The Ragged King
It's not too late to join the march to the eternal Jerusalem
The King has arrived. He has come to claim His city.
For centuries, the people have waited for one born of David’s line to come and liberate their nation. They have been conquered by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans. Their Temple has been destroyed and rebuilt. They have clung, however tenuously at times, to faith in the God of their fathers. They trust His promise, and He has promised them a King. Now, the King has come.
Hosannah, they cry, Hosannah to the Son of David!, and strew his way with victor’s palms. Yet this King is not much like the kings they knew before: more a parody of a king, a holy fool of a king. He rides to victory not on a warhorse, but on a donkey. He is followed not by soldiers ranked in gleaming armour, but by fishermen and housewives and ex-lepers and once blind beggars. If legions of angels surround him, then they are invisible. And yet the standers by must have glimpsed something of the light of God concealed in that ragged retinue, something that gave away their master’s noble estate: something that told them, unequivocally, that this man was their King.
In John’s telling, the King’s story is one of light conquering darkness. So, in recent weeks, we have the story of Nicodemus entering by darkness and later seeing light enough to anoint the Lord’s body after his death; the story of a blind man whose sight was restored; and finally, the moment that pushed the religious leaders into their final raptures of condemnation, the resurrection of Lazarus to life and light from the deepest darkness of death. We heard from Matthew’s account of the Beatitudes that the reward of the pure of heart is to see God, in all his blinding intensity, and we joined Peter, James and John on Mount Tabor as they witnessed that light in Christ.
The narrative arc from darkness to light began at Advent, when we prayed that we might don the armour of light. It reached its first peak in the Christmas gospel, the first chapter of John, when the light entered the world and darkness did not overcome it. In Lent, we march closer to the culmination of that glory.
Yet even as the glory shines, it is hidden. The angels’ song is silent. Our King rides into the city on such mute beasts as those among whom He was born in the darkness of the stable cave in Bethlehem. Now, He enters the Temple that He once called His Father’s house, a place filled with the glory of God’s presence, but finds that it too has been darkened and corrupted. Yet He had foreseen already that He would be “glorified” not in the Temple, but on the Cross, on that Good Friday when the moon eclipsed the sun. Abandoned by His disciples, crowned with thorns, dead among thieves, He shows His true Kingly form and His glory is manifest to those with eyes to see.
“Thy Kingdom come.” So the Christian faithful pray, every day, as Our Lord has taught us. Not “thy tyrannous theocracy come,” certainly, but nor “thy Democratic People’s Republic come.” It is specifically God’s Kingdom that Our Lord told us to pray for. And so we, like the ancient citizens of Jerusalem, await not a celestial president or prime minister, a perpetual Dear Leader in the sky, but a king. Neither elected by popular acclaim, nor the self-made meritocrat taking power by guile or threat of violence, but one born to his role and raised for it from childhood. Not a constitution or a flag or a managerial role waiting to be filled, but a person, a Lord in permanent and indissoluble relation to his subjects, whom others can love and follow, to the death if needs be, because they can trust that he will die for them, just as he has lived for them. A King whose unconditional love for his people is nothing short of fatherlike. Father, king, Lord: unfashionable terms of hierarchy, I know, but those are the images He employs. The one who told Peter to sheathe his sword was no gun-toting radical of Right or Left, no revolutionary seeking to overthrow the social order. For as much as He is a person, indeed at the very source of His personality, He is the Divine Logos, the entirely reasonable mind of God enfleshed, the same mind and Word which gives meaning through the relationships inherent in the ordering of the cosmos. So, to pray “thy Kingdom come” is to make ourselves subjects to the kingship of the Fatherlike Son who once rode into Jerusalem; and thereby, too, it is to submit and to accept our proper place in the Church, the duly ordered hierarchy of heaven and earth. It is to put ourselves in personal subjection to the Crucified King and so to share in His kingly rule, not by right, but by gift: a gift in which the fatherly Lord deigns to make Himself also our servant, our brother and our friend.
Now, this holiest week of the year, is the time for us to intensify that subjection. We do so by following our King’s commands, especially the two final commands He left the night before He died. And these – lest we be distracted by spectacles of ever so humble footwashing – are the real focus of Maundy Thursday, namely: Love one another as I have loved you and Do this in remembrance of me. To be subjects of our King is to see one another as fellow subjects, as brothers and sisters under one fatherly Lord, and to act accordingly; it is to see the light of that Kingship shining through one another’s rags, deformities and sickness, whether physical or spiritual. It is to see the light hidden in our darkness.
To that end, the night before He died, Our Lord left us with the perpetual vehicle of His presence, hidden under humble elements of bread and wine. Not merely as a way of remembering Him, as though we might otherwise forget: we have Holy Scripture for the retelling of His story. No, rather he left it that by His unifying presence, we might be re-membered in Him, reconstituted: disparate members brought back into our primal unity as one body, each complementing the other, none unnecessary, none dispensible, all sensitive to the pain and joy of the others, united under one Head, one rational Logos, the Word made Flesh, the King who brings light and sight, clarity and meaning to the apparent - but only apparent - chaos of the world. The King holds the banquet, love bids us welcome to the feast. We are to taste the salt and light and so become the salt and light, seeing one another illumined, appreciating each shade of flavour. Taste and see, the psalmist says: for taste is the most direct of our senses, capable of instant apprehension of a myriad indescribable savours, and so the closest to the contemplation by which God Himself sees the creation, for all its diversity, as a unity as simple as Julian’s hazelnut or Blake’s grain of sand. To be lifted up into the simplicity of that divine contemplation is to have what S. Paul calls the Mind of Christ. It is to remember and to be re-membered in His glorious light.
And we will remember that light, come the joy of the Resurrection on Easter Day. But to remember ut well, we must first enter the darkness. The altars will soon be bare. The only two days of the year when the Eucharist cannot be celebrated, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, are near. Dare we be there? Dare we take up the Cross, hobble up into the cloud that hung on Golgotha, as it once hung on Sinai?
Lent is almost over, but even the eleventh hour is not too late. You who have fasted, you who have not fasted, welcome! All can still join the ragged throng on the hard march to the eternal Jerusalem, the true Kingdom and our final home.
Thank you! That motif of being fellow-subjects under God is vital, in my view. The trouble with atheistic humanism is that it leaves humans at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, and the most powerful humans at the peak. Hence the natural environment, including other humans, are reduced to the raw material on which the most powerful can impose their desires, to monstrous effect. To acknowledge that even our human monarchs are themselves fellow-subjects of a monarch whose powers they can never usurp is a valuable corrective, and the institution of monarchy at its best is a political reflection of this celestial reality. When that monarchy is, further, a Christian monarchy, it is additionally held up to the standard of loving servanthood that Christ as King manifests. Whether it actually lives up to that standard is another matter entirely, but it seems to me a far preferable standard than that of "might makes right," whether that is the might of a democratic majority or of an armed dictator. While I have several reservations about Kant, the "Kingdom of ends" certainly seems preferable to some sort of factory of means.
Wonderful post! Especially like the way you moved from our own subjection to the necessity of seeing one another as fellow subjects, as brothers and sisters, and to act accordingly.