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| Christ Surrounded by Musician Angels, Hans Memling, 1480s |
Today is the Feast of Christ the King. He who is the King
of the Universe, Master of the World, Supreme Sovereign of Creation, and Benign
and Righteous Ruler of the Nations. All kings have their kingdom, and the Kingdom
of Christ is the Kingdom of God – a kingdom “which is not of this world” (Jn
18:36), although in the Church it extends its rein in the midst of the world,
its boughs stretching forth into every sphere of human endeavour, in the past,
present and future.
Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done
Christians pray for this heavenly dominion of peace and
righteousness to spread through all the earth – for the coming of God’s Kingdom
– every day in the Our Father. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on
earth as it is in heaven.” This sacred refrain uttered by the very lips of our
Lord has multiple layers of meaning. Among them is the more literal meaning, by
which we pray for God’s Will – synonymous with His Kingdom – to be done on
earth, in all human affairs, in every life, and dimension of activity. A Will
which is not domineering, or merciless, as the Divine Will is often painted to
be, but which as St. Maria Faustina says “is love and mercy itself”.
Another meaning, inseparable and interconnected with the
first, is that by “on earth” is meant our own soul – so that in praying “Thy
Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” we are praying that
God’s Will, which Aquinas states is God’s Essence, teeming with the Divine Attributes,
may establish its reign in us and fecundate our souls with Its divine fruitfulness
of grace and virtues, so that our interior garden may be like that of Eden which
teemed with life in all its vibrancy and multiplicity. Our Lady indeed, as the
Fathers understood, being “full of grace”, was the Eden par excellence, because
her soul was a land in which God’s Kingdom reigned in all its fullness.
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| Christ the King Crowning Mary as Queen |
The King and Queen
Our Lord is rightly hailed the King of God’s Kingdom. For although He was eternally King, coronated as the world’s custodian from the instant it came to be, His coronation was made manifest in time on Calvary, with the Cross His Throne, the reed his sceptre, the thorns his crown. Our Lady as Queen Mother, like Bathsheba to Solomon, stood faithful by his side. His was not a Kingdom as the world understands kingdoms – with all its messiness of politics, power and corruption, but His was a Kingdom of relationship, of communion, spiritual freedom and love.
The Prime Minister
As Joseph the Patriarch was the Vice Regent or Prime Minister of the
Kingdom of Egypt, under Pharaoh who appointed him thus because of his
righteousness and wisdom; so too our Lord Jesus appointed St. Joseph his
putative father as the Prime Minister of His Kingdom – a role which the Church
recognises in the title ascribed to this Saint of Saints – Patron of the
Universal Church, i.e. Guardian of the Kingdom of God. Joseph could not be
there at Calvary in the flesh, as he had passed away, and was awaiting His King
and Son in the limbo of the fathers where he rallied the just in anticipation
of the Lord’s descent into those ancient realms. And so John the Beloved stood
by Mary’s side, attending to His Lord and Saviour with the profoundest
devotion, representing not only all disciples that ever were, are and shall be,
but above all – St. Joseph, the Minister of the Kingdom of God, who was there at
Calvary in a tangible way in the person of John.
The Princes
And who was Peter? The Prince of the Apostles, the Chief
of the Princes of the Kingdom of God who shared, and all Popes after him, in the
Prime Ministership of Joseph. With all the other Apostles and their successors,
fellow brothers of the King – Princes, made royal not by their birth in the
flesh, but by their birth in the Spirit – confirmed by means of Pentecost, yet
wrought through the power of their baptism brought alive at the Last Super,
where they consumed the Blood of the King, and so made their very own blood,
and the blood of all believers henceforth who might partake of the Chalice of Salvation,
share in Christ’s Royalty as fellow heirs of the Father.
Knights, Nobles and Courtiers (...and Kings!)
All other believers are fellow knights, nobles and courtiers –
inferior to the King by an infinite degree, but who have been elevated from the
dunghill of the peasantry of sin, into the court room of heavenly delights, occupying various degrees and offices. For “he has
cast down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.” (Lk
1:52). Nobles and courtiers in one sense, tied by a sharing in the one Blood of the King by means of Holy Communion, and in another sense fellow kings in the King by the simple virtue of their baptismal kingship in Christ.
The Eternal Kingdom
What distinguishes the Kingdom of God is its eternality.
