CHRIST THE KING – 2016

In his book The End of History, Francis Fukuyama suggests that with the coming of democracy, the world has entered a safe, steady state in which human events such as we have known them throughout history, will come to an end. 

It is certain that large numbers of people regard anything that smacks of authoritarian rule as deeply suspicious. But Even in modern democracies, matters are hardly as dull and predictable as Fukuyama suggests. Look at the dramatic “upset” in the United States with the unexpected election of Donald Trump as an example, and the extreme responses it has brought forth. And if the result even of a democratic election such as this can cause such reactions, what does today’s feast have to say to modern people, with its image of Jesus Christ as an absolute monarch, the King of all Creation?

The feast of Christ the King was brought into being in 1934 by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Quas primas. Why would he do this in that particular year? 1934 was a fateful year in the world. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin ruled as absolute dictators in their respective countries of Germany and the Soviet Union. In Mexico, a terrible civil war was raging, leading to a tyranny which was hostile to the Church and persecuted and killed priests and lay people alike. In the East, both Japan and mainland China were likewise in chaotic situations and slipping into an authoritarianism controlled by powerful military interests. Governments were taking on an authority and total power of an almost infallible character for themselves.

Against this, Pius XII asserted the real and ultimate source of authority in the world, the Kingship of Jesus Christ, as the Irish constitution has it, “from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred.” All authority to rule by earthly powers is, in fact, subject to the benign Lord Jesus Christ. They rule by his authority, and are accountable to Him for all that they do, whether they acknowledge Him or not. God, who created human beings, has placed us under the gentle rule of his Son, whose “yoke is easy, whose burden is light.” Jesus is a humble King who, far from ruling over us from a throne high above, descended to be one amongst us, to place himself, at the end of his earthly life, in the hands of human beings, under human authority.

In today’s feast, Jesus is presented as the Suffering Servant of God, the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” whose authority is not of this world, but something greater and higher, despite his apparent powerlessness and helplessness in the hands of Pilate, who represented the universal, absolute and apparently unstoppable power in the world in Jesus’ time, the Roman Empire. We should note that in the gospel Jesus speaks, not of his kingdom, but of his “kingship” or reign. Jesus is King, not of place or time, but wherever human beings have responded and turned to Him for salvation. Where He is loved and obeyed, where his power is uppermost in human hearts; this is his kingship.

There is no earthly power, from the Roman Empire of his day to the powers-that-be and colossal economic forces in the contemporary world, that can defeat Him. And while it sometimes seems as though the victory is theirs, as long as He reigns in our hearts, the ultimate victory is his; and ours. To this hope we must all cling, no matter what comes our way; for we know that to Him belongs the victory and glory and the power, for ever and ever. In the words of the Latin hymn for Christ the King, “Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!”“Christ conquers! Christ reigns! Christ commands!”

Fr. Phillip