It’s the last day of the year – the Church’s year that is. Next week we start Advent, the build up to Christmas, a new cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth.
The fact the Church calendar is so out of sync with the rest of our life / world always causes a bit of a shock for me. The end of November really doesn’t feel like the end of a year – however an end of year is supposed to feel. And usually I’d say that is a good thing – because it helps point out the need to continually refocus our holy life, which doesn’t march to the same cycle as the world around us.
But this year the sense of disconnect is much stronger – at this time it seems like everything is stuck in place. In the US we don’t appear to be able to treat an election as a fixed point with some sort of finality; and as for the coronavirus, news of vaccines is obviously encouraging, but equally obviously it doesn’t change anything for now. This moment doesn’t feel like the end or the beginning of anything.
So what are we to make of this situation. Is it an indication that the church and our life tied to the cycle of prayer, preparation and celebration is hopelessly disconnected from the “real world”, the world in which we have to spend most of our time? Doesn’t this Feast Day with which we “end” the year somehow spotlight that disconnect as we praise Jesus as a King. Kings are surely pretty much irrelevant to “real life”, even in those places that still have them.
However, when we look at today’s reading from Matthew’s gospel it provides a perspective that is relevant regardless of our attitude towards Kings. Jesus gives us his view of how the king (that is himself) will behave when he returns. His description of what matters to that king has absolutely nothing in common with any other view of kingship, ancient or modern. As with everything else that Jesus tells us about power and responsibility it turns human assumptions upside down.
We should also notice that being a king is only one image we have of Jesus. The image of the king (or master, or landowner, or whoever is in control) who goes away and then comes back to see how we’ve been behaving is common across the parables that we’ve been reading recently. But even today, on the Feast that celebrates the kingship of Jesus, we get a first reading which draws on a completely different image – the shepherd. Now shepherds are probably about as far from our everyday experience as kings, but we do know that their one key characteristic is that they stay with their sheep and continuously look after them. So we need to be careful that we focus attention on the relevant aspects of this image of kingship – and it certainly isn’t that the king has gone away to return later.
So what does Jesus emphasize about the expectations this king has. This king doesn’t care how well you flattered him, how low you bowed, even how much you paid in taxes – he only cares about how you treated the poor, the hungry, the migrants and those in jail. He cares about that because those are the people he identifies with, his brothers. That’s nothing like any other king I’ve ever heard of.
So it is true, our holy life is disconnected from the world around us. But the disconnect doesn’t take us away from the “real world” – it takes us deeper into what that world really is. A bit like the withdrawal of a nun or a monk to a monastery isn’t a way of cutting her or himself off from the world, but enabling her to look deeper into how the world is and what it needs.
Whatever we may be feeling about the current times, poverty, exclusion, imprisonment, sickness didn’t just start. They won’t go away when US or any other politics moves on and this pandemic is over. Jesus’ message, his view of kingship, is always relevant, to all people, at all times – and it reflects the real world, one in which we always have to tend to the hungry, the sick, the dispossessed. We will start again in our new year to try to do that, as we do every year, and Jesus will be with us, from birth to death to resurrection, as he is every year.