Today’s readings: Daniel 7, 13-14; Apocalypse 1, 5-8; John 18, 33-37.
The key to belonging to Christ’s kingdom is worship in truth. That is the way we can relate to Jesus as redeemer and lover of souls. Believing in Christ Jesus is not like subjecting yourself to someone who rules over you. So we need to set the terms right in order to understand exactly what today’s feast of Christ the King means and implies.
It takes a lot of imagination to think of the one who redeemed us in terms of a king. Yet for biblical imagination, the promise and expectation of newness from Yahweh that would make a worldly newness available to God’s people found expression many a time in cosmic language and in terms of cosmic upheaval. As Walter Brueggemann writes, that was for them “the extreme mode of hope”.
For both Judaism and Christianity this is apocalyptic language. The book of Daniel speaks of the one who is “coming on the clouds of heaven”, and John’s Apocalypse adds that “everyone will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the races of the earth will mourn over him”.
In this day and age, both the imagery of kingship and apocalyptic language can easily lend themselves to misinterpretation. It may sound like a language that is too universalistic, whereas experience and the evidence around us show otherwise. Yet it is significant how John in the second reading speaks of “the Ruler of the kings of the earth” who “loves us and has washed away our sins with his blood”.
It leads more to worship language, because the way to relate to Jesus the Lord is through worship. Worship is an act of poetic imagination that can defy our conventional structures and our perception of lived reality. True worship makes us enter into alternative scenarios of reality that go beyond what we perceive and what we go through. In this sense, worship is apocalyptic because it can open new windows from where to perceive and understand reality as completely different.
On this celebration of Christ the King, we need to see what is really at stake when Christ, scourged and mocked, is brought before Pilate. We have a man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial, a slave of the empire, crowned with thorns, claiming a kingdom not of this world. It can be the climax of absurdity to pretend that there could have been in any way connection between them.
But the standpoint from which that gospel account was written reverses completely the meaning of that scene. Easter seems to interrupt what otherwise would have been a lost argument. Easter restores the victim and indicates where the truth was.
Belonging to Christ’s kingdom gives the different standpoint, provides the different perspective of things and the energy needed to be witnesses to the truth in a culture where truth is very often the victim.
We live today in the aftermath of the so-called crisis of ideologies, we’ve seen empires fall and others rise. The right question in this context would not be ‘Who are we?’, but ‘Whose are we?’ or ‘To whom or to what do we belong?’
Belonging is about being faithful, it is about loyalties to one or the other empire. This is the question we are very often confronted with in daily life whenever we have to choose between who is right or wrong, who is truthful and who a liar.
Non-belonging generates the clash of empires within us. Pilate was fearful of public opinion and so could very easily be manipulated and in turn be manipulative himself. It is a matter of utmost importance for us to ask ourselves about belonging. Otherwise, like Pilate, we would face life’s questions with irony finding it terribly hard to enter into conversation with the Lord of life.