King on the Hill
Introduction
A repetition
This Thirty-fourth
and Last Sunday of Ordinary Time is always the feast of Christ the King. After
having celebrated all the feasts of Our Lord and his saints through fifty-two
weeks, this Sunday’s feast is a kind of crown we place on the old church year which
is about to leave us. When we return to the assembly next Sunday we will have
exited Ordinary Time and will have entered into the Extraordinary Time of
Advent. That’s the season of preparation for Christmas which keeps us so busy
that we have little time to prepare for the Lord’s birthday.
The feast of
Christ the King was instituted as recently as 1925 by Pope Pius X. At that time he was doing battle with various
kings of this world. He was fighting anticlericalism in
Back in the old seminary days
when people were smart and knew Latin we were given a liturgical rule: “Ne bis
de eodem” -- “Never twice concerning the same matter.” On Palm Sunday in royal
procession we sing out, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Hosanna to the King of
Fed up with kings
Down though the
centuries the world has had its fill of kings.
Back in Jesus’ day, there was King Herod who was jealous and fearful of
Jesus, the new-born king of the Jews. Not knowing for sure who and where the
infant was, he slew all baby boys two years and younger just to make sure he
had eliminated the threat to his throne (Mt
The most recent
rogue king is Saddam Hussein who’s about to go on trial the 28th of
this month for his brutal kinging. This king, indeed, did not live in a cave;
he lived in eight palaces before he ended up in a hole in the ground. His
kinging dotted the landscape of
King
Jesus
No doubt about it Jesus is king coming and
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
But if Jesus comes as king,
it is in order to put the world straight about kings and kinging. So when he’s asked,
“Are you a king,” he answers, "Yes,
but my kingdom is not of this world” (Jn
The game King on
the Hill
As kids we liked to play a game called King on the
Hill. It really catered to an innate yen to be both greedy and grabby and to defeat
and lord it over others. In that game you stood on top of a raft or a mound of
sand or any kind of a height, and you drove down anyone trying to get to the
top. Whoever managed to unseat the guy on top proclaimed himself king.
Full-grown people also like to play the game. The three big boys on the block,
the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all
like to play King on the Hill. They all have a yen to defeat and lord it over
the other.
Christians play the game. For ages Catholics proclaimed themselves “The One True Church.” There was no room on the top for anyone else
but us. Theologians and churchmen kept quoting for us a dictum of St. Cyprian, an
early church father of the third century (258). He claimed that, “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus!”
“Outside the church there is no salvation!” We quoted his dictum in Latin to
make it sound impressive and not so gross. Cyprian’s dictum stuck, and it eventually
deteriorated into a mumbled and half-examined belief that only Catholics were
up there on the top of the hill in the kingdom of heaven.
Protestants
also play the game. Their fundamentalists sport bumper stickers that proclaim
Jesus as the only way or only answer. That leaves no room on the top for any
other way or any other answer. In Alvin, Texas (home of the famous pitcher
Nolan Ryan), deep in the heart of the Bible belt where I spend a few of the
winter months, I often have to pass a humongous billboard erected by The Church
of the Living Stone. It grossly plays King
on the Hill as it declares with letters ten feet tall “Jesus is Lord over
Do you know what Jesus does
every time Christians play King on the Hill in his name and try to make him
king? After
the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the fervent crowds wanted to seize
him and make him king. Scripture says, “Jesus fled from them and hid himself alone
up in the mountains” (Jn
Jews play it.
Jews too play King on the Hill. Their fundamentalists
fire themselves up with the eschatological belief that reclaiming the land will
hasten the coming of the Messiah. So
they push Palestinians off their very own hills in the
Do you know what Yahweh does when Jews play King on
the Hill in his name? With Jesus he flees up into the mountains where both hide themselves from us
humans trying to make them king.
Muslims also plays the game.
For Islamists (fundamentalist Muslims) there is no room on the top for any other
way than the Islamic way. No room on the top for any other cultures than
Islamic culture. All men should wear beards, all women should hide their
existence under berkas and all should fall on their knees in prayer five times
a day. If you don’t, you’re an infidel
-- damned and lost. “Outside the Mosque there is no salvation.” That sounds
familiar, doesn’t it?
