Christ the King

 Christ the King

John 18:33-37

This is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, and next week we start over again, with Year C, where most of the gospel readings will be taken from Luke.  Pius XI made this feast a universal one in 1925, after world war I.  It seemed like a good enough idea that when Catholics and Protestants got together to develop the revised common lectionary, some Protestant denominations decided to  celebrate the feast as well.  It’s the only feast common to both groups to have been set up after the Protestant reformation.

But what is it all about?  We don’t have kings and even people who do don’t understand what a king is.  During the middle ages in Catholic Europe there was a remarkable movement from kings who held unlimited power and were often corrupt, to kings and queens who went out of their way to live their lives as they imagined Christ would.  So you have Stephen of Hungary, Louis of France, Henry of Bavaria.  You have Margaret of Scotland, Elizabeth of Portugal, Hedwig of Poland -- and these are just a few of the remarkable rulers who achieved the title of saint.  And since that golden age the Church has tried in vain to influence subsequent kings and queens to imitate these saints, who in turn tried to imitate Christ the King.  But as the church's influence died out rulers relapsed into the old mold, where they were mostly dictators who considered themselves above the law -- the law of God as well as that of man.

So what made these individuals saints?  They listened to the gospel.  They heard Jesus say that if you wished to be great, you must become a servant.  They heard his parable of the sheep and the goats -- the idea that the Master will recognize his sheep by what they do for the least of their brothers.  And they knew that all men and women were called to follow Christ, so they encouraged missionaries, they set up dioceses, they built monasteries and on and on, all the while recognizing the Pope as the ultimate vicar of Christ on earth.

Many years ago when I was young I was invited to give a presentation in England.  Afterwards my wife and I boarded the flying Scotsman to Edinburgh. There we took a tour of the city.  The tour guide spent quite a bit of time talking about Saint Margaret.  Despite the fact that Scotland had become largely protestant since her time, she is still revered and remembered fondly.  Margaret was born into the English royal family -- her father was an heir to the throne.  Margaret wanted to be a nun, but through circumstances that almost seem miraculous, found herself encouraged by her confessor to marry Malcomb, who was then king of Scotland.  Scotland had been Christianized by Irish missionaries, but there was still a lot of the old pagan religion, and Malcomb’s kingship involved a loose rule over nearly independent dukes.

In addition to bearing eight children, three of whom would become saints in their own right, Margaret Christianized Malcomb into the kind of ruler she had seen in her time in Hungary under Saint Stephen.  The two of them would open the castle doors to the poor, and they would wait on them before they ate themselves.  Although he was illiterate, Malcolm and Margaret contemplated the scriptures that she read to him and put them into practice.  They built monasteries and  churches, and worked tirelessly to bring their subjects to Christ and unite the scattered christian communities under the pope.  It was said that Margaret, who was about four feet and ten inches tall, had a way about her that won over the men who ruled under Malcom, and gradually the kingdom became more homogenous and united.  The kingdom became an example to the rest of Europe, and acquired the nickname “Athens of the North”.  Margaret died six days after the news came to her that Malcomb and her oldest son had been killed in a battle with England over a border dispute.  She died with her eyes fixed on the crucifix.  We know a lot about her life because her confessor, who had been with her since she left England, wrote a little book about her.  It’s out of print, but I read an eighteenth century copy in the Catholic University’s rare book library.

You could read about the other royal saints who had heard the call of Jesus, that if you wanted to be great, you must become the servant of all.  

We still have rulers in democratic countries, who try to live lives compatible with the Gospel.  Former president Moon Jae in of South Korea comes to mind.  Hopefully there will be more.  But one thing we can learn from studying the lives of the royal saints is that becoming a saint is not limited to professional religious people, and that any legitimate vocation can be the means to holiness. On this feast of Christ the King, let us increase our efforts to submit to his rule.