All other kingdoms, from Egypt to Rome, from the Mongolian Empire to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire; and who could repress what history declares as inevitable – to Britain,
Russia, China and the United States as they appear today: all are transitory castles
of sand that will blow way with the passing of time. Yet God’s Kingdom is
everlasting. It’s King eternal. The Church is the custodian, the created castle
of God’s Kingdom, and concerning it, whose foundational rock is Peter, but
Peter in Christ “the cornerstone” (Eph 2:20), and to all his successors up to Pope Francis today, our Lord has said: “You are Peter and on
this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail
against it” (Mt 16:18) – those hellish gates which are death, hatred, disbelief,
persecution, scandal, rebellion and falsity.[1]
Citizenship to Heaven
The citizenship to the kingdoms of the world are
conceptual and temporary. Death kills one’s citizenship. There are no citizens
in the grave. Yet the citizenship of heaven is sealed in the eternal covenant
of Christ’s Blood (Heb 12), won by His death on the Cross, and it is not a social construct fabricated by the
agreement of human beings, but a spiritual reality infused into the soul at
baptism as an outpouring of the same resurrection-breath Christ breathed unto
the Apostles (Jn 20:22). For “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil 3:20) says
St. Paul, and neither “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or
nakedness, or peril, or sword” (Rom 8:35) or the grave, will be able to strip
this citizenship from us. For indeed eternal life is breathed into the soul by
means of baptism – surely, lost through personal mortal sin, diluted by venial
sin, yet regained by repentance and confession, fanned anew by acts of love, and
transformed into a raging Pentecostal wind through a life of union with Jesus
in prayer and service.
The Message Given to King Hezekiah on His Death Bed: Its Deeper Meaning
We see in the Judean King Hezekiah a type of our Lord,
and an allusion to the resurrection. Within the message spoken by the Lord
through Isaiah to Hezekiah as he lay sick and dying on his bed, were spoken the
following words: “on the third day you shall go up to the house of the Lord.”
(2 Kings 20:5b). These words were spoken in response to Hezekiah’s prayer of
entreaty to the Lord.
Indeed, what words other than these might the heavenly
Father have said to His Son in the interior recesses of His heart as He lay
dying on the bed of the Cross: “on the third day you shall go up to the house
of the Lord.” What house? “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise
it up” and our Lord was saying this, writes St. John, in reference to the
temple – the house of God – which was His body (Jn 2:19,21). Truly, on the
third day our Lord went up out of the limbo of the fathers to the house of the
Lord which was His body – the dwelling place of the Divinity. Yet as Christ
rose, so also must the Church; for as the head rose, so also must the body.
Whence we read: “on the third day he will raise us up” (Hos 6:2).
In Ephesians we read that God has “raised
us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus”
(Eph 2:6). Notice the past tense – raised and seated, which are in the aorist
in Greek. Thus the mystery of our resurrection has already been accomplished in
Christ’s rising from the dead – on that third day called Easter Sunday. It is
simply that this mystery must unfold in our souls in the present, through the
free cooperation of our wills with this grace, by which our soul begins to
enter into the mystery of the resurrection. It is then that, in the hope of salvation,
our corruptible bodies must wait until the last day when they will partake of
the glory of the resurrection which our soul would already have delighted in –
but a delight which will be only complete when our soul is cleaved again to our
glorified flesh.
The Spiritual Aspect of the Resurrection
Those who live the life of beatitude in
heaven, in the fullest sense of the word, live in God’s Kingdom – they live in
God’s Will. This is the spiritual side of the resurrection – which is certainly
to be raised up from temporal death and bodily corruption for sure, but even
more importantly (and this in no way denigrates this outward aspect) it is to
be raised up from our fallen state of being, and from its mode of operating in
our wills as slaves of sin. The intrinsic symptom of this deepest kernel of the
mystery of the resurrection, is our bodily glorification and its share in the
triumph over physical mortality.
The power of the resurrection, and
thus of the whole Paschal Mystery, in redeeming us from a state of sin to
grace, is what is referred to as our salvation by which we are transferred from
the kingdom of darkness – of our fallen wills, and of Satan – to the Kingdom of
Light – of God and His Divine Will (Col 1:13).[2] The growth in this salvation, increasing from grace to grace, from
sanctity to sanctity, towards the highest state of sanctity which is to live in
the Will of God without any exit from Its Pure Act, is referred to as our
sanctification. So on one level, whilst the words of Isaiah to King Hezekiah
can be applied to Jesus, and foundationally they must be applied, and do apply
to Jesus – the focal point of biblical interpretation – they also apply to our
salvation, already mentioned by reference to the resurrection in its eschatological
and salvific dimensions.
