Christ Jesus Victor

     Today, in the new Roman calendar, is the last Sunday of ordinary time, the feast of Christ the King.  Pius XI instituted the feast during the dark years between the world wars, when the faithful were flanked right and left by the forces of tyranny.  On one side were those who aimed to raise the State to its old place as object of cultic worship.  On the other were those who so deified the individual will that it was hard to see how they could make half-decent citizens of any earthly city, let alone the heavenly Jerusalem.  Pius affirmed both man's longing for freedom and his need to submit to authority.  Against those who preached a radical autonomy he declared that Christ is King; against the Communists and socialists of Russia and Germany and fascists in Italy and Spain, he declared that our King is Christ.

     So then, we celebrate the feast -- or we do at my parish; elsewhere it's an uncomfortable reminder that we do not ultimately govern ourselves (I once heard a sermon that demoted Christ from King to Guide, maybe a Faithful Palestinian Guide, really fine at reading tracks in the desert and finding the nearest challah).  The reading today, too, was perfect, and richly ironic.  It was the account in Luke of the conversion of the "good" thief.  And that choice invites some attention.

     There on a cross hung the savior of the world, scourged to an inch of his life, a plaited crown of thorns streaming the blood down his brow.  He was struggling to raise his body a little against the spike that nailed his feet to the wood, so that he could expand his chest to take a short breath.  His heart was growing enlarged, the pericardium filling with fluid.  He was dying.  Above his head, in three languages so that all the world below would enjoy the executioner's wit, was fastened the mocking sign, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."

     Christians will readily note the most obvious irony, that the sign that was meant as mockery, or as a threat against any other would-be messiahs among the Jews, in fact told the truth: Jesus was the King.  But there's another irony here.  It isn't simply that the Romans and Jews mistook the King.  They mistook kingship itself. They could not grasp that Jesus showed himself most truly a King, and showed kingship for what it most truly is, not despite the cross, but through it.  It's the same mistake made by Adam and Eve, who wanted to be as gods, supposing that to be a god means to have your untrammelled will, regardless of good or evil, a will beyond love.  Had they wanted to be like God, they would have obeyed His command, intended in love for their good; but they wanted to be like god, like little false gods of self-empowerment and license.

     Then what a flash of enlightenment must have been shed upon the heart of the thief crucified beside Jesus, who ceases in his jeering, and recognizes that Jesus is the King, and that this is what it is to be a King, to give oneself utterly for one's people, that is, for one's enemies.  So he does not say, "I am sorry for you, fellow," or "Don't listen to them below."  He does not speak to Jesus man to man.  He speaks to him as subject to King: "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom."  That can make sense only if he understands, somehow, without any theological sophistication, that Jesus is both Lord and God.  He's asking Jesus not only to remember him, but to forget -- because he knows well what kind of life he has led.  Only God's memory conquers the grave; only God's forgetting cancels out our wickedness.  The thief's prayer is granted, and he enjoys a privilege unique in history: the only Christian to die next to Christ.  "This day," says Jesus, "you shall be with me in Paradise."

     But we don't know the King, and don't know what a King even is.  We preach self-actualization; read Self magazine; wrap our legs in a lotus to get in touch with our inner self; refer all matters of good and evil to the vote of our unholy trinity, me, myself, and I.  On our way from church to Sunday breakfast we passed a car with a purple sticker, reading "I Am a Goddess."  Undoubtedly.  Every man a king, every woman a goddess.  No thief, looking upon his life in sorrow and resignation; no sense that even our good deeds are so shot through with selfishness and pride that they would damn an angel who thought to do them; no inkling of a suspicion that we might be the cause of despair in others, that we have added our petty share of the ice of wickedness crushing the earth over the centuries.  No sense either of the transcendent holiness of God; or the terrible beauty of goodness; or the immaculate purity of the truth.  Not even a sane self-interest, enough prudence to cast your lot with the King, a bulwark against tyrants without and within.

     But he who has himself for a king has a slave for a subject; and she who has herself for a goddess has a devil for a devotee.