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In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
In one of his homilies St. John Chrysostom says that anyone endowed with
power can rule, only a king can die for his people. And this we see so
wonderfully and tragically manifested in God become Man in the Lord
Jesus Christ. He himself says in the Gospel that the rulers of the earth
subdue their people, rule over them with power but He calls us to be
rulers of another kind, to give our lives to people so that they be able
to follow the example given in freedom, liberated from fear and
liberated by Him from sin and evil.
And yet, there is a condition to this. We so hopefully think that being
Christ’s by name we can also participate in His glory, but there is a
condition to it which is absolute. Do you remember how Christ on His way
to the crucifixion spoke to His disciples on the way of Caesarea
Philippi about His coming passion. He described it point by point, He
tried to make the Apostles sense the horror of what was coming, and He
will die, the Son of man, and His last word however was that He would
rise again. And the Apostles in a way that we find probably unthinkable,
heard only the last words, the words that promised His victory and His
glory, their freedom and their victory, and their glory as being His
disciples and followers from the beginning. It is made so clear by James
and John, and their mother coming up to Christ and saying, 'When You
come in Your Kingdom, let us sit on the right and left hand of Your
throne, of Your glory.' They had forgotten, they had not heard, not
perceived what Christ had said about the cost to Him of this victory.
All they heard was the future glory.
Aren’t we most of the time, not only from time to time but most
of the time as deaf as the Apostles were, as blind, as unthinking? What
the two Apostles John and James said was tantamount in saying, 'Lord, to
Thee the cross, but to us — the victory.' But isn’t it our mentality far
too often? Do we not assume that now that Christ has died and risen, we
can forget about His crucifixion and think only of His enthronement on
the right hand of glory? But when James and John came up to Him with
their words of hope, what did Christ say? He said to them, 'Are you
prepared to drink My cup? Are you prepared to be baptised with My
baptism?' which from the Greek can be translated, 'Are you prepared to
be merged into ordeal that is to be Mine?'
These words Christ speaks to each of us. It is not enough to think that
Christ by His cross and passion, by the horror of an impossible death
and His descent into hell has won for us freedom and victory and the
hope of glory. If we are Christ’s, we must be prepared to drink His cup
and be merged in His ordeal, in other words, to live on this earth on
His terms. And His terms were the sacrificial love that made Him become
Man and die on the cross that we may live. This is the challenge of His
kingship to us. Yes, He is King because a king gives his life for his
people. We are His people indeed, but if it true that we have been sent
into the world as a vanguard of the Kingdom, to use the translation
given of a passage of the Epistle by Moffat, if we are sent as a
vanguard of the Kingdom, we must be prepared to conquer the world for
Christ on the same terms as He, pay the same cost as He and not
otherwise, not expect that the death was His and the victory is ours.
We are if our baptism is true at all, not only formally, not as a
ceremony but as an event of our life, we are, each of us singly and all
of us together in our oneness and togetherness, we are an extension of
the incarnate presence of Christ, the body of Christ as Paul and the
Scripture call us. And if we are the body of Christ, we are as a Church
and in each of its members the body broken for the remission of sins of
the world, we are the lamb of sacrifice, we are sent into the world to
die for its salvation. First of all to die to ourselves, to renounce
ourselves, to turn away from ourselves, to turn our gaze on God and
then, because we will follow His gaze and follow in His footsteps, go
back to men, to those who need Him, those who are lost. We are called to
be like the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost sheep and brings it on his
shoulders after a long search if necessary, at the cost of much toil and
tiredness and danger indeed. And perhaps are we called, the Church as a
whole is called to this. But according to the frailty which is ours,
each of us is not called to this. We are called like Christ to take our
neighbour upon our shoulders and carry him as Christ carried His cross,
if necessary — to die upon this cross, to die for the salvation of this
neighbour of ours who in human terms is our enemy, our adversary, our
persecutor, the one who is indifferent both to God and to us and indeed,
to his own eternal destiny. It is only if we are prepared to take the
world on Christ’s terms that we are Christ’s own people, not if we
simply profess Christ as our God, as our King, as our Saviour.
This is the way in which we enter into communion with Him. But if we are
in Christ and if Christ is in us, each of us must
fulfill within the limits of his life, within the limitations of his
capabilities what Christ has done — give our lives for others that they
may be set free, renewed, that they may start into a new life. Then we
will have done what characterises a king, we will have given our lives
for those who are beloved of God to the point of His incarnation and
death upon the Cross. If we are not prepared to respond to the words of
Christ, 'Are you prepared to drink My cup, are you prepared to be merged
into My ordeal?' we are not fulfilling the promises of our baptism
because St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans says that with Him through
baptism we die His death and we rise with Him for life eternal. But our
dying must not be only ceremonial and symbolical while we hope that life
will be real, our dying must be real, our offering of self, our learning
to love one another, our neighbour, the lost, the persecutor, the enemy,
to love him as Christ said, 'No-one has greater love than he who gives
his life for his neighbour.’ This is what the feast of Christ the King
says to us. He is King because He has given His life and if He is in us
and we in Him, this is our vocation — give our lives. Amen.
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