Homily - On the power, mercy, and justice of Christ the King

The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe (C)

Dear brothers and sisters,

It pertains to kings to be powerful, merciful, and just. If a king is a not powerful, he cannot maintain his kingdom. If a king is not merciful, he cannot maintain the loyalty of his subjects. If a king is not just, he cannot maintain his laws. In this way, we see that “supreme power, mercy, and justice are inseparable.”[1] But where do see the power, mercy, and justice of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe? We see them displayed on the Cross.

BL Arundel 60, f.12v

His power is seen in his willingness to lay down his life for us. “The rulers sneered at Jesus and said, ‘He saved others, let him save himself” (Luke 23:35). And, indeed, he could have done so; such power was within his authority, for “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). But he chose to demonstrate his supreme power through the seeming weakness of love.

His mercy is likewise seen in his willingness to lay down his life for us. “[O]ne of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, “…Save yourself and us” (Luke 23:39). He could have saved the three of them, but had he done so we would have no means of salvation. He demonstrated supreme mercy when he chose “to reconcile all things for him” (Colossians 1:20).

His justice is also seen in his willingness to lay down his life for us. Humanity infinitely offended God because of our sin, both the Original Sin and our own personal sins, an offense so great we could never find a way to atone for it. But Christ Jesus could not only make an act of atonement on our behalf because of his humanity, he could make his act of atonement have infinite value because of his divinity. In the union of his divine and human natures, supreme justice was fulfilled when he “made peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20).

Today, brothers and sisters, we confess and acknowledge that “the maximum revelation of God possible in this world occurs in Jesus Crucified, because God is love and the death of Jesus on the Cross is the greatest act of love in all of history.”[2] The universal kingship of Christ Jesus is founded in love.

We have seen his supreme power, mercy, and justice, but is this all that is necessary to be a 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.”[3] Clearly, Christ Jesus guides and governs us by his own example of selflessness when he says, “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you should also do” (John 13:34).

Even our English word “king” is itself revealing of his Jesus’ kingship. 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.”[4] He is certainly a favored son, as the Father himself testified at his Baptism (cf. Matthew 3:17).

A true king, then, is a leader who comes from among a people to guide and govern them along the straight path. Being “the head of the body, the church” and “the firstborn from the dead” Christ Jesus is, we might well say, the only true leader from among a people – indeed, from all people; he is the true law-giver and governor, not just of humanity, but of all creation.

Some may wonder why he chose to manifest his kingship on the Cross, why he chose to reveal his authority in humility. It is true that “the sinless Christ had a right, theoretically, to come as a glorious king, [but] freely surrendered that right out of love for the men he was to redeem. He voluntarily gave up that right out of love for the Father whose plan he was to fulfill.”[5]

In the kingship of Christ on the Cross, we see that what the Roman poet Virgil said is true: Omnia vincit amor; et nos cedamus amori: “Love conquers all; let us, too, yield to love.”[6] Amen.  

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[1] Saint Bonaventure, Breviloquium, VII.5.2

[2] Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, 25 November 2007.

[3] “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.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Michael D. Meilach, O.F.M., The Primacy of Christ: Doctrine and Life (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1964), 33.

[6] Virgil, Bucolics, X.69.

Homily - How is Jesus king of humanity and of the universe?

 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.

Returning to today’s Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, how is it that Jesus can claim the title of king? He can do so in two ways. He can claim the title of King of Israel because he is of the royal blood of the line of King David. The very title of Christ “refers to God’s anointed king descended from David.”[4] But you and I are not members of the Kingdom of Israel, nor do we live within its borders; how then can Jesus be our king? He can do so because of our common humanity; he is the true representative of the human family because he shows us what it means to be human and how to walk along the narrow road that leads to salvation, to eternal life with God.

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.

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[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.

Homily - 25 November 2018 - The Solemnity of Christ the King

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.

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[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. Sørina 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.