The Feast of Christ the King

 

Christ Pantocrator, from the interior dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Pilate said to Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?”

Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?”

Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”

So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

John 18: 33-37

Today is the feast of Christ the King, Catholic New Year.

Jesus does not say here that he is or is not a king. “You say I am a king.” 

But the last sentence says he is the king of everyone who seeks truth. The essence of being a king is that people do as you say. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate does not get this. He does not get it because he does not belong to the truth; as he reveals in the next verse:

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Pilate is a zombie. To Pilate, the king of truth is not a king; he has no dominion, and no power.

This is definitive, conversely, of who is and is not a true Christian. Christ himself is truth, and king of truth. Accordingly, anyone who seeks and prizes truth is a Christian. Anyone who does not, regardless of whether he mouths the Latin name “Jesus,” in or outside of a church, is not.

And then again, I think whoever seeks and prizes truth, and sits down and carefully reads the gospels, is going to recognize the ring of truth. At the same time, those who do not seek truth are perfectly capable of reading them, and quoting them, and having no idea what it’s all about.

Friend Xerxes just yesterday quoted a Scottish theologian, John Macmurray, as asserting that the “kingdom of heaven” over which Jesus reigns is “friendship.”

“Jesus said contradictory things about it. That the kingdom could appear at any moment. And that the kingdom was already here, and known.

The only human experience true for both statements, Macmurray argued, was friendship.”

Friendship is for from the only human experience that can appear at any moment, yet be already here and known. Think about it for a moment: any possible concept we might have of the future fits, pretty much by definition. 

Reducing the Kingdom of Heaven, over which Jesus is king, would seem to require a willful misreading of the gospel.

Friendship does not require God to incarnate and die for us. Friendship is known to all mankind. The oldest known connected narrative, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is the story of a friendship, between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. 

Macmurray might respond that the Christian ideal is of friendship among all men. 

But try to reconcile that reading with the following passage:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

This cannot be a universal friendship, then, for it separates mankind into definite camps, and condemns one.

Consider too this passage:

And He said to them, ‘Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times as much at this time and in the age to come, eternal life.’

This places the kingdom about one’s commitment to family. If the kingdom of God is friendship, this places friendship above love of family. Most people would say family takes priority over friends: blood is thicker than water, and so forth. Is saying friends are more important than family a profound and worthy message?

The Greeks, of course—meaning Jews in Jesus’s time—recognized various forms of love, for which we have only one word. Friendship was philios, family love was storge, sexual love was eros. Divine love, of which Jesus spoke, was agape, sometimes taken as cognate with the English word “charity.” Not philios.

But charity in turn is not the kingdom; it is necessary to enter the kingdom. The kingdom is truth. Or, one might say, the real world.