Immediately
before Advent, we celebrate the feast of Christ the King.
Anglicans borrowed this feast as recently as 2000 from the Roman Catholic
Church, which introduced the festival in 1925 with Pius XI's encyclical Quas
Primas. "Christ the King" has had an unhappy history in Belgium,
with Léon Degrelle's Rexiste movement in the 1930s, rooted in Quas
Primas, espousing an anti-democratic, fascist vision of society -
the Rexistes went on to collaborate with the Nazis during the German
occupation of Belgium in WW2. (An excellent novel, liked by both Robert Innes
and me, which touches on these themes is Hugo Claus' The Sorrow of
Belgium.) As usual, the Gospels are one step ahead of the Church's official
pronouncements. In this passage, Jesus does not speak about himself as a king -
he never does this: it is always others who call him king,
often sarcastically, as at his crucifixion. Instead, Jesus teaches us about the
kingdom: the kingdom is a place of rare treasure, a pearl of great price, a net
which gathers fish of all kinds; a scribe trained for the kingdom (a reference
to the existence of early Christian scribes like Matthew himself)
uses treasures old and new. Our confidence in Jesus is increased because
he sees himself not as an earthly potentate, nor even as a king of earthly
glory like David, but as a transparent glass through which we see God's
kingdom. All praise to Jesus Christ our King, through whom we see God clearly!
Jack
McDonaldCanon theologian
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