Mass readings for the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe:
Ezekiel 34.11-12, 15-17 Psalm 23.1-6 I Corinthians 15.20-26 Matthew 25.31-46
Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, or more specifically, this is the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.
So, none of this Christ “our” king stuff. Yes, he’s our king, but that’s because he is the king… of everything. And that might strike those of other faiths as curious, or even arrogant, to those who hold to secular ideologies it’s all superstition, but as Christians we believe that in Jesus Christ is revealed the truth of God, and of humanity, and of the very nature of reality; that salvation comes through the cross, and redemption through belief in the God who willingly dies for us, and in the man who conquered death for all who believe in him. It is by his Word we are ruled, and it is by his standard of justice that we are judged.
Yet we know that for many, he’s a king effectively in exile in our spiritually “republican” age. For others, he has no more effective authority than the current monarch of Canada – kept comfortably at a distance and expected to come out on special occasions and follow the script handed to him. He’s a figurehead.
And there are still more who confess no faith in Christ, yet who argue their particular religion or ideology, contains all that we find in Christ, but does not burden them with the moral obligations that come with Christian faith or a need to believe in the fantastic story of the New Testament. I can be good without God, and charitable without Christ; I can shout God is great, and my soul is relieved of any burden of guilt for what I might do in his name.
The gospel today makes it clear that the only perspective that matters is that of the absolute truth of things, not our own subjective take on the world and ourselves. Christ gives not a wit if we think we’ve got a good argument to justify the horrors we may perpetrate or the injustices we excuse.
But how do we escape our subjectivity, how do we get away from our biases, our necessarily personal perspectives to see things “as they are” and so know what to do; or at the very least understand what we’ve done for good or ill and learn from it?
Jesus Christ surveys us from his throne, he has the perspective of absolute truth. He can see the sheep and goats, and can separate out the one from the other as any competent shepherd could. How can we partake of this perspective, if only very partially, seeing only dimly, yet enough to know of our errors and so ask for forgiveness, and sufficiently to truly practice virtue?
Well, we can start by listening to him; and really only him. So many will fill our heads with nonsense; and not frivolous nonsense, but deadly nonsense that corrupts our thinking and leads us toward moral disaster, and then, most likely, social collapse. I would hope that from his words you can grasp the outline of how we are to treat people; and so, when we come across directives, laws, orders, regulations, rules, mandates, edicts, policies of and from whatever human authority that demands the contrary, you and I will know that isn’t of Christ, that it isn’t virtuous, right or good.
But you know, people can so easily fool themselves and allow their thinking to be twisted and to see things upside down. Most of us regard our philosophies as true, our perspectives (allowing for personal bias) essentially balanced and fair, the information we have with respect to things of importance in our lives to be in the main correct. We all have our understanding of history, that is the stories we know and tell that organize and explain to us everything in a way that makes sense – and this we are apt to find reasonably accurate even if there are some minor errors here and there.
I would say I am this way. I am, and I suppose this is obvious, a Christian which means I have accepted a particular history of the world, and I fit myself, and all the facts and news and other sorts of information into that. It helps me make sense of the world, and it keeps me from going mad even as I see a world that seems to be either on the cusp of insanity, or indeed, is mentally unhinged.
But I’ve mentioned this before, people who adhere to the most evil of ideologies, the most horrible of religious creeds, they would say the same of themselves. They’ve got it right, and I’ve got it wrong. They’re the righteous ones, and I’m either a fool or a cretin.
Think of history’s most infamous villains, the Nazis. We know broadly what they did and we have made a commitment to remember that horror, but also the great sacrifice that was necessary to end that evil. We also need to remember the delusion that captivated the German nation and had them believing, whether zealous Nazi, or moderate nationalist, that they were actually fighting a defensive war; and that Germany had gotten a raw deal, that the war they initiated was a just one. On the buckles of their army uniform belts was inscribed the phrase “Got mit uns”, that is “God is with us.” And uniformed thus, committed atrocities on an unimagined scale.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, when all the terrible secrets of that evil regime came to light, with all the hard evidence of atrocities in occupied countries, and of the industrialized slaughter of Jews and others deemed undesirable in the open, surely this led to a change of heart and mind, and a realization by the many who had joined the party that they were wrong. I wish it was so.
In my undergrad days, studying media, and in this instance the power of propaganda, I had read and found disturbing a book entitled, “They thought they were free” by Milton Mayer. It’s a study of Nazis. However, it’s not about the Nazis during the party’s development or when in power, but in the years following Germany’s defeat. Mayer went to Germany in 1952, took a teaching job at a university, and in the small town he lived in, found ten rather ordinary men who had been members of the party and set to doing long interviews and even socializing with them to learn what they honestly thought. They were a tailor, a cabinetmaker, a bill-collector, a salesman, a student, a teacher, a bank clerk, a baker, a soldier, and a police officer. In his book, Mayer reports,
“Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, ‘the democratic part.’ The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it” (They thought they were free, p.47).
I find that chilling. And I see this in a great many people today, those who crowd our video screens with their protests, their vandalism, their not very subtle calls to have their enemies punished, cancelled, destroyed, couching it all in the language of justice and peace.
I’m not dismissing that the complaints they voice are without any foundation, I’m troubled by their suggested remedies that too often target the innocent; or indeed, in some cases specifically target the innocent as retribution against groups or races they see as evil and irredeemable.
It was in grappling with that, the reality that grievances can be so effectively played on that we can be led to do the most horrific things and regard them as heroic, or at the very least justified, that I was reminded of a conversation I had not so long ago. It was with a descendant of Germans who’d been displaced by the war and emigrated to Canada. He told a story that now is something of a family legend. Gathered together for some occasion, the extended family fell to bitter remembrance of the loss of their farms in East Prussia, what is today Poland; how they didn’t deserve it, that most of them hadn’t joined the Nazi party, how they were unfairly regarded as being responsible for what happened even though, as a poor farming family they had scarcely any influence on those in power, and so on. Apparently, over the increasingly angry voices came the word, “enough!” It was from the matriarch of the clan, the grandmother, who had as much reason to offer bitter complaint about the injustices suffered. But instead, she recalled them all to their Christian faith, that they could nurse their bitterness, and indulge in fantasies of taking back the homeland, or they could get on with their lives and live as Christ had taught them. That it would be in this that the family would have life, and in this country realize their dreams by hard work, neighbourliness, practicing all those virtues that Christ lays out for us, and more.
In this I heard her calling to be ruled by the king, the true king, and not to heed any other. There is no process, either by coup or lawful election that hands any person a mandate to overthrow Christ; to mandate anything in contradiction to his law. We need to remember that, and recall this to our family, friends, and neighbors; and ensure that those in power are aware that any attempt to overthrow the divine constitution will surely fail, but in the attempt much harm can be done. So, let’s not go there, let’s not find excuses for atrocities born of explicit intentions and diabolical plans, or claim to find moral equivalence where it does not exist.
To be ruled by Christ is follow a demanding law, and one that requires us to fight for our king against every ruler and every authority and every power set against him, until all his enemies are under his feet.
Amen.