Civis Romanus Sum

Propers: Christ the King, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I’ve always had a thing for history. I think we all do, really, on some level. While history classes in school seldom prove popular, history books regularly populate our bestseller lists. History is not simply what has happened; we have a separate word for that. History subsists in what we’ve written down, and what it means to us.

A people’s history, then, is their shared story, disagreements and dissents included, of how we got here, why we act the way we act and think the way we think, our values and meaning and purpose and goals. It’s all there—culture and conflict, folly and philosophy, our loves, our grief, our strife, our triumphs and mistakes—there in our history, there in our religion. A person who knows not their history is a leaf unaware of the tree, let alone of the forest.

And this Sunday, Christ the King, is really all about history. God is infinite and eternal, beyond time and space, beyond any concept of before and after. Yet we know God in His Incarnation, His instantiation within history. He comes to us as a specific Man, through a specific people, in a specific time and place. In Jesus Christ, and more broadly in the history of Israel, God is made known to us through the scandal of particularity; such that one Man is for us all men; and one people’s story of their relationship with God becomes by grace the story of universal salvation, which is to say, the story of us all.

I am not a Jew. Yet through this Jewish man Jesus, proclaimed to us in this Jewish book of Scriptures, I have come to know the grace and love of God. And I believe that all the world shall come to know this grace as well. That’s Good News. That’s the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, the finite contains the infinite, to be given then to us.

The Feast of Christ the King is one of our youngest celebrations. In fact, it was only just instituted during the twentieth century. And that might surprise people, given how archaic rings the title of “king” within postmodern ears. “Christ is Lord!” remains the oldest of Christian confessions of faith, our first and truest Creed. Yet this particular Sunday of Christ the King was recently established in direct response to the rising tide of totalitarianism between the two World Wars: against fascism on the Right and communism on the Left.

To say that Christ is King, is to say that nothing and no-one else is. To say that Christ is King, is to confess before the sundry powers of this fallen sphere that we have a love and a loyalty and a God who transcends power and politics, transcends blood and soil. I am a Christian before an American. Because Jesus didn’t die for democracy or imperialism or the free market or the Constitution. Jesus died because He offered a grace that the world did not want to receive, would rather kill than receive. And He died for that world none the less.

There is no Western history without Rome. Everything before was leading up to it, and everything after has derived from it. That’s how we tell the story, anyway. Rome is all of us: the astonishing coagulation of Latin law, Greek thought, barbarian bravado, and Semitic soul. We are Rome; and where we walk is Rome. And Rome—to be clear—crucified the Christ. Who killed Jesus? We did, you and I.

So much of the Gospels is political, but not in the way that we think. It isn’t Left or Right, liberal or conservative. It is anti-Roman. The Jesus of the Gospels sets Himself against the Caesars, against the Emperors of Rome. And we don’t even see it, because we are Rome. We are the Empire. We are the Western world, bestriding the globe as a colossus, with all the best of intentions. And Jesus is the opposite of that. He is a different kind of Emperor, a different kind of King.

The Beatitudes, from His first and greatest sermon—blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers—these aren’t sweet little sentiments cribbed from Hallmark greeting cards. This is a declaration of war. Not war by fire or steel or sword: that was always our mistake, trying to make the Messiah act the way that we would were we Him. But this is spiritual warfare, flipping the values and morals of Rome on their heads. And Rome knew it.

Romans valued nothing so much as fama, which is sort of like fame elevated to the position of personal identity, elevated to outright idolatry. Fama was the idea that you are what people say you are. You are your job, your degrees, your wealth, your house, the vacations you take, the purchases you make, the offices you hold, the clothing you wear, how many Instagram followers you have—that is who you really are; that’s your soul.

And there’s no room in that world for the poor or the meek or the hungry or for peacemakers.  Don’t be such a pansy. There’s only room for having and taking and earning and buying and looking damn good while you do it. And this doesn’t just apply to the people at the top, to the kings and the senators, the movie stars and music gods. It applies to all of us, whatever our rung of the ladder, to the entire rat-race, to the totality of this dog-eat-dog, up-by-the-bootstraps, you-are-what-you-post whole world.

Christ offers to us all a different way to be, an alternate reality. His is the right-side-up Kingdom for this upside-down world. And it doesn’t work like other kingdoms. It doesn’t value the strong over the weak, the boastful over the meek. This King values humility and service, repentance and truth, generosity and joy: the selfless self-giving that constitutes the only real love, divine and eternal. In this Kingdom, you’re loved, no matter what. In this Kingdom there’s no room for lies.

In this Kingdom you are upheld in every moment, every thought, every breath, by the infinite ocean of consciousness, being, and bliss who is the One True God. The transcendent Creator, the Man on the Cross, and even the Spirit who fills up our lungs, are all of them One, all of them God. And you cannot put a price on that. You can only give it away. And even if they kill you for doing so, well—we have a God who knows the way up and out of the grave.

And Rome doesn’t know what to do with that. Empire doesn’t know how to handle that. Empire only knows how to throw money at a problem, and failing that, kill them. Yet money and violence cannot conquer the Christ, cannot keep Him dead and down. And so Empire has no way to stop Him, no way to keep Him from rising. Thus is the Empire defeated, because its only weapons have failed.

Ours is the King who feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, heals the sick, rebukes the sinner, teaches the ignorant, forgives the repentant, brings down the high, lifts up the low, speaks truth to power, raises the dead, and obliterates any distance, any impediment whatsoever, between God and humankind, cosmos and Creator. Is this your history? Is this the story we tell? Is this how we got here, why we act how we act and think how we think? Are our values and meaning and purpose and goals those of Jesus’ Kingdom? And if not, why not? Whom do we serve as our king?

Are we being Jesus for a world in need of Him, or are we serving Caesar in both combat and in coin? I think we know the answer to that one, don’t we? But here’s the Good News. Jesus didn’t come for the righteous; He came to save sinners like us. And when He was nailed to that Roman cross by a Roman soldier under Roman law, He looked to the heavens and prayed, “Father forgive them. They know not what they do.” Even murdering Him couldn’t stop Him. It could barely slow Him down.

Jesus conquered Rome at the last. Not by matching them Legion for Legion. Not by calling down fire from Heaven. Not by any method of vengeance or violence. But by offering the poor, the despairing, the worldly, the weary, and every single person in every level of society a vision of goodness and beauty and truth: a vision of His Kingdom, where the first are last and the last are first, and all sins are forgiven and the past is but prelude.

It is not a Kingdom of this world, but it is a Kingdom that changes this world. And it is ours for the taking, here and now, in Word and in water, in bread and in wine, in the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ given for you and for all. His is the Spirit who burns in our veins. His is the Body that makes of us one. He is Jesus Christ our King. And we are His Kingdom forever.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.