Christ the King
2010

 On 2 June 1953, the French philosopher, Jean Guitton, was listening to the radio broadcast of the coronation of our present Queen. “This Westminster Abbey, he wrote in his Journal, is the only place which still incarnates the idea of a sacramental coronation.” And he added, “It is strange how a great silence falls upon the whole world in order that it may follow such rites.” Yes, however much you change words, however much you alter forms of government, the idea of the monarch, the ruler, still holds sway. There’s something about kingship which speaks to a human need. The Pope, in his way, is a monarch, and one could see in the recent response to the small white figure this need finding its voice. But there is, we all know, a darker side as well. This feast of Christ the King is a protest. It was a protest at 20th c. totalitarianism - at the Great Party Leaders, Duces, Fuehrers, who did such terrible harm. It’s a protest at the parodies of kingship. It conjures up that other figure St Benedict puts at the beginning of his Rule: “the Lord Christ, the true King.” Christ the hidden strength of all those brave men and women who withstand the dictators and their regimes, in the name of conscience and truth, freedom and humanity. Christians may pay Caesar’s taxes, but we keep our incense for the Lord. For there is in the human heart this terrible vulnerability to the suction and lure of power. We naturally worship it. St Paul speaks of the principalities and powers that rule us, demonic and human, sometimes embodied in persons, sometimes anonymous, movements, ideas, forces, powers. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karénina there’s a scarily realistic portrait of a well-to-do, liberal, society man, convinced he’s an original thinker, whose every opinion is merely a reflection of so-called Public Opinion. His king is what the progressive papers say. Well, Tolstoy ended his days as a cranky monomaniac. That’s not the answer either. But the human heart is a vulnerable thing. Whatever it may think, it cannot do without a king. This is why it’s so vulnerable. It’s like an empty throne. Round it the claimants cluster: people, ideas, and the rest. And we’re so vulnerable.

 Today the Gospel of Luke takes us to the Cross. The Church takes us there, vulnerable heart and all. We’re taken there to meet the King. “Above him, there was an inscription: ‘This is the King of the Jews’.” “And the people stood there watching.”
 Jesus, first of all, is being jeered at. Three times in fact in this reading. First by the Jewish leaders, then by the soldiers, then by one of the two criminals crucified beside him. And each time, the jeer, the taunt is: If you’re a King, save yourself. If you’re a King save us. It’s a king’s job precisely to rescue people, but this king can’t even rescue himself. What a joke! “How many divisions has the Pope?”, taunted Stalin. The kingship of Christ is something other. But which one of us hasn’t said to Christ, to God, in his or her heart, “If you’re all you’re meant to be, why don’t you, dot, dot, dot? Why do these things happen to me, to others? Why don’t you make my life ok? “Omnipotence in bonds” was the title of one of Newman’s sermons. Why is this king so impotent?
 Then the “good thief” speaks. “Thief” by the way is a misnomer. He wasn’t a semi-endearing minor pick-pocket who hung round the shopping malls of Jerusalem. He was a big-time criminal, and there would have been plenty of  people whose lives he’d wrecked very glad to see justice being done to him. But he finds the way to the kingdom of Christ. First, he acknowledges his guilt and the justice of his punishment. Then, he affirms Jesus’ innocence: “this man has done nothing wrong.” In classical Christian language, he repents and believes. And therefore he starts to hope: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” It is magnificent. Surrounded by jeers and in the kind of physical agony not conducive to positive thoughts, he says to the crucified impotence beside him, You are a King. You are on your way to your kingdom. Remember me. And the king replies. “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” This is the heart of it.  It’s the only time in the Gospel when the oft-occurring phrase, “Truly, truly I say to you”, is addressed to an individual. And that individual belongs to the dregs of humanity. And Jesus does for him precisely what the taunters taunted him for not doing, precisely what a king is supposed to do, and precisely what no king or queen, no government, no nothing can actually do. He saves him at the depth no one else can reach, and takes him to the height only he can open. “Today you will be with me in paradise.”  In worn-out Christian language, the King has mercy on him, forgives him his sins and brings him to everlasting life. This morning we heard St Cyril of Alexandria say this: “Although as God he is the Lord of glory, he takes on our low condition to raise human nature to royalty. He came to be first in everything. He is the way, the door... he leads us from death to life.., from weakness to strength, from slavery to the freedom of the children of God, from the obscurity of our condition to kingly honour and glory.” There is the kingship of Christ. There is the power for which our hearts were made so vulnerable.
 
 Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Next Sunday we begin another. Round and round we go. And at the centre of every liturgical year stands Easter, stands the Cross, stands an empty tomb, the victory of the one true King over sin and death. And perhaps at their heart, the world and history and each of us is like an Easter night. A Paschal night waiting for the Risen One - ille qui regressus ab inferis humano generi serenus illuxit, the King come back from the world of the dead to shed his peaceful light on all mankind. The King of kings and Lord of lords. Unique.
 May a great silence fill us as we fall before him!

          Fr. Hugh, O. S. B.