The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe
Dear brothers and sisters,
Each liturgical feast of the Lord Jesus Christ is rooted in another feast of the Lord Jesus.
Thus on Corpus Christi we take a longer look at the institution of
the Holy Eucharist, one of the motifs of the Thursday of Holy Week. On the
Sacred Heart we consider the implications of the piercing of the heart of Jesus
on the Cross, one of the elements of Good Friday. Today we are celebrating the
Kingship of Christ which is one of the elements to be found in the feast of the
Ascension when we remember the exaltation of the risen Christ as Lord.
At the Ascension the disciples, who have just seen Christ lifted up
into God’s glory, are told that he will return in the same way – that is, in
the glory of the Second Coming. So today’s celebration is also turned toward his
second Advent, closing the liturgical year and orienting us toward the purple
season when we think in hope about that Second Coming with its awesome
implications.[1]
Today’s Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
King of the Universe, is, though, rooted in yet another mystery of the life of
Jesus, that of his Incarnation and Birth in Bethlehem.
Before we explore this connection, I hope
you will be patient with me as I nerd out perhaps a little more than usual. It
is important to first consider what it means to be a king and what we mean by
the word universe.
Kingship is something I have always been
fond of, or at least intrigued by. Growing up, I loved the legends of King
Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; I built bigger and better castles
out of Lego bricks each day for my mini-figure king; and my brother, cousins,
neighbors and I pretended I was a king out in the fields around our house; now
I can great joy in the stories of the return of the king of Gondor.
As Americans, we have a distorted notion
of kingship, largely formed by half-truths we learned about our Revolutionary
War and all that. But even non-Americans often have a distorted notion of kingship,
formed largely by the unvirtuous acts of royals through the centuries. At its inception
in human societies, kingship, however, was something virtuous and noble. To see
this, we can look to the origin of the word king.
The
Latin word which we translate as king is rex. “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.”[2]
Even our English 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]
A true king, then, is a leader who comes from among a people to guide and
govern them along the straight path. But if Jesus is the Second Person of the Most
Holy Trinity, how is it that he can be our king? How is it that he comes from us?
To understand this, we have to return to Bethlehem.
In the
womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Only Begotten Son of God took our humanity
upon himself for our salvation. Because of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve –
which we have all inherited from our first parents – humanity owed an infinite
debt to God that we cannot pay because we are mere finite mortals. Even so,
because it was a debt owed by humanity, only a human could pay it. What were we
to do? Looking with love upon our plight, the Father sent his Son to pay the
debt we could not pay; the sinless Son of God became man to pay the debt of
sinful humanity. He redeemed us – he bought us back – with the price of his own
Blood shed upon the Cross. This is why the mystery of his Incarnation and Birth
and so closely tied to his Death at Calvary, as well as to his Resurrection and
Ascension; indeed, they cannot be separated.
Now, though, we have another question:
what does it mean to be king of the universe, and what is the universe?
Having been a boy in the 1980s, the first
thing that comes to mind when I hear the word universe is He-Man and the
Masters of the Universe. After He-Man, I think of things like Star Wars and so the
title of today’s Solemnity always strikes me as a bit odd. But the origin of
the word universe can help clear things up. It comes from Latin roots, unus
meaning one and versus meaning to turn back or to convert or to change.
Universe, then, means the totality of all that exists, from plants to animals to
humans; from countries to continents; from planets and stars to solar systems and
galaxies; everything that is created is part of the universe. But how can a human
make such a bold and extensive claim to kingship? Christ Jesus is king of it all
because, human though he is, he is also divine; he is the one who created all
that exists and he has come to convert it all, to bring it all back into unity
in himself. He alone can accomplish what others can only dream of.
Given all of this, we might think this
feast has its origins in medieval Europe, but it does not; it was first
established by Pope Pius XI in 1925. As countries throughout Europe and around the
world were abandoning the idea of kingship, he called the whole Church to
reconsider the kingship of Jesus Christ. Why?
In his enclyclical letter in which he established
this liturgical feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, Pope Pius
XI recalled the evils of his day:
...the seeds of discord sown far and wide; those bitter enmities
and rivalries between nations, which still hinder so much the cause of peace;
that insatiable greed which is so often hidden under a pretense of public
spirit and patriotism, and gives rise to so many private quarrels; a blind and
immoderate selfishness, making men seek nothing but their own comfort and advantage,
and measure everything by these; no peace in the home, because men have
forgotten or neglect their duty; the unity and stability of the family
undermined; society in a word, shaken to its foundations and on the way to
ruin.[5]
The Pope had in mind the rise of such
movements as communism and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He
hoped to stop the growth of such groups and draw people back to together under
the common kingship of Christ. His hope was not achieved and society has only
become more broken and divided, its foundations now well on the way to ruin, because
we have, by and large, refused to truly place ourselves under Christ’s kingship;
we have not given him dominion over every aspect of our lives; we have refused
to follow his way of kingship, the way of love.
[1]
Aidan Nichols, O.P., Year of the Lord’s Favour: A Homiliary for the Roman
Liturgy: Volume 3: The Temporal Cycle, Sundays through the Year (Leominster:
United Kingdom, 2012), 172-173.
[2]
“The Vocabularist: Where did the word ‘king’ come from?”, BBC, 26 March 2015. Accessed 23 November 2018. Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-32010563.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Peter S. Williamson, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: Revelation
(Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, Michigan: 2015), 44-45.
[5] Pope Pius XI, Quas primas, 24.
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