Feast of Christ the King - evensong at St Michael's and All Angels

26 November 2017

The Feast of Christ the King was officially instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925.  It was a direct Catholic response to the rise of secularism and nationalism.  Everyone had still a very vivid memory of the devastation of World War I.  Mussolini had just seized power in Italy and European countries were no more colonial power because they had lost control of almost 90% of the earth’s surface.  In Russia Stalin had replaced Lenin in the Soviet Union. It was a time when execution  of Christians (and everyone else) in the name of an independence from God was common.  To state it simply, with the institution of the Feast of Christ the King, Pope Pius XI wanted to remind the Church and the world, of  whom was the true leader of nations: Jesus Christ.

Today we live in a different world. However we can find some strong similarities with the time when the Feast of Christ the King was instituted. For instance, we currently live in a very secularised country and world. God and any references to him tend to be down played and make them irrelevant to people’s lives. Sometimes, small but significant changes in the vocabulary used to name community events are just an acknowledgment of how deeply this ongoing secularising process permeates our daily lives. Just think of the way of naming some events: Easter and Christmas Fairs are now Spring and Winter fairs. Also, Christmas time seems to be far more an opportunity for shopping than for celebrating the coming of the Lord. Meanwhile, the celebration of Jesus’ birth would play a very little role in the overwhelming consumeristic world that every year would envelops us more and more, especially when we may feel bombarded with the Black Friday deals from mid November on. It is frankly a little bit depressing.

At the same time, dangerous seeds of neo-nationalisms are blossoming all over Europe. Something to be really worried of!

Now just before the beginning of Advent, the time were we set to prepare ourselves for the coming of the Lord, the liturgy invites us to celebrate Christ the King. A very strange king, I have to say, because kings are usually monarchs, which in greek would mean “one who rules alone”. A monarch symbolises then the concentration of all the power in one person, who is the head of the state and chief commander of the army.

Today, instead, we have just heard Matthew’s gospel describing a king who delegates his power to his disciples. A power that is not based on the monopoly of the force or the ability to rule over people, and essentially to control a territory through bureaucracy and taxes, but on love. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”. Jesus doesn’t have any financial power to enforce “all nations” to believe in him, but the power of his word and his love. As a matter of fact, he refuses to rely on what usually makes a king powerful on earth: army, money and territory. Paradoxically, He is the peaceful king who rides a donkey while entering the city of Jerusalem. Christ the King is then a powerful sign of contradiction for our modern societies and a strong prophetic message to the world: Jesus Christ is the ultimate sovereign of this world, and to him belongs the earth and what is in it.

This is feast is also a wonderful opportunity to reflect on our church leaders. Is it Jesus our main point of reference, our benchmark when we look at our leaders and religious guides? I remind myself every day that Jesus is the only shepherd of the flock, the only true leader, the authentic pastor, and I’m just a sheepdog: the people of God don’t follow me, but him, who is the only king we worship. This seems something obvious! Something we should already know, but very often forget. Always more frequently church leaders seem to be tempted to fall either into the messianic role of helping people or managing people. And to be honest there is nothing wrong with helping people or being a good manager of people’s gifts. The danger is that having people working with a religious leader, could enhance the leader’s image to the point of no return. In other words, a church leader could cross the line when what started out as managing people’s gift for the work of the kingdom of God could become the manipulation of people’s lives for the building up of one’s pastoral ego.

The feast of Christ the King is a strong reminder for leaders then, and the way we -as congregation and community of faith- see our leadership in our daily parish life. Good vicars, leaders, pastors, or whatever you may call them, will show the way to Jesus, but they won’t never pretend to be the way. Jesus is. It is extremely important for all of us to understand that, because we all are part of the process of shaping our futures leaders. Vicars don’t blossom overnight from the grass like mushrooms in the woods. They are nurtured in our congregations.

The feast of Christ the King is certainly a strong reminder to us, vicars and would be vicars, to be spiritual directors, to pay attention to God, call attention to him. Being attentive to God in a person or circumstances or situations is a real response to our vocation to be holy. We are not called to make ourselves the focus of people’s lives, but to point them to Jesus. Sometimes we have to do nothing but enable people to find Jesus, be still and let God do his work. Your job as believers -and indeed your vocation- is to nurture your future leaders by demanding what is needed for your lives. You help your leaders to be true to their vocation when you ask them to show you the Lord who is here to save, to heal and give true meaning to your lives. When the center of a church life is Jesus Christ, we will see the signs of it every where. There will always be time for silence and adoration, time to praise the presence of God in a person, a group or circumstances that enrich our faith. We will then be able to name “the peaceful king” while he walks among us, and tell other people: meet the Kurios. Good vicars would learn through experience and patient listening to the word of God and the celebration of the Eucharist how important is to constantly name God when his name slips our minds and hearts. Good congregations would have the courage to call back their church leaders to their true vocation when their ego threaten to become the center of their pastoral life.  

