will lament
him because we have failed to love him as we ought, because we failed to allow
him to straighten and direct our lives and walk on his path, and because we
will, at that moment, experience his judgment and his justice.
In
this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the
way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us
for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards
truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through
Christ's Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the
overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves.
The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy… The judgement of God is
hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely
grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an
answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of
history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only
fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two
together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work
out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless
grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we
know as our “advocate”, or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1).[7]
Truly, for those who have striven
to allow the Christ the King to rule over the lives, there is no reason to fear
his just and honest judgment, painful as it may be, because “the king’s grace
is greater than [we] know.”[8]
Amen.
[1] Cory Grewell, “The Elegiac Fantasy
of Past Christendom in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The
Fall of Arthur.” In The Inklings and
King Arthur: J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, & Owen Barfield
on the Matter of Britain, ed. SΓΈrina
Higgins (Berkeley, California: Apocryphile Press, 2017), 221.
[2] Ibid., 225.
[3] “The Vocabularist: Where did theword ‘king’ come from?”, BBC, 26
March 2015.
[4] Ibid.
[5] King Saint Louis IX, Letter to
Phillip III, 3.
[6] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, 47.
[7] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, 47.
[8] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 159.
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