Christ the King
Today we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King. What does it mean to proclaim that Christ is King? All four of today’s readings build on each other to answer this question.
In our first reading, David has been king of the southern half of Israel for a few years, but the northern half has been trying and failing to flourish as an independent kingdom. In today’s scene, the northerners are penitent and weak, and they come to beg David to be reunited and form a covenant with them. They say they are of David’s flesh and bone, which is not literally true, but the northerners are alluding to the creation story, when Adam took Eve as his wife, recognizing her as “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.” In other words, as the disparate tribes gather around David, they beg to form one body with their shepherd-King. They invoke creation, marriage, and Yahweh’s fidelity to Israel to express the protection, precedent, and pattern that they need.
Today’s Psalm celebrates this royal covenant. Our Psalm sings of the united tribes gathering around the seat of David in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is described as the center of “compact unity,” where God’s people gather in order, cohesion, and beauty.
Today’s third reading is an ancient Christian hymn indicating why Jesus is the new center around which we gather. Jesus is God himself. In Christ, the “fullness” of God “was pleased to dwell.” There is no remainder, no secondary hidden knowledge – everything decisive about our origins and destiny is there in Jesus. Through Christ all things were created, in him all things hold together still, and all things were created eventually for communion with him.
In the final, climactic lines of this third reading, it says that the cross brings everything together, for it is “by the blood of the cross” that Jesus performs his definitive act of reconciling God’s holiness and our sinfulness.
To show how this reconciliation happens, today’s fourth and final reading takes us to the cross. In this Gospel, the royal successor of David, the creator and sustainer of the cosmos, hangs crucified between two thieves. Our king has laid aside all royal prerogatives. He was willing to be humiliated, to sacrifice, and to forgive. It is from this position of apparent weakness that he finds himself in solidarity with the penitent thief. Jesus recognizes the thief’s repentance and humility, and welcomes him into Paradise.
If this is what God is like – if the royal line of David leads to the cross, if Christ’s sacrifice is the source for our reconciliation - then we are accountable to a very unusual type of authority. A king leads the defense of his people, but this battle is fought differently. Following the crucified king will ask us to lay aside our egos, and re-evaluate many worldly loyalties and ambitions in light of our new identity.
Re-evaluating our identity and strategy, in light of our creator and his cross, is exactly what Pope Pius XI had in mind when, in 1925, he declared that today, the 34th Sunday of ordinary time, would become the solemnity of Christ the King. Slightly over a century ago, the Pope wanted the Church to consider carefully Christ’s royal power, and to put the crucified king in front of us as an invitation to convert and live differently.
When the Pope created today’s feast, Europe was still living in the ashes of World War I. The pride of worldly kingdoms killed 20 million people in that war, with another 20 million wounded or maimed, not to mention all the psychological scars, ruined landscapes and villages. And so the Pope declared today’s feast, inviting the Christians of his day, like the ancient Israelites, to beg to be re-united under a new King. The Pope declared today’s feast, and the Church has kept celebrating it, in order to invite us also to reconsider the source of our unity. Today the Church brings us the good news about a different kind of king, and a new citizenship - if only we will accept the invitation.
It’s an invitation that American Catholics should take seriously. Today, the politics of the cross do not fit squarely with either of our national political parties. Even our own Church is sometimes divided politically. Sometimes Catholics feel pressure to choose between betting “social justice Catholics” versus “pro-life Catholics.” It’s so sad. In Christ’s Kingdom, social justice and pro-life hold together and flow from the same source. With Jesus as our King, we have something important – and probably unpopular – to say to both political parties.
Pope Francis himself is an example of fidelity that refuses to accept secular political categories. Take Laudato Si, his beautiful encyclical that is most famous for asking us to simplify our lives, step away from technology, and conserve the environment. But, in the same document, he also says that care for creation has implications for how we treat human nature. Just as we should respect ecological limits, Laudato Si proposes that we should respect human limits, that we cannot manipulate the human body at will, and that we should embrace the gift of being created either male or female.
Does Laudato Si make Pope Francis liberal or conservative? Is he a liberal, because he talks a lot about the poor and the environment, or is he a conservative, because he is pro-life and critical of the ongoing sexual revolution? Is the Church itself liberal or conservative? Is Jesus liberal or conservative? The labels make no sense. These are false and anachronistic choices. Our faith is one coherent whole, grander and more ancient than whatever was on the ballot last week, or whatever guru we might find on social media. If we belong to Christ’s kingdom, our identity changes, and we become Catholics first and anything else a very distant second or third. If Christ is King, we must commit to our identity and take a stand for the fullness of our faith. The good news is that if we stand with Christ, all things can be made new. He forgives seventy times seven, to the bitter end, even as he hangs crucified. From the cross, he sends the grace we need to be creative, long suffering, reconciling.
To be an ambassador for Christ's kingdom in this culture will also take courage and wisdom. We pray that we might be like the penitent thief, who, on encountering the crucified king, confronted his own sinfulness, begged for mercy, and asked to be admitted to the kingdom. Amen.
