Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today we mark the Feast of Christ the King which is the last Sunday before Advent begins next week. It’s a placement, in the liturgical calendar, that is both retrospective (looking at all the Christ is) and forward looking (anticipating his birth at Christmas). It serves as something of a liturgical fulcrum and calls to mind, perhaps, “The Once and Future King,” a collection of fantasy novels by T. H. White about the legend of King Arthur.

Christ is our once and future king — he is the one who rules our lives, the one whose birth we anticipate, and the one whose coming again we await. This paradox perhaps illustrates that he is a Lord who is unbound by time and who governs all our days. He governs our coming and our going in this life. He rules over the hearts of faithful people.

This feast also points toward the fact that all the things which hold sway in our media, politics, power games, and squabbles are happening in the shadow of his throne. We mock his reign with our pretense of earthly power. His call to us is a call to a kind of faithful powerlessness.

Reigning from the Cross and crowned with thorns we have a once and future king whom it would be far easier to consign to cooing irrelevance in his crib or to inert passivity hanging from the tree. But his birth, his life, and his resurrection are a promise fulfilled — it is a promise that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. It is a Kingdom grounded in loving peace, faithful service, and courageous hope.

Christ the King Sunday calls us to remember who rules our lives and to ponder not so much what it means for him to be a king but for us to be his subjects. We are called not so much to admire his rulership but to recommit to servanthood. We are given a charge to live first as citizens of the Kingdom. This means living with the sure and certain hope that the once and future king was, and is, and is to come as Lord of our lives.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert