Christ the King 2024
Daniel 7:13-14; Apocalypse 1:5-8; John 18:33-37
I am sorry, but try as I might, I cannot become enthused by the Feast of Christ the King. Perhaps I should. After all, the world desperately needs the Lordship of Christ, the reign of God, as said world appears to be careering to hell on a handcart: but I can’t. It is an anachronism, something out of time, which is slotted uncomfortably into the Church’s calendar. It was established at a particular time to meet a particular challenge: the threat posed by the rising tides of communism and fascism during the inter-war years in Europe.
Even then, there was something strange about it. Kings were already a busted flush in the 1920s and ‘30s. Today, they have practically no significance at all. I remember a Zimbabwean priest preaching on this day, and explaining how alien a concept he found it, coming as he did from a socialist republic, where the only kings of whom he had heard were Old King Cole and Elvis. (I should point out that this was before Mugabe and his successor Mnangagwa had turned Zimbabwe into a dictatorship.)
Here in Britain—now referred to officially as the United Kingdom—another anachronism, as its constituent nations have never been more disunited—our constitutional monarchy wields no genuine power, and impinges less and less on the public consciousness. Admittedly, a glance at the so called Great Power across the Atlantic shows us that there are worse systems—perhaps if the United States had remained loyal to the Crown as Canada did, they might by now have been almost civilised—but since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, who was almost universally admired for her diplomatic skills, royalty has moved further to the margins.
What then can we usefully say about Christ the King? Oddly, the irrelevance of kings may be the one thing which gives meaning to the feast, for Christ Himself was effectively irrelevant in relation to the power structures of His day.
“Are you the King of the Jews?” asks Pilate. This pagan Roman governor may have been unaware of the hostility of devout Jews to the very notion of kingship. They had not been ruled by a king since the time of the Babylonian exile, centuries before. Admittedly, Herod the Great is sometimes referred to as King Herod, but the Jews themselves would have rejected the term, and upon his death, his so called kingdom had been split three ways among his sons by the Romans.
Rome was not averse to having petty kings among its subject peoples. They were known as “client kings” and were well aware that they occupied their thrones by permission of the Romans, their usefulness limited to their ability to prevent any rebellion by their people against Roman power and Roman rule.
Hence, when Pilate put his question, he may genuinely have wondered whether Our Lord might be of use to him as a minor and ultimately impotent keeper of order among the unruly populace. If so, he was quickly disabused of the notion. “My kingdom is not of this kind” says Jesus. In other words, I am neither of use to you, nor a threat to you. My kingship takes the form of bearing witness to the truth, a concept which Pilate found incomprehensible. “What is truth?” he asked, and closed the conversation.
In human terms, Jesus was and is the most unkingly king, and if this feast is to be celebrated at all, it cannot be in the triumphalist manner familiar to some of us from our youth, when it entailed a procession of the Blessed Sacrament, with white gloved attendants carrying the poles of a canopy, before the monstrance was enthroned above the high altar. Jesus’ kingship is obscure, hidden, exercised in service among the poor and lowly.
Does this day, then, say anything to us? It does, in an upside down way. We are told in the Apocalypse that Jesus has made us a line of kings and priests. The First Letter of St. Peter calls us a royal priesthood. That royalty, though, must be expressed in the way in which Jesus expressed it; in apparent irrelevance, in seeming insignificance, in service of the poor. As kings, we must be “unkings”. Whether this feast really brings that home to us is another matter.
