Christ the King

The feast of Christ the King is a funny one. A funny one in that it is a bit difficult to know how to take it. On the face of it it’s fairly clear what Pope Pius XI intended when he instituted it in 1925. Empires and kingdoms were crumbling all over the place, including the splendid and apparently invulnerable Empire of Russia – remember that 1925 is just eight years after 1917. To quote the psalmist, “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.” Pius was pointing out that, dramatic as they were, these happenings were no surprise; nothing human, not the Athenian Empire, not the Roman, not the Ottoman, not the Russian, can last forever. But there is one kingship, empire, call it what you will, that does last forever, and that “forever” lasts beyond the existence of this little planet, beyond the existence of the universe, for all mind-dizzying eternity. This, perhaps, is a point that we could usefully remember now. The British Empire is a memory; the terrifying Third Reich even more so. The Soviet Empire has fallen, though the fall-out from the fall is still with us. America is becoming dwarfed by the looming bulk of China, and, yes, even Al-Qaida will fall. The Christians chased the Moslems out of Jerusalem, and the Moslems chased the Christians out of Al-Andaluz – Spain – only to be chased out in their turn. This has been the reality of our planet since history began.

Oddly, in his attempt to counter all this turmoil and fear by pointing to the one true king, Pius XI fell into very much the same trap, by regarding Communism as the one great threat, the one human institution that would overrun and destroy everything, as if this human movement alone had more than human powers and capacity for survival. This piece of blindness, incidentally, goes a long way towards explaining the Catholic church’s ambivalent response to Nazism: it was some time before they realised that the attitude “Anything but Communism” was a terrible mistake. I think Pius would have been surprised and incredulous to hear that this terrifying new force, apparently bent on destroying Christian civilisation and all he held dear, would itself fall after seventy years; barely a human lifetime, killed no less by that strange hybrid “Christian Socialism” (which in the main is neither Christian nor Socialism) than by active opposition.

I think one of the important lessons of this feast, of the idea of calling Jesus Christ a king (which he never did himself, except once in a parable and once, with his back against the wall, to Pontius Pilate) is that there is no one great threat, no human institution that will overrun and destroy “everything”. Because “everything” – as in Life, the Universe and Everything – is beyond human power to destroy.
It’s something we need to hang on to. To me that first reading was so topical. Everything (political) in this world is such an appalling mess. Our whole being is screaming out “This is not right!”, screaming for confirmation that it is not right. Whether it is the bankers throughout the world, whether it is the MPs wrongly claiming tens and even hundreds of thousands in expenses, whether it is two thousand people who cannot afford healthcare crammed into a stadium in America – not a third-world country, by the way, unless you are poor – where doctors, nurses and dentists work for nothing, whether it is simply the way the little people are going under with scarcely a ripple left on the surface…the whole world, everything, seems to be tilting, slipping into one huge injustice, and They (oh, but who are They?) are getting away with it.

There is one book that shouts out in chorus with our own voices: “This is not right!” and has been doing so for thousands of years. Our God, our God from the very beginning, our God who has lived among us, shouts in chorus with our voices: “This is not right!”

It sometimes seems as if our monarchs and heads of state live, by definition, in a different world from the rest of us. And that is one of the ways in which Christ the King is different. He made a point, an almost excessive point, of being like us in every possible way. And that is why there is something odd about this Feast: Christ the King made every effort to be as unkinglike as he could. The only time he looked remotely like a king was when his kingship was parodied, with the crown of thorns and the reed sceptre.

I am not talking politically at all here, but I wonder whether you share with me the instinctive admiration for rulers who, when their subjects are in danger, have joined them: have led armies, have stood on the ramparts, have died for their people. I am not saying that Henry V or Alexander the Great were necessarily nice people or good at governing. I am saying that somehow that sort of kingship chimes with something deep within us. Why else was there such an outcry when it was discovered that an American president had been a draft-dodger; why was that phrase “they will fight to the last drop of other people’s blood” so current; and why, even to a pacifist like me, did it seem so right when the son of the heir to our throne saw active service in Iraq?
I think it is because we have an inborn (should I say God-given?) instinct to want a leader who leads from within, a leader who risks their own life when their subjects do, who endures all that they do. And again, it is our God who has done this, who has responded to our desires.

The feast of Christ the King is very cleverly placed at the turning point of the liturgical year. It looks back at the long and sometimes grey period of Ordinary Time, the Sundays after Trinity, and forward to Advent and Christmas. It finishes the year off on a high - you could say it crowns the year; and it prepares for the beginning of the astonishing kingship that is Christ’s.
The pictures of Christ as emperor, Christ in power, Christ enthroned, leave me completely cold. This is not the Jesus I know, not the Jesus I find in the Gospels. The Jesus I know was born in poverty, lived in poverty, lived as the common man, was at the service of the common man and died a horrible death by execution. In the tradition of the Old Testament God - who is the same as the New Testament God, the same as our God - Jesus made it quite clear that the behaviour of the occupying force, the religious fundamentalists, the uncaring rich, the violent, the prejudiced, was not right. And he did it without ever becoming political in the wrong sense. He did it by living it.

And when he likened the kingdom of heaven to the workings of leaven in dough, he was explaining his kingship to us. Since the son of God was born as one of us, everything is different. Different from without, because the God who has been on our side from the beginning is now one of us. But also from within. Christ did not become a king on the Cross, or at the resurrection. And I guess, strictly speaking, he did not become a king at Christmas, or at the Annunciation. He has always been king. But that was when the leaven was slipped into the dough of creation, and when everything changed. Our king leads from within, from within creation, from within humankind, from within each one of us. Since then, if the world is charged with the grandeur of God, so are you, so am I - from within. There is that of God in everyone. And nothing can ever be the same again; and evil, and death, terrifying as they are, can have no dominion.