Christ the King
Christ the King
Edward Holloway FAITH MAGAZINE November - December 2015
A Meditation
Universal King - because from His ‘Fiat’ the universe itself was spawned in the first microseconds of the explosive energies with which the creation itself began. King - because through Him, as Eternal Word, Intellect of the Divine, that dynamic movement of energies was ordered like an equation to its ascent of being. It was ordered says the Wisdom of Solomon, in “number, in measure, and in weight” (Wisdom 11:20). King and Son of Man, - because as the Angels were made in the sheer likeness of God’s immaterial being, so man’s kind was, from the beginning, made to the Image not of God in general, but of God to be Incarnate, in Christ. King he is as Teacher, Leader, Ruler of our lives: the Lord of History. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. King again, because victor, as becomes a King in battle hard won over the power of evil and loss placed in the nature of Man by Original Sin, and the long catalogue of personal sin. King victorious, he is called Saviour, King as our Redeemer, the one who won back his own inheritance, and rescued us from our powerlessness to overcome the realities of sin, ignorance, and death. We could not break out upwards to God. We needed Him to break down the wall of the dungeon of our servitude.
Call him the Lord of Life, because He is the Sunshine of our souls. He quickens life within us by his touch, as the sun quickens life upon the bare, winter tree. Call Him the Lord of Life, because as Divine he is the food and the life of the immortal human spirit. And, in his divine Person, linked now to the flesh and Son of Man, He knew a way to make this reality of his relationship to us, a real thing, a lasting thing, a sign of the New Covenant in his blood. Lord of Life he is in the Holy Eucharist he left with us and for us: it is Himself. King also He is in the Church: - He led onwards through the Old Testament, in priest and in prophet, over long ages. He fulfilled that expectation of a Messiah, an expectation growing ever more fervent within Israel, in his own Person, when the Word was made Flesh on Christmas Night.
Call Him King again in the Church, the Assembly of his people. He is priest, prophet, and king, speaking through Council, Pope, prophet, and great saints, through the ages. His is the “But I say to You” never ceasing from the centre of Peter, where that power subsists, that spoke once upon the hillsides of Judah, and the lakeside of Galilee. His is no hesitant or ambiguous voice. There is finality in his decisions. Therefore it must be said of his Church, as once it was said of Him, that welcome or unwelcome, “never did man speak as this man speaks”. For Christ is the Living God, in the Person of “the Son”, not simply the greatest and most perfect of the prophets and the Buddhas. Nobody is ever named God as a courtesy title!
Call Him, on this feastday, King in all things, and in all relationships to us, because He is the Firstborn of all creation. From Him, life streamed out in the Beginning, and all was ordered by natural law unto His Coming, the season of Advent, we next celebrate. In Him, all creation, Angels, Mankind, the beautiful order of matter, finds its source, its meaning, and its fulfilment. He is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Of Him we conclude with St. Paul: “In Him were all things created, visible and invisible, in heaven and on earth, whether thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers: all things were created by Him and for Him. And in Him, all things do hold together in Communion, because in Him it has well pleased the Father that all Fullness should dwell”. (Colossians. 1. 15-20).
Originally published in Faith Magazine, November/December 1991.