In the older version of today’s feast of Christ the King—and, to be clear, we’re not talking about a huge gap here, just between 1925 and 1970—the Gospel read is the Lord’s conversation with Pilate, before his Passion, about his kingship, which is “not of this world.” We get that in Year B. In Year A, we get the Matthew 25 warning about the sheep and the goats.
I point this out both because it is interesting and because it gives a little hint as to the multifaceted aspect of this feast. When Pope Pius XI instituted it, as a statement of sorts against modernism and, really, the full dissolution of Christendom after the First World War, it was a moment of asserting the enduring primacy of Christ’s lordship in the face of what was more and more the lack of substantial temporal power of the Church. That trend has continued.
When Paul VI moved the feast to the end of the liturgical year, he explicitly intended to enhance the eschatological emphasis, embedded here at the end of the Church year and the start of Advent, on the end of the world and the Second Coming. Between the three Gospels in the new cycle, we hear notes on Christ’s kingship as otherworldly mystery; as judgment on the powers of this world; and finally, today in Year C, as the truest kind of power.
Not that it’s up to me, but I think if I had to choose from among the three, I would choose this one. The most superficial reason for its inclusion is that small line showing the label atop the cross: “This is the King of the Jews.” But the deeper reason is that it is from the throne of the cross that Jesus shows the nature of his reign.
This is not what the soldiers who made the sign had in mind. The label was a mockery, a point of irony. Hardly anyone there at the scene could really imagine that this man was a king. He was stripped naked, nailed on a cross for all to see, a sign of humiliation and suffering, the complete opposite of any power or authority.
This little detail about the sign, shared, with a little variance, in all four Gospels, is a remarkable sign of their authenticity. It is one of those many, many things that would have been removed had the Gospel writers, and those transmitting their work, been engaged in some sort of mass hysteria or conspiracy. In that strange fantasy, favored by the modern skeptic, where the apostles fabricate a set of narratives to support their idea of a God-man, surely this detail would have been removed. But it remains in all its shame.
Why? Because the attempted irony of the label veiled a profound truth—that this moment of weakness and suffering was, as Peter Kreeft puts it, “the most powerful thing anyone ever did,” because this act of weakness and vulnerability and pain was the only thing capable of defeating sin and death and hell.
The greatest power was this act of love. This act reflects the supernal love of the triune God in his own eternal being, for God’s power, the power that transcends all created being, has in it nothing of the grasping need of human and earthly power. God’s power is his goodness, and his goodness is his truth, and his truth is his being and his essence, and no situation in history, no bodily suffering, no matter how severe, can affect him in any way, change who he is and what he has chosen to do in his absolute and sovereign will.
This is the true form of kingship. Earthly forms can mimic, in small ways, the display of power and might and sovereign will. But these earthly forms will always be vulnerable in the way that the vulnerability of Christ is not. Kings and empires rise and fall; powers wax and wane. God remains God. And God remains man, in Jesus Christ.
Somehow the dying thief sees all this in a flash of clarity. While the crowd mocks the Lord’s kingship, he prays: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” But here again we receive a surprise, for the Lord’s kingdom is already come. “Today you will be with me in paradise.” The radical act of faith receives a radical act of acceptance and grace.
We should remember all of this scene when we encounter that strange monarchical tendency of our age, where powerful men and women are called “kings” and “queens.” No doubt it is sometimes good to celebrate strength and power, especially when that strength overcomes adversity for something good. But there is no true strength in worldly power. Many have noted the phenomenon of young men flocking to traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy, drawn at least in part to a more robust and masculine expression of faith values than we find in mainstream American life. In many ways, I think this a good thing. But it is dangerous if it equates traditional Christianity with strength for its own sake; the strength and clarity of Christian doctrine is a weapon against vice and sin, not against unbelievers or our political enemies.
To ascend the thrones promised us as sons and daughters of the king means to ascend the cross. John Bergsma writes candidly, “We only rule from the cross in this life.” Or, as the Catechism puts it, quoting St. Ambrose, “That man is rightly called a king who makes his own body an obedient subject and, by governing himself with suitable rigor, refuses to let his passions breed rebellion in his soul, for he exercises a kind of royal power over himself” (908).
The other kingly figure in our Gospel, then, is once again the penitent thief. Kreeft makes this point rather sharply: “This man’s life was more successful, more glorious, more happy, more worth living than yours if at the point of your death you do not hear from Jesus Christ the words that he heard: ‘Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.’” The penitent thief knows at the end of his life that none of his striving meant anything if he could not end up a loyal subject of the true king. He saw on the cross strength veiled in weakness, but he also saw that his life could be worth something, finally, in the service of the king.
The sooner we come to that same conclusion and decision, the better—for this king is the only one who can reconcile us to God and to one another. He is the only one who can bring us to paradise.