God Reigning From a Tree
Each year, on the Sunday before Advent begins, we celebrate the Reign of Christ, sometimes called the Feast of Christ the King. This holy day was instituted in 1925 by Pope Pius XI. He was concerned about tensions in Europe after the Great War and what he saw as the disappearance of Christian values in the leadership of nations. The feast was meant to remind temporal monarchs and heads of state what a proper, just, Christian ruler was like.
We wait in sure and certain hope for the day when Christ will reign over all the nations and all of a reconciled creation. We look forward to the day when sacraments shall cease and we shall all be gathered with the whole Church, finally in perfect unity. But this day will not be the first revelation of Christ's reign on earth. That wondrous truth was revealed to us already, in the events we recall today through both the palms and the Passion.
We begin by recalling, with the sign of palms, Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In part a satire of Roman processions, in part a genuine welcome and celebration by the hopeful citizens of Jerusalem. For many people, Jesus was thought to be the answer to generations of tribulation. He would be the one to raise an army, lead a revolt, and return Judea to Judean rule. After all, he is a son of David, shows signs of divine favour, and has spoken openly about the coming kingdom he represents. Surely, Jesus of Nazareth is the long-awaited saviour of his people.
How disappointed those crowds must have been when the revolution did not come. The Romans did not return home. The temple's treasury was not restored. In fact, other than a few more contentious conversations with the leaders of Jerusalem, Jesus doesn't appear to accomplish much of anything before he is hanging on a cross on Golgotha, like a common thief.
Of course, you and I know that Jesus is the long-awaited saviour and that the Cross—a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles—is the place of victory, not defeat. As so often happens with the divine plan, the way events unfold is not as humans would have expected them and we miss what is truly happening even though it is before our very eyes.
From the moment of Jesus' conception, nothing about his story has been as we would have thought it should be. A virgin mother; birth in a stable; magi gifts from foreign lands; a childhood in Egypt to escape murder; healing miracles; preaching the kingdom of God; teaching with authority; surrounded by fishermen and women; dining with prostitutes and tax collectors; winning hearts in Judea and Samaria; arguing with Pharisees in public; and all by a carpenter's son from an unremarkable place like Nazareth.
Seen at a distance, it may seem obvious that when Christ was to take his power and reign, it would not be in the way of mortal kings. Indeed, Jesus has been saying and showing as much to be true all of the way along. "The kingdom of heaven is like..." And it's never what anyone listening expects heaven to be like. So why would the king of heaven and his throne look or sound or be anything like a mortal king? Why wouldn't God, committed to cooperating with humanity, find a way to turn our fear, hatred, shame, and violence into something beautiful that we, through it, might also become beautiful? Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
We have been slowly hearing this story all of the way through Lent. We began on Ash Wednesday with the burnt remains of last year's palms. A reminder that our ideas of victory and triumph are not the same as God's and that all of our endeavours eventually turn to dust. We heard the story of Jesus rejecting temptation in the wilderness—temptations to take for himself comfort, power, and security; all signs of mortal rulers rejected by Christ. We heard his conversation with Nicodemus about the possibility of being born again. With the St Photini, the Samaritan woman at the well, about water that gives eternal life. We heard of Jesus manifesting God's glory in the life of a blind man who had been condemned by his neighbours as the product of generational sin. In every case, Jesus explains and demonstrates that God's ways are not our ways and God's thoughts are not our thoughts. The kingdom of heaven is close at hand and it is nothing like what we have imagined.
The Passion is not the end of the story, of course. Easter and the glories of resurrection are near on the horizon. But it is the Passion which is our focus for the next six days or so. The Passion is not the whole story but it is the part of the story that, on this side of the veil, perhaps seems closest to us. After all, we are all going to die somehow. We hope it will not be painful or public or shameful like the Crucifixion, but we will, one day, pass from this life to the next.
We would do well to remember that, for early Christians, the Passion was the very centre of the story. It is no mistake that the cross became the most recognizable symbol of our faith. They were focused on the Crucifixion, not in a guilt-ridden or shameful way, but because the Cross is the moment when who Jesus is and what he is about becomes clear. Like God's glory being manifest in the blind man thought to be full of sin, the Cross is the throne from which the Son of God's reign of peace and love is most clearly seen.
St Mark's gospel, the first to be recorded, hurries along to tell the Passion story. It was not the Last Supper, but the Passion that early Christians connected to their Eucharists. The body and blood of Christ, pierced and streaming upon the Cross were what our ancestors hoped to connect with. If one was not given the honour of dying as a martyr, like Christ, then one wanted to die with the Passion close at hand. As one was dying, someone who knew the Passion story would recite it over and over while a cross was held before the dying person's eyes so that their death could be as closely connected to the death of Christ as possible. A good life and a good death were those that strove to join to the life and death of Christ, in its glory and its suffering.
At the heart of our faith are mysteries. Truths that we know through experience to be real, but which have no explanation that humanity can comprehend. How is it that the one who sustains all life in creation would know what it is to die? How is it possible that the most beautiful kingdom is one built on sacrifice and vulnerability? How is it that the gateway to eternal life is death? How is it that a Cross stained purple with God's own blood is the throne from which grace and mercy, peace and love pour forth into the world?
These are the mysteries we carry in our hearts through Holy Week. May it be a blessed and sacred time for us all.
