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, the Son of man, will die. 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 is true that we have been sent into the world
as a vanguard of the Kingdom, to use the translation of a passage of the
Epistle given 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 as
a Church and in each of its members, are 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 travail and tiredness and danger indeed. And perhaps
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.
