Bread for the Journey – Peter Steele SJ

Christ the King

Every year, the Lygon Street Festa is held in Melbourne—street music, street theatre, lots of music, lots of food. It is, as they say, a cultural event, something having to do with the self-articulation of a particular group or region.

Nobody would suppose that it was a cultic event—something which taps the wellsprings of meaning, of life and death, in a context of worship. Around this time we celebrate the feast of Christ the King: and it would be easy to suppose that this is a cultural thing, not a cultic one.

Few of us have seen a king, and few of us want to: kings are things that other people have, or had—along with armour, and bad drainage, and madrigals, and serfdom. What can the feast have to do with our own lives?

Historically, kings have come in all shapes and sizes, all degrees of good and evil. At their worst, kings have done to whole countries things which you, I hope, would never do to a dog: and if you do, you will be arrested for it. But the original point of kingship was not all the swagger and the power, but to have an individual in whom the mortal need and the mortal possibilities of the people were represented and addressed.

The crucially important thing about the king was not that he was the final decision-taker, but that in his person the people could see, concentrated, their own hopes, in spite of their own fears. The king was, in a cinematic sense, the projection of their own shared possibilities. Sometimes he was thought of as a divinity: but even then it was vital that he should crystallise humanity. People had kings not in order to shelve themselves, but to take heart to be themselves.

In the Old Testament account, God begrudges the people of Israel a king because he sees what they will be prone to do with one if they have one: they will idolise him. They will be likely to pass the buck of personal or communal responsibility to him, and half-live their own lives instead.

No doubt they did that, as we are all tempted to do the same thing. All of us are prone to divinise mini-kings, mini-queens, whether they are local role models, international stars, or other relievers of our own distinctive responsibilities.

But the notion of kingship, and of queenship, as an opportunity to represent humanity-at-large, and to throw back, as a mirror does, the sense that each of us is an embodiment of humanity and not just a whirling personal fragment, kept coming back to Israel, however many squalid or seedy kings they had.

And that is why, when our Lord, hands tied together and looking down the barrel of death, stood before Pilate, the conversation was about kingship. By kingship, Pilate meant command: by kingship, Christ meant representation—being the representative, the advocate, of any mortal, distressed, guilt-scarred human being: being Pilate's representative, for instance.

And when Pilate, out of racist contempt or simply as a jeer at the conquered, had the notice pegged up on the execution-poles of Jesus, saying, 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews', no doubt he was playing the gambit of the conqueror—the conquistador, as they say in other countries—but when he explicitly refused to take it back, he was refusing to take back a greater truth than he knew. It was the representative of a suffering people, as of a suffering world, who was being put up there to twist in the wind.

The feast of Christ the King can be turned to all sorts of purposes, as can any feast, any human contrivance. I ask you to take it as a challenge to your compassion.

You need to have compassion upon yourself, unless you are more exceptional than anyone I have ever met. You need to have compassion upon someone in the chapel or church where you celebrate this feast, someone in your life. You need to find a way of tracing in the cheerful or the cheerless faces of people whom you meet frequently the features of humanity at large, which is to say your own features.

Up there on the dark throne, at a dark moment, under the sinister crown, the face of Christ held Pilate's features, and Peter's, and Judas's, and his mother's. He was to carry all of them, if they would go, into resurrection.