HOMILY for the Solemnity of CHRIST the KING [C], November 20th., 2016
“This is the King of the Jews”
Like many who take for granted things in their own land, I have never seen the Crown Jewels. Indeed given the palaver associated with seeing them, I probably never will. We are apparently the only country to use such things, though of course not the only country to have a monarch.
Apart from what other noble people wore, like a sword, spurs for feet and bracelets for ankles, there is also the ring for royal dignity, the orb for Christian sovereignty and two sceptres for rule of Church and state, and then the crown. The first collection was assembled before the Norman Conquest, by Edward the Confessor. King John famously lost them crossing the Wash, King Edward III had to sell them and buy them back, and Oliver Cromwell had them melted down and the jewels sold, so that replicas had to be made.
For a long time they were kept in a cupboard in the Tower and for the price of a tip one could see them, till the day in 1671 when the evil-sounding Captain Blood stole them, tiptoeing out with crown, orb and one sceptre. They were then kept in a large barred room; when a fire broke out in 1841, nobody could find the key, and someone, possibly the Tower’s resident gorilla, had to bend the bars to let somebody in.
Many of the crowns were incomplete, like crowns used in a theatrical play. When needed, the jewels were borrowed from jewellers, and if they didn’t drop out during the ceremony and roll under the furniture, they were given back afterwards. All rather a fake, and one trusts not like that now.
Their history is like the history of human life: sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes true, sometimes false.
Now, Jesus is a king. But where is his power? He taught people and they wouldn’t listen; he loved people and they wanted to kill him; he healed people and they betrayed him; he gave joy to people and they were not grateful. His crown, at his Cross, was some twigs and branches of thorn bush. His coronation was a joke. His coronation procession was a joke, a journey on a donkey. He carried neither orb nor sceptre, but collapsed under the weight of a heavy cross.
Yet this is he whose Kingdom will last for ever.
The Kingdom of God – we use the expression often, but what is it? It is the Presence of God. Now God is fully present already, but we are not fully present to him. He can only be fully present when we let him, when, like two wires touching and electric current passing between them, God and we are joined.
Jesus has done everything necessary for the Kingdom, but the Kingdom can really only be here when everybody knows it.
The Kingdom is to be open, exposed. As you know, in the summer months when the Queen is at Balmoral you can visit Buckingham Palace and see the state rooms. I sometimes feel it would be more effective if you could visit when the Queen was there, if you could wander down the passages and suddenly bump into the regal presence, or ask Her Majesty where the loo is.
Obviously that cannot be, but Christ the King is found by us in his palace corridor, so to speak, whenever we practise the values of the Kingdom. It would have been much easier, as for an Oriental potentate, for Christ to sit on a throne and be fed crystallised fruits, and have slaves walking away from him backwards. It is much harder to stick to being honest, truthful, peaceful and loving. These hurt, like the crown of thorns.
In fact, the soldiers could not have chosen a more appropriate crown for Jesus if they had tried. His crown is simple, but painful. It is not expensive, nor rare. It is more painful to be honest when we could do a fiddle, more painful to be truthful when we could tell an easy lie, more painful to be peaceful when we could hit out, more painful to be loving when we could plan revenge.
This is how the good thief recognised Jesus.
Jesus is with us on a difficult journey, the Way of the Cross. We pursue it whenever we choose for good over against evil, come what may. Every step we take on this Way is helping the Kingdom to come. When all the steps have been taken, all of them, then the Kingdom will be here!
The Preface of today’s Mass tells us what this Kingdom will be like: a kingdom of truth, life, holiness, grace, justice, love and peace. Clearly it is not here yet. It can only infiltrate slowly into people’s lives and hearts.
Kings come in all shapes and sizes. Take the late King Bhumibol of Thailand. You could go to prison for ten years for saying something uncomplimentary about him, and for all I know you can go to prison for twenty years for saying he is dead. In Thailand citizens are being attacked in the street for not looking sufficiently grief-stricken about him. There was even a bill before the Thai Parliament to order all the traffic to stop twice a day while the national anthem was played.
No, the Kingdom cannot be forced on us by decree. But equally it will not be locked up, burnt, stolen, sold or only looked at from afar like the Crown Jewels. We can say that the Kingdom has come when the Crown that is God and the Jewels that are us, his people, are held together, and for ever.