Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - Feast of Christ the King - 24 November 2013

Christ Pantoctrator 6C

That stark mocking inscription above the cross of Jesus, ‘This is the King of the Jews’, reminds us that the feast of Christ the King can never ever be about the triumphant rule of an absolute monarch over docile subjects. There is certainly no hint of that kingdom from the harsh voices taunting him on the cross, nor, let it be said in any revelation of the Risen Lord after his resurrection from the dead. What we are being led to is an understanding of the weakness of Christ who emptied himself to be with the lowest of the low and who will then in exaltation draw his friends close to him.

I like this quotation for Pope Benedict’s writings on the Feast of Christ the King: ‘The feast of Christ the King is…not a feast of those who are subjugated, but a feast of those who know they are in the hands of the one who writes straight on crooked lines’. That should be a self evident truth for any Catholic Christian, we are not conquered subjects of a triumphant warrior, nor or of a despot whose word is law, but of another kingdom where the law is love itself.

Remind yourselves of who was the first to enter this Kingdom with Christ. Not the great saints, prophets or holy men and women, but a crook hanging beside him on the tree, whose lives certainly had not been straight. It was to a robber that Jesus said, ‘Indeed I promise you, today you will be with me in paradise’. We ought to use the image of paradise rather than kingdom’ , for this gives us a totally different space than any replica of this world, peaceful, harmonious, free from pain, sorrow, sickness and death. Paradise regained from sin, where life with the triune God-who-is-love draws us intimately together in one body.

Jesus himself gives us hints of this’ kingdom’ of heaven, it can only be compared to something as there is no earthly way to truly picture it, but the hint is of a community feasting in joy, where the last shall find themselves first, a place where we see fully, where we understand all and are truly ourselves, at one with each other, the best we can be! Remember us Lord in YOUR kingdom!