11/20/2022 - Christ the King Sunday

Celebrating the King on Calvary
The Feast of Christ the King stands in stark opposition to two contemporary trends in some Christian circles and many socio-political thinkers. The first trend is the rejection of honorific titles like “king” or “lord.” The second is the proposal that Christ is not pre-eminent as a revelation of God (… “image of the invisible God,” as our Second Reading points out), but merely one among many equal sources of truth and leadership.

The distaste that some Christians have for the notion of kingship mistakes the very nature of Christ’s dominion the Feast that we celebrate today highlights. His is a total reversal of the roles usually assigned to royalty and servitude. He refuses to be the master of the world, the mighty monarch, the spiller of blood, the enforcer of supremacy. His reign subverts our notion of kingship. It was because nations and states were abusing their power that Pope Pius XI introduced this feast in 1925.

The mystery of the Cross is so difficult for humans to comprehend that even Christians have devoted their lives and scholarship to ignoring the awful truth of Christ’s sovereignty. Christ’s kingship is an abomination for any earthly royal aspiration. It is an assault upon the desires of every tribe or nation that ever-craved ascendancy. Today, in our world there is a full display of lust for power. René Girard, professor of language and culture at Stanford University, is a rare contemporary thinker who confronts the implications of Christian faith. In his book, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard shows how Christ dismantles the triangle of desire, violence, and retribution.

In Christ there is no envy, greed, or lust for power. He, the innocent king who executes none, is executed. He seeks no vengeance. Christ the king is the only sovereign to embody such principles. Jesus is the sole king who saves fallen humanity from its twisted wish. In this respect he is truly original, truly exceptional, the divine challenge to a world which imagines kingship to be enslavement of the other.

Reading the Gospels we find examples in the life of Christ when ‘kingship’ was signaled in his direction. The wisemen from the East brought him gifts worthy of a king, but Jesus was an infant then and a frantic effort is made by Joseph to smuggle him to Egypt to escape the wrath of King Herod who devised a plan to kill ‘the infant King’. After the multiplication of loaves (Jn 6) people wanted to invest kingship on him and Jesus escaped into the cover of darkness and hills. Jesus makes it clear that his idea of king and power is totally opposite to the world’s idea of a king and power. That is why the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer in today’s Mass describes Jesus’ kingdom as “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace”. 
 

Pontius Pilate is intrigued by the accusation of the Jewish leaders who wanted Jesus to be tried on the charges of sedition, which was a punishable offense according to Roman Law. “Are you a king?” Pilate asks. Jesus replies, “Yes, but my kingdom is not of this world.” Pilate knows that sedition charges are valid only when it challenges Roman rule, and he does not know any power beyond the political power of Rome enforced by violence and brute force. A king crowned with thorns, with a reed for a scepter and a borrowed scarlet cloth for an attire is in stark contrast to any one’s imagination of a king with power. This is amplified many times over few hours later when Jesus hangs on a cross with the title of king nailed to the vertical beam, in three well known languages of the time. With no army to defend his cause, with no avenging followers gathering strength to come to his rescue and with no knowledgeable consequences to this cruel execution, kingship of Christ shines through when he pronounces salvation to the thief on his side, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

This feast is an invitation to all those who have power or authority of any kind to compare their use of power or authority with Jesus. For the rest of us we must remember that our hunger for pre-eminence, our desire for dominance, which may well motivate our every choice and predilection, must be laid at the foot of the cross to share the crown Jesus offers us.

Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O.