11/24/2024 - Christ the King of the Universe

Christ the King of the Universe and the servant of all

Royalty and Kingship, for most of us these days, is the stuff of tabloids and cartoons and for the younger generation challenging computer games. Our last collective focus on the matter of kings and queens occurred during the media attention given to the car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, France on Sunday August 31, 1997, when Princess Diana died. I was visiting Germany at that time, enroute to a seminar in Rome before my missionary assignment to Kenya, in Africa. Five days later the world mourned another death with less tabloid attention but with more worldwide participation when Mother Teresa died at the age 87 on Sept. 5, 1997. The high contrast of the two events had impacted me at that time as I had personal encounter with Mother Theresa several times and I also had admiration for the efforts that Princess Diana made particularly in raising global awareness of landmine victims and the indiscriminate nature of the weapons. Countries came together later in 1997 to sign the Mine Ban Treaty in Ottawa.

Today, as we celebrate the Feast of Christ the king, as servants of the King of the Universe, the impact of a person like Mother Theresa could be our inspiration. We love our autonomy. We celebrate choice because it is ours. So, king imagery is quite problematic for us. Notions like honor, obedience, duty, and loyalty vex anyone whose highest value is individualism. We are also not enthused about chivalrous virtues like unquestionable loyalty or rendering obeisance to a higher human. Unlike the kings of history books, Christ is a strange king as the accounts in the fourth gospel as all our expectations and knowledge of kingliness are reversed. Christ is a king-servant who washed the feet of his followers. He is strangely noble and powerful enough to quell a storm and yet vulnerable to fall on the cobblestones under the weight of the cross. When caught by his enemies, there is no army to fight for him or powerful faction to ransom him. He will be the ransom. He is a king who is also a priest offering himself as a sacrifice. 

The past centuries have witnessed the growing number of men and women, who recognized in Jesus, a kingliness that summoned nothing less than the loyalty of a free human heart. Something was unlocked in them when they discovered a “lord of life” whose ambition was not to dominate humanity but to save and serve it. Missionaries in far off and hostile lands still proclaim Him their king and live a life of poverty having left behind their homeland of affluence. As the old mid-19th century Christian song with folk origins reminds us: “When Love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”

Though shied away from the grandiose popular acclamation of kingship, even after He fed 5000 people, He acknowledged a kingship different from the present world order even in front of Pilate who claimed to have power to save Him from impending death. He preached and lived to establish the Kingdom of God. How do we allow Him to establish this kingdom?

The Kingdom of God is … in the past was manifested in the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth; it is in the present in our work as Church and in the efforts of many others to create a world of goodness and justice; it is in the future reaching its completion in the glorious coming of Christ in glory. The Kingdom of God is … a space. It exists in every home where parents and children love each other. It exists in every region and country that cares for its weak and vulnerable. It exists in every parish that reaches out to the needy and in every person whose heart is conditioned by love, justice and peace.
 Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O