It is a widely held belief that we live in an era when trust in institutions and authorities is at an all-time low, which makes me wonder if there is any way, in this context, for us to unabashedly celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. It feels more than a little outdated. It’s not just that the founders of this country rejected monarchy as a system of governance, it’s also that the whole idea of complete loyalty and unwavering obedience to any person, organization, or cause strikes most of us as not only somewhat degrading but also foolish and quite possibly dangerous as well.
And yet if we were to do away with this feast day, or even simply rename it, we would still be left with the witness of Scripture, which over and over again proclaims God as ruler and creator, and extends that proclamation to Jesus the Christ, the Anointed One, the Prince of Peace, the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords. Is all of that witness, too, to be rewritten or erased to save us from further embarrassment and confusion?
Professor Karoline Lewis has responded to concern and skepticism about this feast with the following proposition. She writes, “When we say Christ is king, we say Caesar is not—[meaning] all of the Caesars that vie for our attention and our worship. [This is] a day to affirm the reign of Christ, and God’s Kingdom, over the reign of those kingdoms that do not hunger and thirst for righteousness.”
I might put it this way: This is a day to remind us that, although as human beings we will always have a choice about how to live our lives and where to place our loyalty, nevertheless as Christians there is really only one choice, one path, and that is to follow and obey Christ Jesus as Lord.
When I say that I have no choice but to follow and obey Jesus I am at once saying everything there is to say about Christian vocation and yet I worry that perhaps I am saying almost nothing at all. Because of course what I really want to know, and what I really want to be able to explain is how. I mean, I was raised to question authority. My wedding vows did not include the word “obey.” Blind obedience is not in my DNA and I don’t much admire it in other people. So how? How do I, how do we follow Jesus as our lord and savior? What does a life devoted to following Jesus as King even look like in the real world?
For one woman I want to tell you about, it looked like paying attention to people who were standing in long lines for bread during the Great Depression and recognizing in them the face of Christ. She saw Christ hungry, standing weary and worn out on a Manhattan sidewalk and knew she had to do something about it. After all, it was right there in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25 clear as day: “For I was hungry and you gave me food.” This woman, whose name was Dorothy Day, didn’t just bring a donation of food to a soup kitchen or even start a new ministry herself. She devoted her whole life to both caring for the poor and trying to end the systemic injustice that creates poverty in the first place. She founded the Catholic Workers Movement, along with its houses of hospitality, its farm communes, its newspaper and retreat centers; she was a tireless activist and writer as well as a committed anarchist who spoke out against both capitalism and socialism. In other words, she was one of the leading radicals of her time, a person who put no stock in the powers-that-be in the world—and she is now being considered for sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church.
Dorothy Day did so much, worked so tirelessly to enact and embody what are called the corporal works of mercy, which form the centerpiece of today’s Gospel, taken from the 25th chapter of Matthew: to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to ransom the captive, to shelter the homeless, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead. And yet, as the writer D. L. Mayfield notes, when you read her autobiography these good works and towering achievements of her life are hardly mentioned. Instead, Day writes about the passion beneath her passion, the unending wellspring of motivation that kept her going in spite of hardship and disappointment and failure. That passion, that motivation, was simply love. She loved Jesus and through Jesus she loved others. And loving Jesus, she was quite clear, meant serving, following, and obeying him. It was love for and obedience to Jesus, not a political philosophy, that made her truly radical, in every sense of the word.
It’s probably a bit of a disappointment to some of us who have idealized Dorothy Day for a long time, to recognize that the source of her tremendous energy and endurance was so…so religious, so conventional. She can come across as almost annoyingly pious and devout. She went to church a lot, she had a disciplined prayer life, and she was devoted not only to the corporal works of mercy but to the spiritual ones, too. These are, in her own words, “to admonish the sinner, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive all injuries, and to pray for the living and the dead.”
The spiritual works of mercy are not listed in one place in the Bible the way the corporal works are listed in Matthew 25, but if you look them over it is easy enough to find their source in the life and ministry of Jesus. Jesus admonished sinners, from tax collectors to religious leaders. He taught the ignorant, interpreting the word of God not only in the synagogues but on the streets and in the fields. He counseled the doubtful, reminding them that God counted every hair on their head, and he comforted the sorrowful, promising them that joy would come in the morning. He is obviously the primary example of a person who was able to bear wrongs patiently, to pray for others—just think about how many times he goes off by himself so that he can be alone with God to pray—and, above all else, to forgive everyone who injured him, up to and including those who nailed him to the Cross and left him to die.
That, dear siblings in Christ, is the king we are called to follow and obey. A king who is not interested in power but in weakness, who lives and works among his people, enduring every pain and hardship they endure, a king who treats his subjects with the tender compassion of a shepherd caring for a lost and injured lamb. A king who healed body and soul, attending always to both spiritual and physical needs, while courageously calling out the structures of power that made injustice, poverty, and oppression look like just the way the world was supposed to be.
This king is still calling us into a better way, into greener pastures, into the place of salvation and healing, into becoming Beloved Community.
Are we able to hear that call? Are we able to set aside our pride and our achievements and kneel at his feet? It isn’t easy. It will make us look foolish and at times it will be dangerous. But the paradox of our faith is that the more we bind ourselves to obedience to God, the more we will experience true freedom, including freedom from all the powers and principalities of the world that are always working so hard to bind us to them instead of to Jesus.
We don’t need to be Dorothy Day, or St. Francis, or Mother Teresa. We just need to be ourselves, our best selves, the selves God called into creation and loves with abandon. That is and always will be enough, and more than enough. Amen.
