Introduction
The Feast of Christ the King is always the last Sunday of the old church year. (Next Sunday, the beginning of Advent, is the first Sunday of the new church year.) In liturgy class we were given the rule, “Ne bis de eodem,” “Never twice concerning the same thing.” So some liturgists wonder why we have this feast of “Christ the King” in late November when we already have such a feast in early spring -- namely Palm Sunday? On that day in royal procession we sing out "Hosanna to the Son of David. Hosanna to the King of Israel."
Some simply don’t like the feast because, they say, history has had its fill of kings. Back in Jesus’ day, there was King Herod who slew all the baby boys two years and younger (Mt 2:16). During WW II we had Kings Hitler and Mussolini to contend with. Then we had King Khoumeini in Iran, King Saddam in Iraq, King Milosovic in Kosovo, and now we have King Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. They all terrorized the human race. The latest of these kings, who lives in a cave and not a palace, and upon whose head we’ve placed a 25 million dollar bounty, has inflicted upon our nation a disaster so unspeakable that we simply refer to it as “9/11.” All these kings played that game which we used to play as kids: “King on the Hill.” You stood on a heap of something: a mound of sand, a pile of wood, the roof of an old shed, and you pushed down any one trying to get to the top. If someone managed to get up there and push you off, he became king. There was simply no room on the top for anyone else but you.
That’s the history of
the human race. At the present moment Osama bin Laden has been playing “King on
the Hill” in name of Islam.
Islam is that family of nations which stands firmly upon a simple,
personal, ardent, one-line profession of faith that “Only Allah
is God, and Muhammad is his messenger.”
That family of nations falls to its knees in prayer five times a day, and fasts from dawn to dusk
during the month of Ramadan. Islam has its staunch fundamentalists who force
the men to wear beards and the women to
wear veils. Bin Laden maintains
that Islamic way is the only
way. That’s his mission, and he terrorizes anyone who stands in his way. “King on the Hill”: no room on the top for
anything else but Islam. “King on the Hill”: no room on the top for any other
culture but Islamic culture. Not only kids play “King on the Hill,” adults do
too.
Not only fundamentalist Muslims but also fundamentalist
Christians play “King on the Hill.” They play the game in the name of Jesus.
You see them sporting bumper stickers that read, “Jesus is the only way”
or “Jesus is the only answer.” My sister lives in a little town named
Alvin (home of Nolan Ryan), deep in the heart of Texas and deep in the heart of
the great bible belt. At the city limits stands a humongous billboard placed
there by “The Church of the Living Stone,” no doubt a Protestant fundamentalist
church. The sign reads, “Christ is Lord over Alvin,” but its overtones read, “Christ and only Christ is Lord and
King over Alvin.” There’s that old only
again. There’s that old mission of exclusion again. There’s that old
game again: no room on the top for
anybody else but Christians. No room
for all those Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, who have to pass by that
billboard every day to and from work.
I’m sure it must anger some of them, just as a billboard that would read, “Only Buddha or only
Allah is King over Milwaukee” would equally anger me.
Twice Pope John Paul II invited religious leaders of all
the world’s great religions to assemble with him in Assisi, to pray for the
peace of the world. [1]
The first peace summit took place on October 4th, 1986,
the feast of St. Francis. From the four corners of the earth they came: a
veritable Pentecost of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Shintoists, Rabbis, Sikhs,
Zoroastrians, American Indians, etc.
TIME magazine (Nov. 10,1986) called it "the greatest" but
staunch Protestant fundamentalist, Carl McIntire, called it “the greatest
single abomination in church history"! Why such fierce disgust? Because
the Pope had hobnobbed with all those "infidels," when he really
should have been declaring that Jesus is King over all of them. The Pope had
given them welcome when he really should have been playing “King on the Hill”
in Jesus’ name.
Of course, we Catholics
should talk. For ages we too have
played the old game as well as the best of them. We played “King on the Hill”
especially in the name of the Church. Until recently we always referred
to ourselves as “The one true church.” Theologians and churchmen kept quoting
for us a dictum of one of the old church fathers who said, perhaps off the top
of his head, “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus!” “Outside the church there is
no salvation!” You quoted it in Latin to make it sound impressive. The dictum
stuck, and it eventually deteriorated into a gross "mumbled and
half-examined” belief that only Catholics get to heaven. My gosh, what an immense sea of damnation that
would be! If you were too compassionate to swallow that, you had to go back to
the dictum, and reinterpret it in such a way as to make it say what it did not
say. It would have been so much simpler and so much more honest to simply have
ditched the dictum.
After
the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, the crowds wanted to seize
Jesus and make him king. But John says,
“Jesus fled up into the mountains and hid himself from them”(Jn 6: 15).
Do you know what Jesus does every time we
try to make him an earthly king or play “King on the Hill” in his name? He
flees from us and he hides himself up in the mountains somewhere.
Whenever Christians are busy making Christ
an earthly king, there is a tricky dynamic at work: we are busy placing not
Christ’s kingship in Christ but our own kingship in him. That is to say, we
are busy placing our own agenda in Christ, and not Christ’s
agenda in him. That is to say, we are busy placing in Christ whatever it is we
want to declare as right or wrong; whatever it is we want to invite or
dis-invite, to include or exclude; whatever it is we want to attack and
annihilate or to champion and affirm. And when we have firmly positioned our kingship is in Christ (and not
Christ’s in him), then we have the stamp of divine approval upon whatever our
agenda might be. Then there are no limits to what we may now do, or rather, may
now perpetrate in God’s name. We now have divine permission even to bomb
abortion clinics or shoot abortion doctors in the head if we want.