The Third Day as Everyday
Yet furthermore, the words: “on
the third day you shall go up to the house of the Lord” apply to the ongoing
work of our sanctification, in a mysterious way which is already accomplished
in Christ (Heb 10:10).[3] For
on one level every day in Christ is a third day upon which we are
summoned to “go up to the house of the Lord” – to enter deeper in communion
with Mary the House of the Lord, the dwelling place of the Most High, where we meet Jesus as God and Infant, and wherein we "go up", that is, in our devotion to Mary we are risen anew in our spirit – partaking in that thrill in God enjoyed
by the Virgin Queen as expressed in her Magnificat. On another level, we long
for a kind of third day which represents that ultimate union and
intimacy with God for which our soul’s thirst “as the deer pants for streams of
water” (Ps 41:2).
The Third Day as the Final and Eternal Day
The highest of such third days is that day which
is itself resurrection – the life of beatitude, which is to abide in the
peaceful Kingdom of God where hunger, thirst, sickness, boredom, pain, weariness,
and grief have no place; and where our wills abide in such union with God’s Will,
that like the Psalmist we will eternally declare, as we ascend from love to
love, and bliss to bliss “Thy will is my delight” (Ps 40:8). Indeed, such a
state of sanctity is proper to the next life – the state of living in God’s
Will, in His Kingdom in such perfection. Wherefore on the Cross, he said in
reply to the thief’s request, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,”
“Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Lk 23:42). For He
knew that the thief would die that afternoon.
Today You Will Reign With Me in Paradise
Yet nevertheless, our Lord extends this statement, "today you will be with me in paradise” into
the present moment for all who aware of their inner poverty to need the intimacy of Jesus in their lives, invoke His remembrance in the Holy Eucharist, wherein He hangs through the past, in the present. Present in the present: yes, reigning in the tabernacle, but by this means, also reigning in us who receive Him - "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I in him" (Jn 6:56) - and so it is that our Lord has said: "The Kingdom of God is within you" (Lk 17:21). For when we read the first
of the beatitudes spoken from atop the mount, our Lord does not say, “Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven,” as
though this blessing belonged to the future. For in contrast to the middle six
beatitudes, provided that the blessedness itself is a 'present' description, which speak
in the future tense, i.e. “Blessed are the peace makers, for they will be
called sons of God,” the first beatitude expresses that poverty of spirit
brings about an immediate and efficacious possession of the kingdom of heaven – “Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 5:3).[4]
What creature could surpass our Lady the Queen of this
Kingdom in poverty of spirit? No one. For this Kingdom is populated by the
lowly, and the lowly hold the highest places in its spheres, and Mary is Queen,
and thus she is the lowliest of the lowly. “My spirit rejoices in God my
Saviour, for he has had regard for my lowliness” (Lk 1:48). This is why a true
devotion to Mary is key – a devotion which St. Louis de Montfort speaks of as
consisting in a disposition of the heart in which the soul is united with Mary and
by which She comes to dwell in the soul, operating in, with and through the
soul’s faculties and virtues, above all the theological virtues – for no other
end than rendering Christ the King greater glory. In this manner we make use of
Mary’s very own poverty of spirit, Her emptiness which allowed Her to be so
filled with grace beyond any other creature, and which rightly established Her
as the Queen of Heaven, for Hers is its Kingdom, and in Her, and with Her
lowliness, so too is this Kingdom in a manner par excellence, truly ours.
Conclusion
“On the third day you shall go up to the house of the
Lord” is thus a statement of a reality which can take place any day, for the third
day is eternally now in Christ Jesus. A reality by which we can spiritually
ascend through a burst of faith, in hope, with love, flying as it were like
eagles, to the House of the Lord, which we’ve spoken of as Jesus’ Body, and of
Mary – but which is also Heaven the place and state where God’s Will reigns.
The Kingdom in which Christ the King dwells, beside Mary the Queen, Joseph the
Prime Minister, Peter as Chief of Princes, the Apostles as Princes, and all the
faithful as courtiers and nobles – not to mention the myriad upon myriad of
angels. “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Today.
[For] you have come to Mount Zion
and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable
angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first-born who are
enrolled in heaven, and to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of
just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the
sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel… Therefore
let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let
us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe. (Heb 12:22-24, 28).
[1]
Concerning the retort offered since the last several centuries that Peter is
not the Rock spoken of here, one need only turn to the Gospel of John, where
plain and simply we read: “Jesus said: ‘You are Simon the son of Jonah; you
will be called Cephas [rock in Aramaic],’ which means Peter [rock in Greek]”
(Jn 1:42). Thus Peter is this rock spoken of by Jesus in Matthew – for even
though the passage is clear as crystal, John adds to this clarity.
[2]
He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the
kingdom of his beloved Son.
[3]
And by that will we have been sanctified by the offering of the body of Jesus
Christ once and for all.
[4]
Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι, ὅτι αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.
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