Looking for the king?

Christ the King 2012


Barbara Lundblad, a professor and ‘blogger, tells this of her friend Delores Williams. Delores grew up in the South and remembers Sunday mornings when the minister shouted out: “Who is Jesus?” The choir would shout back, “King of kings and Lord Almighty!” Then, little Miss Huff, in a tiny soft voice, would sing her own answer, “Poor little Mary’s boy.” Back and forth they sang – KING OF KINGS…Poor little Mary’s boy.

On the feast of Christ the King, we cannot and should not fill our minds with images of a regal Jesus seated in majesty without hearing little Miss Huff say softly, “Poor little Mary’s boy.” Any language, any image we borrow from the archaic world of royalty enthroned with pomp and panoply needs the counterpoint of Miss Huff’s truth—that this King is an anti-King, a King whose royal robes are rags and whose throne room is the place where, as the ‘60’s song said, where the ragged people go.

This feast is a latecomer to the calendar. A Pope created it in 1925. I think he took a long, horrified look at the tyrannies and dictatorships and ideologies that were brewing to make the 20th Century such a blood bath and placed this feast as a contradiction to all those forces. A simple Sunday feast is a fragile statement to make against the forces of power and violence.

“Christ the King” is a paradox, a paradox as deep as that choir shouting its proclamation and little Miss Huff whispering her deeper, more powerful truth. The early Christians were very clear that proclaiming Christ Jesus as Lord was a very different thing than proclaiming Caesar as Lord. The Christians were seen by the Romans as subversive, enemies to peace and order, worshipping a Jew who had been executed under Roman law. Merely suggesting that there was any king besides the Emperor was treason. Proclaiming that this Jesus was King was treason and insult both.

Is it still treason? If not, is that because we have forgotten the scandal, the outrageous nature of the Kingship of Christ? Have we placed King Jesus, the rejected and abused and condemned King, in a safe seat dressed in Caesar’s robes? Have we forgotten how astounding it is that we proclaim the marginalized and rejected One as King?

Thomas Merton wrote:

“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ has come uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it –
because he is out of place in it,
and yet must be in it
- his place is with those others who do not belong,
who are rejected because they are regarded as weak;
and with those who are discredited,
who are denied the status of persons,
and are tortured, exterminated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.”

If we wish to see Christ the King, do not look in a palace. Do not look in a place of power or prestige. Do not look where everyone sits content with their privileges or their rightness or their security.

Look instead to the rejected, to those invisible, to those whom we are tempted to dismiss with pity or with condescension. Look to those for whom each day is a struggle to simply exist, who do not have the luxury of a sense of security. And look too at the impoverished, vulnerable, wounded parts of ourselves, those parts that do not fit, that are inconsistent, those parts that we least wish to own or admit.

It is with those and it is there, in those forgotten parts of our world, that Christ the King stands at home. It is there that the pure love and grace of God shines forth. Into this world, this demented inn, the uninvited One whose own people did not receive him—here he reigns. Here he is strong. He stands because he has not been offered a chair, or he finds a cardboard box, or he takes a plastic chair with dozens of others in a crowded waiting room. Here the love and humility of our King shines forth with hope.