Mass Readings for the Feast of Christ the King:
Daniel 7.13-14 Psalm 93.1-2, 5 Revelation 1.5-8 John 18.33b-37
How do we make today’s society understand “Christ the King”? For me that is the perennial problem; the question that arises when the end of the Church’s liturgical year rolls around as it does today.
We don’t live in a time of kings and queens; you might say our age is “republican” even in Canada where we still have something known as a “constitutional monarchy”. It’s not just that kings are no longer politically powerful, because the idea of kingship is something more than it being the highest executive office of the land.
Not so long ago, and here I mean in the context of eternity, and so I mean not so many centuries ago, kings were seen as intermediaries between the mundane and the divine, not unlike priests. Indeed, in Christian rites of royal investiture, the king was anointed just as a priest is, just as all of you who are baptized and confirmed are anointed to your office of discipleship.
Christ, as the anointed (for that is what “Christ” means, “anointed”) is our king because he is the bridge between this world and God; and he is a king according to the ideal put forth in sacred scripture, not as we see kings, or other powerful people in this world.
When we think “king”, we need to get out of our heads the current cultural reference points: we have celebrities and politicians, sometimes with those two things coinciding in one person, but that isn’t going to help us understand Jesus Christ. Our Lord is not a super celebrity, or a supernatural celebrity. He is not a person of glamour, but of true, authentic authority, and his authority draws very much from his authenticity. He is who he is; and we recall that God said to Moses from the burning bush, “I am who I am.”
We, as his subjects, as citizens of the heavenly city, as the people of the kingdom of God, are to be authentic, to be who we are as God’s children, men and women made in the image and likeness of God and to reject the identities the world tries to impose on us, the categories we see foisted on our vulnerable young who in their confusion begin to portray themselves according to strange notions of race, sexuality, or social activism.
So many of the famous and the powerful of this world don’t possess real authority, for genuine authority comes from God, but rather they are mere practitioners of influence by deception and use glamour to try and overawe others.
Glamour is empty show, the flashy image; it is the managed public persona, the public relations creation, “the empty suit” that we find too often in positions of power and influence today.
Indeed, I see in many of our leaders today a complete lack of authenticity. And I mean that in the sense that they are not their own persons, but rather represent unseen power through their managed public image; their words are not their own, their decisions are those made by committee, their leadership stemming not from personal convictions that come from serious reflection, but from the consensus of advisors, pollsters, power brokers, vested interests whose deliberations are all away from the public eye.
With Jesus Christ, we have authenticity itself. Christ becomes flesh, and there has been no one as genuine in his manner as Jesus; no one who is so self-possessed and in charge as he. He is no spokesman for God because, as we confess, he is God and enjoys a closeness to God the Father that surpasses even the closeness we have as individuals to ourselves.
He is not of this world, his kingdom is not from this world; and so, we are not aspiring toward a kingdom of this world, but rather to seek God’s kingdom which is beyond this world. Even as we are in this world just as Christ was in it, standing before the myopic person of Pontius Pilate who could not see the truth standing before him, we must deal with a world that cannot comprehend that who we are is something greater than the sum of our possessions, something deeper and more profound than our public personae.
Persona is an interesting word, coming as it does from the world of classical theatre. It literally translates as the mask through which an actor speaks his part. Persona is a role one plays, it’s a costume you put on, an accent you adopt for your stage character; or perhaps, we can think of it as a disguise, and so, a means of hiding from the world your true self.
One of the great corruptions of the idea of kingship was in the embellishment of what we would call the royal regalia, and the ceremonial life of the court. We see this when we visit old European capitals and tour the palaces where once kings strode about with their retinue, but now have long since been toppled by revolution. You see, the grand palaces, the magnificent robes, the elaborate ceremonial reenacted, all of that was meant to communicate to the onlooker the majesty of the royal person. But because too often that royal person proved unworthy of kingship, this all came to look like so much ridiculous pantomime theatre. The act of revolution was to pull the mask off the face of the pretender; the mere mortal who played the part of king, but was no more worthy of it than any other human being.
When I do read or am told about a celebrated person who was truly authentic, I am always impressed, and I think about whatever their accomplishments were with even greater admiration.
To be clear, the authentically awful don’t earn my esteem; learning that a favourite actor from movies I loved to watch as a youngster was a horrible person actually does diminish them for me, even if I can still enjoy their screen performances.
Healthy, good, virtuous authenticity does not require that someone must be a person with whom I am in complete philosophical, ideological and spiritual harmony.
One example that comes to me is Sir Winston Churchill. Now there is a man, should you know the full biography, who was far from perfect, held some objectionable ideas, advocated policies and programs with which I cannot sympathize, and yet he is someone that I find admirable for in everything I read about him I find he was his own man, and was thoroughly authentic with others. He wrote his own speeches; and so, when we read them, or listen to them, or see them re-enacted in films, we actually can gain insight into the man. While today, so many who stand before us to speechify all do so from notes and text prepared by others, fashioned from a myriad of political considerations and electoral calculations put together by others who then write “the script”– they really are “actors” who play a role, and one can only guess at who they really are.
What vexes me is how easily we, as a society, are taken in by these performances; how we can’t see the obvious constructed nature of those who play the roles of leaders; or if we see it, we support them based on their performance, we willfully suspend our disbelief because we want to give ourselves to the fantasy of being a follower of some latter-day Solomon or David; and in that, we are then no longer true to ourselves. Imagine how inauthentic we are then; how we cease to be ourselves as people who ought to aspire to be led, not by a mere mortal human being, but by truth and love.
It is little wonder that we see increasingly the young inventing bizarre personas, cobbling together characters, the more confounding and disturbing the better. They can then play these parts on social media, at the local protest, in their new campus “safe spaces” where they can show off what is essentially their costumes, test their disguises.
How did we get here?
You’ve probably heard it said that people get the leaders they deserve, this comes from the French philosopher Joseph de Maistre in the 18th century. I read an essay on that famous aphorism by the Soviet-born Alexander Boot. He argued that people, unfortunately, are drawn to admire and support those who tell them what they want to hear, even if it is all comforting lies. As Boot writes,
“And what people want to hear is greatly affected by the kind of education imposed upon them by the [same] elite (by those in leadership, principally political, but also cultural leadership) … There’s a circle there, and it can only be vicious. Keep running inside that circle for a generation or two, and you get not democracy (or a truly free and healthy society) but rather what Boot calls a spivocracy – rule by coercion both soft and hard by those who have no sense of the public good, just their own good. It’s the politics not of ideas, but of winning election and re-election; it’s culture not of edification, reflection and moral formation, but “bread and circuses.” It’s concern for the poor without doing anything that substantially changes their lives; it’s the bemoaning of our empty consumerist culture all the while continuing to support feeding the insatiable beast; it’s decrying the state of the environment, and penalizing the common people for presuming they should be able to heat their homes and eat while insulating the powerful from any real sacrifices. This is all to say, it’s inauthenticity; it’s role-playing, it’s disingenuous, dishonest; it’s not in the least Christ-like.
And that is where we must return as a society, and the Church must lead the way. It’s world youth day, and I pray that our young people will wake up to the freedom that comes from truly being who they are as God’s beloved children. I pray that the process launched by His Holiness to have the Church in conversation will lead us to recover who we authentically are: those who are in the world to testify to the truth. And we will speak that truth if we belong to the truth, the truth that is Christ our King.
Amen.