Today we finish our Church year with the Feast of Christ the King. It feels somehow appropriate that we should complete our annual cycle with a recognition of the power and majesty of our Savior, even as we may be already looking forward to the next season, which returns to the simplicity and powerlessness reflected in the birth of a child.
This practice of ending our year with this Feast is a recent one, dating only from 1969. The Feast itself is hardly much older, instituted in 1925. The concept of Christ’s kingship does however go back to early days in the church, and builds on the strong Jewish tradition of recognizing God as the ultimate authority, the source of everything, the “ruler of all”.
The nature of this ruling authority is described in many ways, both in Jewish tradition and by Jesus himself. Analogies to the very human power of kings and other rulers are used (Mt 25:31-46), but more frequent are analogies to other types of authority and power, the shepherd being one of the most common (Ez 34:11-12, 15-17). We might not immediately recognize the shepherd as an authority figure, but he most certainly is. The flock, particularly in ancient times, was totally dependent on the shepherd for its wellbeing and safety, he led them in every sense.
So the story here is one of power and control, however it is framed.
Or is it?
In the origins of the feast there is an element of that. The papacy was deeply involved in the political fallout from the First World War and disputes over the status of the Vatican State in relation to the still very new Italian state. The decision in 1969 to rename the Feast from “Christ the King” to “Christ the King of the Universe” could be seen as distancing it from human political preoccupations to a focus closer to the earliest perspective – that Christ’s kingship is part of his threefold characterization as “priest, prophet, and king”. It is not a statement about political power but about Jesus, as Son of God, being in authority over all creation – a theme dear to Paul (1 Cor 15:20-26, 28).
We may take all this for granted now. It’s just “part of the wallpaper”, the fabric of ideas that we rarely stop to consider as we go about our lives, trying to deal with the more practical issues of living a good life. In today’s gospel Jesus moves very quickly from considering the glory of the Son to the practical implications of his teaching. But perhaps just once in a while, and particularly on this feast day, we can step back and wonder – what does it mean to be “King of the Universe”?
We might also note that just as the Feast has evolved, so has our understanding of the universe. For most of human history “the universe” consisted of our earth, what we now understand as Planet Earth, and a separate and wholly distinct domain of “the heavens”. Only 500 years ago did humans start to recognize that there was more to “this world” than just the part we could walk on. 200 years ago we could understand that the earth was one of a number of planets which circled the Sun and there were many stars like the sun out in space somewhere. Together this was “our universe”, understood now as a domain of matter, all subject to the same laws of physics.
But, as the saying goes, the universe isn’t what it used to be. From a Solar System and some stars (quite a lot of stars, but somehow a number that was imaginable, since we could see them), we came to understand that however hard we looked we could see more stars. Then we realized that some of those stars weren’t actually stars but other whole galaxies, groups of stars (billions of them). Then as we looked through our latest space telescopes we realized there were billions of the galaxies. Just recently the probability that there might be planets around that unfathomably large number of stars became a certainty.
That’s just the bit we understand (sort of), before we get to black holes and dark matter and a bunch of stuff that we don’t understand in the slightest.
For many people the idea that there is any kind of spirit or force throughout this unimaginable vastness that could be described in any sort of personal terms is nonsensical or just crazy. And even if there were, the notion that anything like that could or would have any interest in or concern for a few billion inhabitants on a single planet is even crazier.
That’s the world we live in. That’s the universe we inhabit. We are probably less awestruck by that universe than the early Christians were by the one they understood. That might demonstrate lack of imagination more than anything else. Let’s for a moment dare to contemplate quite how vast is God’s creation and then recognize that Christ is king of that universe.