With our kingship in Christ, there are no
limits at all. We now have divine permission even to beat up a gay human being,
turn him into a scarecrow and leave him dying chained to a wooden fence out in
the country somewhere, and then in the name of Jesus, picket his funeral with
the Rev. Mr. Phelps, who is filled
with “faith-inspired” hate, and whose sign reads, “God hates fags --
Romans, chapter nine, verse thirteen.”
In the place of Christ’s kingship
which affirms a morality that declares “justice, compassion, and honesty” as
“the weightier (the really more important) matters of the Law” (Mt 23:23), we
now parade our own kingship and our own brand of morality which chooses to be
obsessed with sexual moralism, and which chooses to go in hot pursuit of the
prostitute instead of hot pursuit of the kingdom of Christ, which is “a kingdom
justice, love, and peace” (preface of the feast). Jesus says of our moralism,
“I tell you the prostitutes are way ahead of you Scribes and Pharisees, and are
preceding you into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 21: 31).
At the present moment, Osama bin Laden uses
the same tricky dynamic. He places his kingship, his agenda in
Allah. He places in Allah whatever it
is he wants to declare as holy or unholy, as faithful or infidel; whatever it
is he wants to attack and annihilate or to champion and affirm. And with his
kingship or agenda now firmly positioned in Allah (and not Allah’s kingship in
Allah), there are no limits now to what he may do. He now has Allah’s permission, and not only permission but full
divine endorsement, to hijack a plane full of innocent human beings, turn it
into a weapon of mass destruction, aim it at the World Trade Center, and murder
five or six thousand innocent human beings at one shot, and do it all
explicitly and whole-heartedly in the name of “Allah Most Merciful and
Compassionate.” Once you have Allah or
Yahweh or God in the palm of your hand, you are permitted to call even war
“holy.”
No doubt about it, scripture abundantly
testifies to the kingship of Christ. Christ is king coming and king going. When
he comes into the world, the Angel Gabriel announces that, "The Lord, God,
will give to him the throne of David, his father, and of his kingdom there will
be no end" (Lk 1:33). At his trial, as he goes out of the world, he is
questioned, "Art thou a King?"
"Yes,” he affirms, “for
this was I born and for this came I into the world" (Jn 18: 37). But Jesus always puts us straight about his
kingship. When asked, “Are you a king,” he answers: "Yes I am a king, but….” Yes I am a king, but ”my kingdom
is not of this world” (Jn 18:36). Yes I
am a king, but I have no swords or subs, but I do have “twelve legions of
angels whom my Father in heaven is ready to send me” (Mt 26: 53). Yes I am a king, but I come “not in order to
be served but to serve.” Jesus does not
play the old game of “King on the Hill,” and neither should Christians
play it in his name.
Good Pope John
Close
upon the feast of Christ the King comes the birthday of a great man. He was
born on the 25th of November 1881. Like
Jesus he was born poor, but when he grew up, he made it to the top of the hill.
On the day of his coronation as Pope John XXIII (Nov 4, 1958), they placed a
triple crown, a tiara, upon his head. In his homily that day he remarked that
everyone has his or her own idea of what the new pope should be. “For myself,”
he said, “I have in mind the example of the Good Shepherd, who came not to be
served and to lord it over others but to serve.” The next day he put his money
where his mouth was: off he sped through elaborate Vatican gates to visit
inmates in a Roman prison. “I come to you,” he said to them, “because you
couldn’t come to me.” And when he
celebrated his first Holy Thursday as pope, he did a remarkable thing. He
revived an ancient custom of the church, fallen into disuse for many centuries:
he bent down and washed the feet of 13 young priests. From the word go, John
thereby put the Church and the world straight about the crowning and “kinging”
of popes.
It’s
true that after he died, they did indeed crown the next pope, Paul VI. But
after that wonderful “kinging” or rather wonderful shepherding of Pope John,
that coronation fell quite flat. So
Pope Paul took his crown, the gift of the people of Milan, sold it, and gave
the money to the poor. And that was the
end of the crowning of popes.
Jesus indeed is “King on the Hill.” His enemies took him up to the Hill of Calvary and there made him king. Over his
thorn-crowned head they wrote the inscription: "Iesus Nazarenus, Rex
Iudaeorum," "Jesus of
Nazareth, King of the Jews" (Lk 23:38).
But up there on the cross, he did not play the old game. There he played a completely new one of his own. In the old game, when you got to the top,
you pushed everyone down, down, down.
Jesus said: "When I get to
the top, when I am lifted on high, I shall draw you all up, up, up unto
me" (Jn 12: 32). The one, for whom there was no room in the
inn when he first came into the world, said to us as he was going out of the
world, “When I get to the top, I will come back and gather you all unto me, for
up there in my father’s house there much room for everyone” (Jn 14: 2).
[1]On Sunday, November
11th, the pope appeared at the window of his apartment for the
midday Angelus, and took the occasion to announce to the crowd in the
square below that he was extending a third invitation to representatives of the world’s religions to assemble with him
in Assisi a third time on January 24,
2002, to pray for the peace of the world.