The Feast of Christ the King

The Feast of Christ the King

November 26th, 2023

The Feast of Christ the King is a young one. It was instituted only one hundred years ago by Pope Pius XI. 1920s Europe. After the first “world” war, when the European Empires were falling apart or at least looking tired, and materialist and nationalist sentiments were taking hold of various peoples, especially those most burnt by the war. While the modern form of the nation state had been taking shape for some two hundred years already, at this point there was an intellectual paradigm shift, with people increasingly willing to assert that the sovereign dignity of one’s own nation was the supreme value and the legitimate political priority, both of government and of each citizen. There was an increasing push to identify the individual and their interests with the interests and character of their nation. The age of empire was over. The age of ideology well and truly begun.

Unsurprisingly enough, Pope Pius did not welcome this development. Indeed, he saw it as a deep crisis in the moral fabric of human society. If our ultimate loyalty is confined to our own nation, we can treat other nations either as an ally from whom we can profit or as posing a threat against which we must arm ourselves; but either way, it ceases to be our job to recognise their welfare as an end-in-itself.

So, the Church was asked to proclaim something different. We were asked to proclaim afresh the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. The intention, if taken at its best, being not to make an assertion to compete with all the other assertions of the day. Rather, to implore, and to implore with confidence: Let us not idolise our own nation, or compete for supremacy against others. Let us turn to the One in whose kingdom every citizen of the world may find a home.

In his eyes it is not simply the shelter or nourishment I offer to one of my own that counts; it is that which I share with anyone, friend or stranger.

The sovereignty of Jesus is not an ideological project that we as a church need to rally and take up arms to impose. It is, we believe, a metaphysical fact, simply the case by virtue of who he is. Cyril of Alexandria, a fifth-century bishop, says Christ’s is “a dominion not seized by violence nor usurped, but his by essence and by nature. His kingdom is founded upon the hypostatic union”. What he means by that is that God through his Word and Spirit is the sustaining Power who underpins all things, and we who belong to the Church believe that Christ is that Power Incarnate. He is, we proclaim, sovereign in precisely that sense. By essence and by nature the world belongs to him. He reigns in our lives already by virtue of the simple fact that his is the “hand that feeds us”, just as he is the Word through whom the flowers of the tree take shape. Yet he can also come to reign from within us, to the extent that we as human creatures have a freedom of will and discernment, by drawing forth our loyalty to him, and our cooperation with his wisdom, majesty, moral courage and clarity.

If this is indeed a reality, it is a gracious, salvific one. It means the richest of our moral intuitions do have a foundation. They are not naïve, nor a perpetual struggle against an inevitable defeat (which one may be forgiven, at times, for imagining). As the parable of the sheep and goats proclaims with such lucid simplicity, there is an Author who gives them substance and sanction; there is a kingdom prepared for us. We enter it by the gates of faith and mercy. We are drawn closer with every act of kindness through which his Spirit flows, noticed or unnoticed.

I once watched an interview—and I’m sorry, the details of the occasion have escaped me—but it was an interview with a paraplegic man who had survived a mass shooting in a mosque. On the day it happened his wife had been evacuated from the women’s section of the mosque, but didn’t realise he had been wheeled out, and ran back inside to look for him in the men’s. She was shot.

The man was asked a question along the lines of what he made of the tragedy, if he regretted her action, and he said, ‘Quite the contrary. I think we must all learn to become like her.’

That phrase really struck me, it stuck with me, because that is what we as Christians say of Christ. We must learn to be like him. We are called to learn to live in that Love which even when faced with death does not take fright. That Love in us does have a Foundation, and it has an end—it is going somewhere beyond our mortal lives.

The Saviour’s parable of the sheep and the goats takes us to the threshold of this end. Not into the endless day, but just to the threshold of a reality beyond our present powers to envisage. I wonder if you noticed this distinction. When the shepherd gathers the sheep, he welcomes them into a kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world. Whereas the goats are sent away into a fire prepared for the devil and his angels. Prepared for bodiless powers, and even then, not since the foundation of the world. No creature, in heaven or on earth, was made by him for wrath. The judgement has something to do with rejecting the loving will of our redeeming God. It has to do with rending oneself asunder from the “cosmos”, the fabric of reality being woven by God, and the purposes for which he has made us.

This makes judgement and redemption two sides of the one coin. It is all about perceiving reality through God’s eyes. If in him we face and know the pain of the other, we also know their joy, know the blessed relief that cup of water brought to the least of these. When Christ comes again in glory, all of it will come to light. There, in light, mercy and justice can finally come together, as we get at the truth of matters, of our lives and of history, from every side.

The feast today turns us toward that prospect, when he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and we will see the reality of the world, and of one another, through his eyes, eyes of justice and mercy, honesty and insight, and above all of love – with all its beauty and all its sovereign power.

 Mthr Kathryn Bellhouse