Today is the feast of Christ the King.
What’s that about?
As religious feasts go, it originated recently, declared in 1925 by Pope Pius IX. The pope was alarmed by the defection of Europe’s intelligentsia and masses to secularism and to communism. By declaring this feast, he intended to keep the church’s stake in the ground by proclaiming an alternative political, economic, cultural worldview.
Christ the King in this pope’s lexicon meant that the Kingdom of God on earth is the Catholic Church, presided over by Christ’s deputy the Holy Father, in concert with the college of cardinals, those red-capped princes of the church who had oversight of various provinces. The cardinals, in turn, oversaw the bishops who were responsible for geographical dioceses that were divided into local parishes led by pastors. This church system developed in parallel with the pre-modern social order of Europe, and at each hierarchical rank, the clergy were in close contact with their lay counterparts, from the courts and nobility, to the emergent universities, amongst the rising middle classes and the traditional peasants and farmers and laborers. Thus the church influenced society and in turn was formed by European society.
Pius IX believed that the work of the church was to teach ‘man’ the divine law, and, through a sacramental system that worked as social control, to force compliance by promises of rewards and threats of punishment in the next life.
They claimed to know the divine law from Scripture and from right reason. But what they didn’t realize was how deeply their own view of the divine law was conditioned by the customs and mores of the ecclesial and social world in which they lived. For example, the status of women in this kingdom of God looked quite like the status of women in Italian society. The church opposed women suffrage and contraception, and the force of canon law was brought to bear to resist the advance of women as equal participants in the public world. For another example, the apparent alliance on the part of the rising fascist movement with the traditionalist social and political values of the church, at least in making common cause against communism, seemed, until it was too late, to blunt the church’s political and social opposition to the Nazis and the Italian Fascists.
I rehearse this history as an object lesson to remind you and me that it is always a big mistake, and often disastrous, to identify the kingdom of Christ with any political or economic or social or even religious system. Our contemporary fellow Americans on the religious right, who confuse the Republican conservative agenda with the righteous kingdom of Christ, only repeat this recurrent blunder, and millions of people in Iraq suffer horribly as a result.
‘My kingdom is not of this world’ Jesus says in the gospel of John. All human systems are ‘only human’, limited in perspective, more or less just, always in need of revision and reform.
But the question arises: revision and reform according to what standard? If the church can’t claim infallibility, still less any political party, then to what do we make our appeal when we evaluate the justice of our political and economic and social systems or programs of reform? Why, for example, should we care for the poor? On what ground can women claim equality? Why is war an evil to be avoided, and peace a good to be worked for?
This is where I turn again to Christ, the King. Apart from the mad claims of religious partisans, or the stupid confusions of the political process, there remains something important to say about the kingdom of Christ on earth.
The gospels show us king Jesus on a cross. That’s a powerful symbol. If the power of this world means domination and destruction and exploitation of the little ones, the cross is a sign of contradiction of that power. For Jesus—this son of humanity, this son of god—took his place as one of the little ones, one of the multitude of the powerless of this world crushed by the cruel machinery of dominative power.
Why then call him King? —because, despite the worst the world could do to him, Christ rules. Not by domination. Not by coercion or seduction. Not by delusion of the masses or the ruling elites. Christ rules because of what he reveals by his dying and rising about the holy mystery of life. God’s power is the power of life itself, of creativity itself.
It is the really effective power, that courses through every good love we know. It is the power by which we transcend the harm of every humanly imperfect love or unjust social order. It is the power that makes family and community sustaining. That power is the wellspring of hope for the future because it releases us from the karma of the past, karma earned by ourselves or somebody else. It is the force that drives the green shoot through the flower, to quote the poet. Life giving power is the standard by which every human use of power is judged. To say Christ is King is to take an archaic symbol of political and social power and transform its meaning. According to the gospels, that’s precisely what Jesus did, and not just in words—in his life and still more profoundly in his death.
Christ turned the power relations of this world upside down: the first shall be last, he said, and the last first. He sat at table with prostitutes and taxmen. Whatsoever you do to the least of these, he told them, you do to me. Let the little children come to me, he said, for to such as these the kingdom of heaven belongs.