Christ the King (2026)
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
In the book of the Apocalypse, we are told the lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power and divinity and wisdom and strength and honor. To him that sits on the throne and to the lamb, benediction and honor and glory and power forever and ever.
When Our Lord, some time before his death, contemplated from the summit of Mount Olives the city of his predilection, and surveyed in prophetic vision the ruin that would later come to overwhelm it, the pent-up love and grief in his heart found expression in a flood of tears. And using words touching in their wistfulness and mournfulness, he said, “Only if you had known in this day the things that are to your peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:42).
If you did know the things that are to your peace. In this phrase, which is a great sigh heaved up from the depths of Our Lord’s heart, is revealed his sense of the great tragedy of his people’s fate, and indeed of all mankind.
For the lot of his own race was at once a reality and a figure.
The ruin of the city and the temple was to be a great historical fact.
That ruin was also a type of what was in all subsequent ages to befall the nations and communities and individuals which would follow the Jewish race in the rejection of their king.
Their king was also the king of men.
Immeasurable was the longing of Jesus to save his people. Correspondingly bitter was the realization forced on him by the passing of the days that all his efforts to save them from the abyss where they were rushing should prove unavailing.
Clearly he saw and earnestly he set forth the conditions that made for the peace, prosperity, and greatness of the chosen people.
With unerring insight and foresight, he traced for the leaders of that people the solid foundations which by their firmness would guarantee the unshakeable stability of the walls girding the holy city.
The imperishable structure of Zion would be, if things fell out according to the Savior’s intent, a fair symbol of the enduring prosperity, spiritual and temporal, destined for God’s people.
In many a parable and by many a figure, he strove to form their minds and their hearts to a worship of God which should bring to perfection that which had been taught them by their great captain who led them forth from the land of exile.
They hearkened to him. The splendid figurative ritual of the temple would have by smooth and natural transition passed over into a liturgy no longer concerned with types but having as its center the divine reality itself.
The great temple, had this purpose been realized, would have become an imperishable sanctuary of this worship of God in spirit and in truth.
From it would stream rays of light, illuminating all tribes, all nations, and all states.
The Jewish race would serve as an instrument in the hands of the true king of men to fashion all human social and political systems to a pattern reflecting the divine ideal of the order that would make for man’s good.
That pattern would not be a drab and monotonous uniformity. It would be splendid in a variety of colors, each flashing forth the particular qualities and virtues of individual races.
All owing their well-being to the Jewish people would gladly pay to it tribute of honor, acknowledge its preeminence, and enjoy their freedom under its beneficent guidance.
This was the grandiose vision of the tremendous what might have been that developed itself before the prophetic vision of the Savior while he sat pensively on the Mount of Olives blinded with tears.
It was not an idle dream that he dreamed. The might have been was possible. Christ was truly king. He offered himself as king to his own people to realize through them his glorious dream.
He had the vision of the great statesman, and his vision was unerring. Through his beatific and his infused knowledge, he saw with perfect clarity the means by which man’s good on earth would be realized.
He knew perfectly what made for the greatness and stability of states, others as well as his own.
He was literally a born ruler. The task of the head of a state is to plan and to order the activities of the citizens in the way best calculated to achieve the welfare of the whole community.
It belongs to him to secure on the part of the subjects such coordination in the wide diversity of their activities as is necessary to attain the common good. That is, the conditions of a happy life for all classes.
Failure to see and to prescribe the right means to secure these conditions is failure in statesmanship. Such failure was impossible for Christ.
He knew all that was requisite to secure the temporal and eternal welfare of men, and his will could not shrink from ordaining these measures.
He could not be moved either by fear or partiality. He would masterfully guide the strong and mercifully sustain the weak, as befits the true king.
He was prudent and just with the prudence and justice that reflected the divine prudence and justice.
His power for good was not limited. The needs of his own race could not exhaust all its possibilities. He was qualified to secure the common good not only of his own people, but of the whole race of men.
He was literally, in virtue of what he was even as man, king of the universe.
Not only was the title rightfully his, he had as well all the ability and effectiveness that was demanded by this exalted position.