The necessity for watchfulness

Last Thursday I went to the Interfaith awareness training in Southall, which is an extraordinary area of London where in the space of a few hundreds yards you have the Church, the Mosque, the Sikh and Hindu Temples. The training consisted in visiting the different places of prayer and worship, listening to the other religious leaders and engaging with them through questions. Although it was just for a few hours, it was a fascinating experience about  feeling their faiths from inside and understanding our the interfaith dialogue works in the Church of England.

While listening to them I realised how much we have in common: they are all very welcoming religious communities. The Sikh and the Hindu faiths have -at different level- a real sense of equality among the believers. Also, the Sikh and the Muslim religions believe there is just one god, while the Hindu, instead, believe that there is just one god who’d manifest himself under different forms, which could be godesses or gods. The Sikh have also a truly sense of hospitality and charity: they have a huge kitchen in their temple, which serves a free meal to everyone on a daily basis. Very interesting, indeed!

However, something that I could not really find in the faith leaders’ presentation to us was a sense of watchfulness. I’ll explain why.

All my life I believed that what makes Christianity truly distinctive from other religions is Jesus Christ himself. And indeed, he is the main mark of distinction for us. However, just now I realised that there also a sense of watchfulness that makes us very distinctive from other faiths. It is true that the Islam believes that the Prophet Mohammed will come at the end of times, but they don’t really expect him to come now or on their daily life. Their religion guides them through prayer and an ethos based on honesty and good authentic human values, but all their prophetic revelations already happened in the past. They are part of their spirituality, but they don’t expect anyone to come.

In our Christian faith, instead, we have a real sense of expectation for Jesus to come. Advent, which will start in two weeks time, is actually the time of expectation for the coming of the Lord. We would pray through the Hebrew invocation “Maranatha” which means: “Come, Lord, come!”.

That’s why we are called to be watchful, vigilant. The whole liturgy of Advent -and of the whole liturgical calendar- is built around this fundamental and profoundly spiritual experience of the coming of the Lord. How can we be watchful then? This is what today’s gospel is all about: watchfulness. Indeed, it put us into the right perspective.  

Once more, we read one of the set of parables that Matthew writes trying to describe the different attitudes necessary to prepare ourselves for the “coming of the Lord”. It is extremely interesting to notice that there is a twofold coming of Jesus for us Christians: the first one is in our daily life, which we celebrate liturgically and existentially at the same time.

As a matter of fact, the liturgy has been designed to teach us to be watchful during particular times of the year: Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter as well as Patronal Festivals and other religious occasions. They mark the pace of our daily life by building that spiritual and human sense of expectation, which again would embody a spirit of watchfulness.

At the same time, there is need for an existential watchfulness for my personal and community life. We know that personal events, important decisions related to my present and future life, people I meet, the person I fall in love: all that would have a deep impact in my life, my family and community.

How do I prepare for them? Are they just a matter of coincidence? Or is there a real sense of watchfulness? An attitude towards them that would help me to read the presence of God who comes to my life through the people I meet, the decisions I make, the people I love and by whom I’m loved?

These are the real questions while we set off to Christmas.

The first thing to say about the need for watchfulness is that we know the Lord is coming, but we don’t know when. We have always to be ready. The parable of the ten bridesmaids -which in Matthew is told just before the parable of the Talents- gives us a very good picture of how to wait for him.

It teaches to be attentive, to observe and discern the signs of his coming. It encourages us to be intelligent, which in his original latin meaning “Intus legere” would mean “to read inwardly”, and essentially understanding. Something we may call “to read between lines”, but certainly in a more spiritual and profound way. It’s the gift of understanding. The parable of the Talents also tells us to not waste our time wondering what to do while waiting for the coming of the Lord, but using our time to make the most of if by being multipliers of the grace of God. Serving our community, being ready to help anyone and sharing as much as we can is a very evangelical signs that we are on the right track. In that sense we experience our limitations because very often we struggle to be “intelligent”. Sometimes we could fall asleep while waiting for the Lord to come, just like the disciples while praying in the Getsemani or the foolish bridesmaids.

Today’s gospel is also a warning against the biggest temptation: selfishness which brings to laziness. The man who hides his talent is very cleverly described Matthew’s gospel, because he is able to justify his laziness/selfishness. And that’s probably why the Lord’s judgement is so hard on me: not because of his sin, but because he so proud and arrogant to want to justify his self-indulgence and egoism without showing any sign of repentance.

Let’s be watchful then! Let’s ask God for the gift of intelligence and understanding to be able to spot the signs of selfishness when they show up in our daily life. And most of all, being watchful would help us to avoid the big temptation to justify ourselves. “I’m sorry I can’t help, I have more important things to do”. “I can’t really make it. I’m so busy right now”, and so on and so forth. Being watchful would also mean put ourselves into the right direction towards Advent and Christmas time. Let’s be “intelligent” in our use of time, spiritual energy, gifts and skills.  We will then discover that when we give up “my time” to devote myself more to the service of the community, when somebody else’s needs come before mine, when I put the others -the congregation, the community, my family and people who need me the most- before me, then my spirit and soul become watchful and sensitive to the presence of the Lord among us.