Dear Friends in Christ:
This weekend we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King. This is an interesting title scripturally, historically, and for us in our day, practically. Jesus effectively turns the title of “king” on its head. He essentially equates his kingship to service and servitude. Jesus is the “Servant King” who “lays down his life as a ransom for the many” (Mt 20:28). Echoing the ‘suffering servant’ of Isaiah 53, Jesus shows in his own actions what power and ruling are to be in the Kingdom of God. In his own day and throughout history, Jesus’ ‘servant kingship’ has been and remains counter cultural.
Jesus encompasses and unites in himself the three-fold identity of Priest, Prophet, and King. He does so as Messiah and as Son. As priest he offers worship and sacrifice not to himself but to God, His heavenly Father. As prophet he, who is the Word made flesh, proclaims not his own message but the Word of the Father. As king he rules not with his own arbitrary will, but obediently serves the will of the Father who sent him. By his incarnation, life, passion, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus has joined us to himself and the Father in the Holy Spirit. He has elevated us to the dignity of “sonship” by his adoption of each of us in our baptism. Yet, even with this great dignity, we are not satisfied.
Today, as in every age, we are tempted to overstep who we are and who we are called to be. We seek not to follow Jesus and his example and model our lives after Him in order to obtain true happiness. Rather, we relentlessly try to fashion for ourselves an absolute reign of individual and personal power and self-glory. Our world lures and temps us to be priests who worship self and to sacrifice not for the glory of God, but for vain glory. We offer gifts not on the altar of the cross, but on the altar of our own pleasure, desire, and satisfaction. As prophets of this age we proclaim not the eternal truth of God but the infallible “truth” of our opinion. We seek not the truth of God as manifested in nature and divine revelation but settle for the deceitful, delusional, and comfortable “truth” of relativism; a lie which, in the end, does not save or bring us true freedom, but enslaves us. As kings in our own right, we seek not to serve but to be served. We choose not God’s will but our own will in all things. We are more interested in trying to convert God to our way of thinking rather converting ourselves to God’s way of thinking. We tell God what He needs to do for us instead of asking the Lord what He wants us to do.
In contemporary society we highly value choice and freedom. We resent anything that we feel infringes upon our ability to choose. The Feast of Christ the King is a reminder that we have choices. We can live for Christ or for ourselves. We can follow Christ or set our own path. We can have Christ as our King or we can crown ourselves as the ruler and master of our lives. To live for Christ is to gain everything and to live in the freedom of the children of God. To live for ourselves and our pleasures is to lose everything and become the slaves of the tyranny of pleasure and whim, sin and death. The choice is ours.