What kind of king?
“Pilate said: So, then you are a king?”
--John 19:37
What kind of king gets scourged at a pillar and then nailed to a cross? What kind of king gets abandoned by His friends and is dragged away and abused –helpless and alone? Crowned with thorns and made to bear his own cross to the place of his execution…? What kind of king do we have? And yet we celebrate at the end of each liturgical year—the solemnity of Christ the King.
And yet for this solemn celebration, we read not about the resurrection, but about the trial and impending death of Jesus. Perhaps to remind us what kind of King we have, and what we did to Him when He came among us.
We were in Garland, Texas this past weekend and attended the vigil mass for Christ the King in a church we’d never been to before: The Good Shepherd. A beautiful church. Being a stranger in a church can be a kind of blessing. When you get too familiar with a place (or person) you may stop paying attention, stop noticing. And being someplace unfamiliar, puts us on alert. We can’t just blindly sleepwalk to the same old pew and settle into a narcoleptic stupor. The unfamiliar can open our eyes –maybe out of fear or anxiety, but also out of wonder. Suddenly, because of the new setting, or new faces and new voices, even familiar prayers can suddenly seem new and mysterious. And in that unfamiliar setting, something new can break through; we might even finally hear the voice of God speaking to us through His words and through His people.
So there I sat in that unfamiliar place, surrounded by strangers, and feeling out of place, insecure, a little bit lost. And when I heard Pilate asking Jesus: Are you a king? I found myself looking around at the people around me, strangers, families, bored children and exhausted parents, ragged loners, and stoop shouldered elderly men and women… the rich and the poor, the very old and the very young, all of them come together, gathered, looking for something, hungering for something…
And it occurred to me: This is it! This is the Kingdom. Right here. All around me. The mother comforting her baby, the big sister helping her little brother, the father and the fatherless… exhausted and overwhelmed, the pious and the pitiful, the prayerful and the impatient. Familiar and stranger, all of us… Gathered there like something out of the gospels; like those crowds that followed Jesus hoping for a miracle, hoping for healing, hoping for a sign; hoping for hope. Looking around I could see the merciful and the pure of heart, the meek as well as the peacemakers. I was sure some there were hungering and thirsting for righteousness, but I was also certain others were just hungering for dinner (since it was a vigil mass). But there they were… the Kingdom of God, and there I was (my wife by my side) sitting among them.
And sitting there, in that blessed moment I remembered something that happened just a few weeks earlier at our school Mass for All Saints day (Nov 1).
On holy days we usually have mass in our auditorium. When we do, I tend to be one of those teachers who stands by the wall, pretending to keep an eye on the students, trying to pay attention, while my mind wanders. So there I was, in a very familiar place, and falling into some very familiar patterns, trying to listen to the priest as he told us something about the beatitudes (which is the gospel for All Saints Day), but –as usual—finding myself distracted by thoughts of coffee and doughnuts… I remember he was making a connection between All Saints Day and the beatitudes and saying something about how there might be saints all around us, saints we never notice… I remember I liked what he was saying, but just as he was getting to his point, something happened. At first, all I saw was one of the deans leap up from her seat and hurry to help someone. As I watched, I noticed two other teachers kneeling over a student who must have fainted. The dean rushed to them, and the school nurse was there, all of them helping this girl back to her feet, getting her up with such tenderness, such love, and such compassion. No hesitance, no fear. Without a pause, they simply stepped into the need of one of our girls.
That seems to me the perfect picture of a saint. And that is what the kingdom of God looks like. A kingdom of saints… These were people I work with every day, people I often take for granted, but suddenly I was seeing them with fresh eyes, seeing them anew. Seeing them not just as coworkers and familiar faces, but as saints.
Perhaps it took being in a strange place, being startled out of the ordinary by the suddenness of a movement, for me to recognize it; to see the truth: the kingdom of God truly is among us. We just have to wake up; just open our eyes and see it. See, the saints all around us. The merciful, the meek, the sorrowful and the helper… The kingdom of Christ is not like any earthly kingdom we can imagine. Not a place of splendor and riches. It is not a place of fame and fortune. It is a strange kingdom where to be first is to be last, and to live is to die to yourself and to follow a king who carries a cross. It is a place of saints hidden in the ordinary, saints who may be sitting on the pew right next to us, saints who walk always toward the need of another and never away. Always toward the king and His cross.
Let this coming Advent be a time of strangeness. Let us all pray to be taken out of ourselves, out of the ordinary, even if it is just for a moment—so that we can see, and hear, and recognize the mystery of our king and His kingdom. A King who was born in a stable and slept in a manger, and who –if only we let ourselves see it—comes to us constantly, in the familiar and the strange, in the need of a stranger, or the kindness of a friend; there He is –if only we have eyes to see.