He was able not only to point to the goal of human welfare, he could effectively lead men to it if only they freely consented to accept his ruling.
The offer was in the first place made to the Jews. If they had accepted it, the same offer would through them be presented to all mankind.
If they had known, and in that their day, what made for their peace and their greatness, what might have been. The tragedy of their blindness, the unavailing efforts of Christ to open their eyes and to change their hearts.
No wonder the pity of it all forced the blinding tears from his eyes and shook his frame with sobs.
Too clearly he saw what his people’s choice would be, and the cataclysmic disasters that would fall on them because of that fatal decision.
In the hate that hardened the features of the nation’s chiefs, in the resistance that showed in the perverse views the common people held of the nature of his sovereignty, he saw forming in their hearts the impious resolve that was ultimately to find blasphemous utterance on their lips.
They would not have him as their king, according to his interpretation of the functions of kingship.
The royalty that they were prepared to concede him was the negation of all that he stood for.
They would have a ruler to their own measure, not to the measure of God.
Their forebears in the time of Samuel, wearied of the direct rule of Jehovah, and disregarding the prophet’s protests, clamored for a king whose range of vision would not be wider than their own, and whose ambitions they would understand and approve.
It was a sad day for them when their prayers were heard by an indignant and a wounded God.
Their rulers became a scourge.
And yet they never learned the lessons taught by history. They grew no wiser, when God, with a divine self-effacement, if the phrase be allowed, did ultimately condescend not in bitterness but in mercy to give his people a king who should be one of themselves.
He was a king who was true, at one and the same time, to the measures of man and the measures of God. He was thoroughly human and yet thoroughly divine.
His rule would be a salvation and not a snare. His would at once benefit his people and glorify God.
He was a king who would be after man’s heart and still be a king after God’s heart. He would betray neither God nor his subjects.
The day came when he was formally presented to those whom he was born to rule. It was at the close of his probation for kingship when he had proved by power, by wisdom, and by mercy, his fitness to reign.
There was a strange irony in the introduction of the king to his people. It was made by the representative of pagan authority. It was the eve of the Pasch, about the sixth hour, and Pilate said to the Jews, “Behold your king” (John 19:14).
The governor’s words were received with acclamation, but with an acclamation that was horrible in the extreme. It shocked and startled the cynical Roman. It took him utterly by surprise. The words had scarcely left his lips when his ears were deafened by the frenzied cry, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him” (John 19:15).
“What,” said the pagan in horror and utterly aghast, “shall I crucify your king?” (John 19:15).
To this question, answer was made in words weighted with the fate of the world. They were words of ominous significance.
They definitely signed away the fair destiny that might have been for the Jews and for the rest of the world.
With one accord, they cried out, “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15).
As this fateful cry fell on the ears of Jesus, the heart was crushed within him.
Not for what it meant for himself, but because of what it meant for them.
Sadly, he reverted in thought to the occasion but a short time before, when to warn the leaders against the fate they were preparing for themselves, he had put in parable an equivalent sentence on their lips. “We will not have this man to reign over us” (Luke 19:14).
Down through the centuries, by one state after another, the same dread cry has been taken up. “We will not have this man to reign over us.” “We have no king but Caesar.”
Nation after nation has followed the Jews in their suicidal folly. They reject their true king who understood kingship for what it ought to be, a service of the people, a restraining of the strong, and a sustaining of the weak.
He himself deigned to point the contrast between his principle of ruling and that characteristic of the great ones whom men by their own choice appoint over themselves.
At the Last Supper, he said to his followers, “You will call me Master and Lord, and you say well, for so I am” (John 13:13). “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them. But the son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life as a redemption for many” (Matt. 20:28).
And yet this king who rules by serving is again and again rejected by men. He is rejected not because he tyrannizes over men, but because he cannot be diverted from devotedly pursuing the real good.
Like frenzied patients, they turned on him, the physician who was able and ready to remedy their temporal and spiritual ills.
He is rejected not because it can be said of him that he is inhuman, but strangely enough, because he is too perfectly human.
The reason is that his humanity conforms to the mind of the prudent and just God, and not to the mind of perverse and erring man.
