If we needed reassurance, having spent the last three weeks or so praying for the dead and perhaps thinking of our own death, and about the Last Things, then the Church in Her wisdom delivers it. Sometimes the link between the readings at Mass is subtle, even difficult to discern. Not this time! The passage from the Apocalypse unambiguously answers any questions that were perhaps left hanging in the air by the other two readings. “I gazed into the visions of the night, and I saw, coming on the clouds of heaven, one like a son of man” wrote the prophet Daniel. Who is this mysterious son of man? And the Apocalypse answers: “Jesus Christ, the faithful witness”, that is, the full and definitive revelation of God, “to him be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen. It is he who is coming on the clouds”. End of quotation. As for today's passage from the Gospel of John, it ended abruptly, just when Pilate was opening his mouth to deliver his most famous line. But the question he was about to ask is all the more present for that: “What is truth?” It is a cynical question, but the Book of the Apocalypse ignores the irony in Pilate's voice and gives a straight answer: “He loves us and has washed away our sins with his blood, and made us a line of kings and priests. This is the truth! Amen.” End of quotation.
So there was this man named Jesus of Nazareth, who claimed to be the Messiah. He was killed under Pontius Pilate, but then something unthinkable happened: he rose from the dead. He was then led into God's presence and God conferred His own sovereignty, glory and kingship on him, as the prophet Daniel wrote. In fact, as the only Son of God, as the eternal Word, he had always had this divine glory, but he emptied himself of it temporarily, so to speak, to become man. He is the one whose “sovereignty is an eternal sovereignty which shall never pass away”, whose “empire will never be destroyed”; the one who is coming and everyone will see him, like it or not.
It is easy to lose sight of the fact that, on its own, this sequence of events, this true story if you like, the backbone of Christianity, is perfectly terrifying. This man who is also all-powerful God, this man who can't be defeated even by death, he will come again to judge the living and the dead! I would much rather there was no God at all, frankly. These are the facts of faith without the truth about the person of Jesus, and they are terrifying on their own.
A few weeks ago I was talking to one of our guests, a lovely woman maybe in her late 50's, quite well-to-do, outwardly very cheerful, bursting out laughing every second sentence, it seemed to me. “I've got friends, I love my job, my life is pleasant and relatively trouble-free”, she told me. “And yet, it all seems such a pointless slog sometimes. All I see is faults. Faults in myself, faults in others, things wrong with the world, all I can remember is bad things that happened... I can't change that, it's hopeless. I'm just waiting to die now, I have nothing to live for. Sometimes only one thing stops me from committing suicide: I simply know that it wouldn't be the end of me”. She said, “I've always known deep down that God exists and that physical death doesn't end our lives, I would just go on suffering.” Needless to say, her words came as a huge shock to me. She was still laughing and smiling, but I knew that she meant it all. I said nothing for a long while. Her life was totally overshadowed by judgement: God's, other people's and her own. She was crushed by it and I didn't know what to say.
But thinking about today's solemnity of Christ the King, it occurred to me that it is meant precisely for people like her. It proclaims the same Good News of our salvation in Christ, but backwards or inside-out, as it were, exactly the way she needed it. Normally we begin with the man Jesus of Nazareth and then “graduate” to thinking of him as a Person of the Holy Trinity, as God, and we rejoice in the fact that we can have a relationship with God through him and in him.
Today's solemnity, however, puts it the other way around. The perspective is very much from the above. We are made to look down on ourselves, on other people, on the world. Without the Good News, behold, it's all hopeless, objectively speaking. The world is full of evil, bad things happen, people are unreliable and hurtful, nothing ever changes for the better, life is a slog, just waiting for death. But, thanks be to God, this is not the truth! This is not the right way of looking, because the ultimate judge, the One who looks down from the highest possible place in the universe, doesn't see things this way. The Good News is that: “He loves us and has washed away our sins with his blood!” And we need to let him look at ourselves this way, we need to let him love us, because only then we will “graduate” to seeing others and the world in a different way. Blessed are the pure in heart!
Well, I did not mention Christ the King to this woman, when I finally spoke to her. But by some miracle, it occurred to me to mention the obvious fact about Mass. She could only remember the bad things that happened to her. Our Lord said “do this in memory of me”. Just as his judgement is the final judgement, so Mass should be our ultimate memory, overshadowing all else. That's one of the reasons why we constantly repeat it, that's why we made it into a religious ritual. This is what he did for us, and so he looks at us and at the world accordingly. And because he is the King of the Universe, this is the final truth about everything in life.
DSP