Words
like dominion, glory, and kingship are grand words. They suggest
great things of epic proportions. They invoke the majestic splendor associated
with a royal coronation. Indeed, if one didn’t know better, the Thanksgiving
and Christmas-themed parades so many cities see at this time of year might
easily be interpreted as some sort of royal occasion, with Santa Claus coming to
town as king. Daniel, however, seems to have had something more like the real
thing in mind.
In
the case of real royalty, the point is that a particular person (whose whole
identity is connected with this role) symbolically unites a community by a
powerful personal bond – a bond so powerful precisely because so personal, a
bond so personal that, through all of human history few, if any, civic symbols
have served so successfully at building and bonding and unifying communities as
has the institution of kingship.
And
so today, at this pivotal turning-point in the Church’s annual seasonal cycle,
we celebrate the powerful, personal bond we share in and with Jesus Christ, who
is our King with all the symbolic splendor and rhetorical power that the word
king conveys - and not just our king but “king of the universe.”
Christ
the King reigns in human hearts, wrote Pope Pius XI who founded this feast in
1925, “because he is very truth, and it is from him that truth must be
obediently received by all.” But truth can be an incredibly inconvenient and
even threatening concept in a world which sees no need for it, a world which
has no desire for it, a world which wants to construct its own reality. It was
clearly so for Pilate [John 18:33b-37], who responded to Jesus’ claim about his kingship by
dismissively asking, “What is truth?” Pilate clearly could not imagine that
such a question could actually have a real answer. Nor should we pretend that
the world has made much progress on this score since Pilate’s time.
It
is in the nature of political office to involve power over others. The more
exalted the office, the more power over ever more others, culminating in the
sort of sovereign power Pilate had in mind when he worried whether Jesus’
Kingship represented a threat to the imperial power Pilate represented. Jesus’
sovereignty, however, is different. Whereas worldly rule inherently involves
the exercise of power over others, Jesus’ royal rule represents power for
others. Jesus Christ is the faithful
witness, the first born of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth … who
loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood [Revelation 1:5-8] . Notice, the book of
Revelation says his blood, not the blood of his rivals or his competitors or
his enemies, but his own blood.
As
Jesus pointed out to Pilate, precisely unlike an ordinary worldly ruler Christ
the King had no followers to fight for him. Jesus’ kingship creates a community
that cannot be defined in Pilate’s terms. Worldly politics concerns itself with
all sorts of very important things, things it’s important for us to care about;
but worldly politics per se has no
transcendent significance. The kingdom of Christ the King alone has such
transcendent significance. Hence Jesus answered Pilate: “My kingdom does not belong to this world.” Even so, it did (and
does) make a difference to this world.
It did (and does) present a real threat, although not in the way Pilate had
presumed. The threat, as Jesus himself identified it, is the truth. “I came into this world to testify to the
truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Christ
the King scandalized Pilate’s Roman sensibilities – as he similarly scandalizes
our modern and post-modern sensibilities – precisely by proposing the truth,
not as something socially constructed, but as something that simply is, not as
something we choose as one option among many, but as something we learn,
something that, so to speak, chooses us and challenges us in ways we would not
necessarily have chosen for ourselves.
When
today’s reading from the Book of Revelation refers to us – to the whole Church
- as a kingdom of priests, that’s a
reference back to the people of Israel, to whom God had said at Mount Sinai: You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a
holy nation. That didn’t mean that all Israelites were transformed from
farmers or shepherds or whatever into Temple priests offering sacrifices all
day long. What it meant was that, as God’s Chosen People, the People of Israel
would be the special link between God and the world, through whom (as promised
to Abraham long ago) the whole world would find blessing. So, when the New
Testament refers to the whole Church as a
kingdom of priests, it’s telling us that all of us, together as his Church,
have been put into a new relationship with God, which makes us the special
vehicle through which the whole world will experience that blessing. As
subjects of Christ the King, as citizens of his kingdom, we have become
Christ’s word and voice in a world full of false and lying words, full of
shrill and demagogic voices. In such a world, we may perhaps (as has been said
so often) be the only word and voice of Christ that many will ever see or hear.
As if
we needed to be reminded, events in the world in fact do keep reminding us what and how strong the power of evil is in the
world. But the presence of evil in our world and the evil misuse of human power
– political power, military power, economic power, all kinds of human power –
are not new and should not surprise us.
As
subjects of Christ the King, as citizens of his kingdom, we like Jesus himself must
testify to the truth in all aspects of life - witnessing to the truth in our
relationships with one another and the wider world. To celebrate Christ’s
kingship and to pray (as we do every day at Mass) for the coming of his kingdom,
is to commit ourselves to the fullest extension of that kingdom to this world – so that this yearly
celebration of Christ the King becomes not just an annual ritual marking the
passing of the seasons, but the deepest expression of what we believe and who
we hope to be and what we hope for our world.
Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 25, 2018.
(Photo: The Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, Imperial Schatzkammer, Vienna)
(Photo: The Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, Imperial Schatzkammer, Vienna)
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