Men persist in rejecting the ideal king. They obstinately persevere in setting over themselves Caesar after Caesar, men who rule them not basing their rule on the prudence of the creator, but on the folly of the creature.
The nations will not be dissuaded from choosing rulers who personify their own pride, their own ambition, and their own shortsightedness.
They, like the Jews, will have any man reign over them, but not this one man who alone would rule to their advantage and not to his own.
They are not made any wiser by the experience that as for the Jews of old, so for them, their choice is ever followed by overwhelming disasters.
The ruin that has fallen on the world of today has the very same cause as the ruin that befell Jerusalem so many centuries ago.
It is the chastisement of the blasphemous cry, “We have no king but Caesar.”
This ruin must not be thought of as an act of retribution on the part of an angry God. It is the fruit of man’s errors and not of God’s act.
Even when impaled on the cross by men, God from this degrading eminence to which his creatures have raised him, appeals to them with outstretched hands to enter into the kingdom that he is ready to prepare for them on earth and in heaven.
Is his appeal destined ever to fall on deaf ears? Is it always to be that not peoples but only individuals are to give response to the invitation of God?
By his death on the cross, Christ has offered to the whole human race the privileged status of people of God. He has redeemed all men by his precious blood.
He has reconciled mankind to God, as is asserted by Saint Paul in his words to the Romans, “When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son” (Rom. 5:10).
In virtue of this reconciliation, man was invited to live, not in part of his life, but in the whole of his life as a child of God.
He was bidden to regulate all his human activity, personal and social, according to this status. It was promised him that if he made filial docility to God his predominant aim, all would go well with him even temporally.
Not only eternal but true temporal prosperity would be the reward of a life based on a frank and full acceptance of the supernatural.
Christ said, “And seek not what you shall eat nor what you shall drink, and be not lifted up on high. For after all these things do the nations of the world seek. But your father knows that you have need of these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things will be added unto you” (Luke 12:29–31).
What states that fling off the yoke of God seek with avidity and seek without success, namely true temporal well-being, that is promised to those who seek primarily to submit themselves to the yoke of God.
When the good tidings of salvation, passing the frontiers of Judea, penetrated to the limits of the known world, and in the dissolution of the Roman Empire, nation after nation gave promise of accepting the yoke of Christ, the words of the psalmist seemed about to be literally fulfilled.
“I will give you the Gentiles for your inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for your possession” (Ps. 2:8).
But again and again, when the glorious vision seemed about to become a concrete reality, it dissolved under the heat of men’s passions and the storm stirred up by their perversity.
The great states, yielding to the lust of power and ambitious to make the people of God their own vassals rather than the bondsmen of Christ, grew jealous of the Lord’s influence and chafed against his yoke.
“The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together against the Lord and against his Christ,” saying, “Let us break their bonds asunder, and let us cast away their yoke from us” (Ps. 2:2–3), as we are told in the Psalms.
State after state in Christendom has become secularized. Christ is persecuted or at best is tolerated. He is outlawed from the councils of the world. His name does not appear on its charters of liberty. His beneficent authority is rejected in favor of the only authority that can exist when his is repudiated. It is either Christ or Caesar.
And Caesar, as the rival of Christ, is another name for state absolutism. Statolatry becomes the official worship of society when society refuses to pay allegiance to God.
The great evil of the states that have arisen from the fragmentation of Christendom has not been the occasional sins of weakness or violence committed by their subjects, but the denial of God’s sovereign rights over social and political life.
The great impiety, the great error, the fruitful source of natural disasters has been to deny Christ all say in the world of international relations, in the drafting of constitutions, in the forming of laws, in the systems of public education.
To the secularist minds, minds that guide and control affairs of business and politics, religion is relegated to the private life of the person.
In his private capacity, it is permissible for a man to acknowledge God’s ruling. As a citizen, he must act as if God did not exist, or at best must pay him but lip service.
Men dare in their ineradicable perversity, in their unteachable dullness, to hope that the state without God can by its own energies, its own intelligence, and its own resources, procure for its citizens temporal welfare and happiness.
They are persuaded that their planning can bring about an order of things in which men shall enjoy the perfection of material, moral, and intellectual culture.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW