WHAT EXACTLY IS A KING?

Calling Jesus Christ our King has intrigued me for as long as I can remember. He tells Pilate in the Gospel we have just heard that He is not a typical king. But what is a typical king? One of a few books I re-read from time to time is The Little Prince, which was written by a famous aeroplane pilot from the early days of French commercial aviation, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. By the time he wrote this book, his own faith in God had faded, but it overflows with spiritual questions and reflections on human nature.

The storyteller is the pilot of a mail plane, forced to make an emergency landing in the Sahara desert. There he meets a curious little person, the ‘Little Prince’, who tells him about his visits to various asteroids. On Asteroid 325, he meets a king, who has a throne and all the robes and symbols you might expect a king to have. The king expects all his orders to be obeyed, but the trouble is that he has no subjects; he is delighted when the Little Prince arrives and wants him to become his subject.

BEING A KING IS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

But the Little Prince is not prepared to stay and moves on to visit other people on different asteroids. The people he meets are all living in their own worlds, definitely out of touch with reality. Saint-Exupéry once said that every human being is like a hub or knot of human relationships with other people, and it dawned on me that a king without those relationships, in other words a king with no subjects, is not a king at all.

Ever since then, I have asked myself about my relationship with my king, Jesus Christ. As a free man, I can rebel and refuse to be his subject, just like the Little Prince. Alternatively, if I want to be his subject, I must do things the way he wants me to, not out of blind obedience, but because I really want him to be in charge of my life.

HOW DOES THE KING OF ASTEROID 325 COMPARE WITH JESUE?

Like most of the other people in the book, the king in The Little Prince is a pathetic, sad figure. He is alone, totally bereft of the relationships that make us human, in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s vision. The man Pontius Pilate interrogates is quite different. As I try to picture him and hear his voice, He strikes me as quietly spoken, confident, strong: ‘Yes, I am a king. I was born for this: to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.’ It’s not unreasonable to dream of having that kind of person as a ruler, although most of our presidents and prime ministers seem to have a much less inspiring agenda. The reading from the Book of the Apocalypse calls Jesus Christ ‘the faithful witness, the First-born from the dead, the Ruler of the kings of the earth’, a title underlined by the last word in the Greek text, παντοκρ?τωρ (Pantokrator), the ‘ruler of all’. The first reading, from the prophet Daniel, insists that ‘His sovereignty is an eternal sovereignty which shall never pass away.’ A far cry from the King of Asteroid 325!

HOW SHOULD WE RELATE TO OUR KING?

Psalm 92 (93) encourages us to offer the Lord, our God, complete trust and confidence: ‘Truly your decrees are to be trusted. Holiness is fitting to your house, O Lord, until the end of time.’ Once again, that is far more than we can reasonably say of most earthly rulers, isn’t it?

This is at the origin of today’s feast, which was a response offered by Pope Pius the Eleventh to the threat to humanity which had come from regimes in Mexico, Russia and elsewhere in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The horrific extermination of huge numbers of people offered a frightening vision of what happens when people forget the demands of God’s law, especially its insistence that love of neighbour, in other words love of every human being, should be at the heart of our vision of society.

The Preface of the (Catholic) Mass today rejoices that Christ offered Himself on the Cross in order to present to his Father

‘an eternal and universal kingdom,

a kingdom of truth and life,

a kingdom of holiness and grace,

a kingdom of justice, love and peace.’

Unlike most of the political manifestos I see, this vision really stirs my heart. For those who want to rule over humanity, it may be a naive pipedream, but for us who see ourselves as subjects of Christ, the King, it is the vision that can save us all.