I wonder what
Allah does when Islamists play King on the Hill in his name? I bet he flees
from them and with Jesus and Yahweh hides himself up in the mountains.
There’s a tricky dynamic at
work when we play King on the Hill in God’s name. We’re really busy not with
God’s kingship but with our own
kingship. That is to say, we’re busy placing in Jesus or Yahweh or Allah
whatever it is that we want to declare as right or wrong; whatever it is we
want to lay claim to or disown; whatever it is we want to include or exclude;
whatever it is we want to attack and annihilate on the one hand or champion and
affirm on the other.
It’s a tricky dynamic. We now possess God
instead of God possessing us. We now
have God doing our bidding instead of us doing God’s bidding. At the end of the
day, it’s not Yahweh who gives to Jewish settlers lands that belong to
Palestinians; it’s they who
give those lands to themselves. At the end of the day, it’s not Allah who hates
Western infidels; it’s Islamists who
hate them. At the end of the day, it is not God who hates gays; it is we who hate them! At the end of the
day, it is not God who reigns as king. It’s we who reign.
It’s also a very effective
dynamic that’s at work when we play King on the Hill in God’s name. It puts the
stamp of divine approval upon whatever our agenda might be. Now with God on our
side there are no limits to how far we can go. If our agenda is squarely and deadly
pro-life, and we are tricky enough to place that deadly agenda in God, then we
have the stamp of divine approval to bomb abortion clinics or shoot abortion
doctors in the head. If our agenda is to bring down Western culture because we
think it’s threatening our culture, and we are tricky enough to place that agenda
in Allah, then we have Allah’s blessing to bring down the
If our agenda is
gay-bashing, and we are tricky enough to place the agenda in God, then we have
the stamp of divine approval to beat Matt Shepard to a pulp and tie him to a
wooden fence out in the country and leave him there to die in his blood and
tears. And the Rev. Mr. Phelps has God’s permission and blessing to parade a
sign at the lad’s funeral, showing that God endorses his agenda. His sign read:
“God hates fags and buries them in hell. Read Romans 9:13.”
Christ’s agenda in us
We make Christ king not by
making Christ endorse our agenda but by making ourselves endorse his agenda. We
make Christ king not by putting our agenda in him but his agenda in us. What’s his
agenda? The gospel for this feast of
Christ the King lists Jesus’ agenda: “When the Son of man comes as king and all
the angels with him, he will divide all the peoples of the earth into two
groups. To the one he will say, `Come you blessed of my Father. Come and
receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was
thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was
naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you cared for me. I was in prison and
you visited me” (Mt 25:31-46). That’s
Christ agenda. Make that your agenda, and you have made Christ your king.
Good Pope John
Close upon this late fall feast of Christ the King comes
the birthday of a great man, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. He was born poor like Jesus on Nov. 25 (this
coming Friday), 1881 in a little Italian village called Bergamo Sotto il Monte
(
The next day after his coronation John put his
money where his mouth was. He went forth to proclaim the gospel without saying
a word. He went forth to unveil a new style of papal kinging and to declare his
future “program of governance.” The new pope sped through the elaborate wrought-iron
gates of the
That great man who made it to the top from Foot of
the Mountain put an end to the crowning of popes. After he died, they did,
indeed, crown Pope Paul VI. But after such a loving and humble shepherd as Good
Pope John, Paul’s coronation fell flat. He
sold his crown (the gift of the people of
Conclusion
A new game
Jesus is king on the hill, the Hill of Calvary.
They took him to the top and there proclaimed him king. They placed over his
thorn-crowned head the inscription, "Jesus of Nazareth King of the
Jews." But there on the cross he did not play the old game. He played a
completely new one. In the old game, when you got to the top, you pushed
everyone down, down, down. In the gospel of St. John, Jesus is quoted as
saying, “When I am lifted up (on the cross, when I get to the top) I shall draw
everyone up, up, up unto me" (Jn 12:32).