On the Feast of Christ the King

Today’s first reading records the Israelites saying to their King, David, “Here we are, your bone and your flesh”.

Jesus, the son of David, the rightful heir to the throne of the Kingdom of David (which in the Old Testament is called “The Kingdom of God”), also is a King who shares his flesh and blood with his people. Jesus does this, of course, not through natural descent and lineage, but by supernatural means: the Eucharist. In this way, we become part of the ultimate “Royal Family” (Who cares about the intrigues of Buckingham Palace!).

Jesus’ kingdom, unlike most, is not imposed from without, by means of force (consider the humility of the Passion), but rather proposed for consent from within. And to spread the reign of Christ in the hearts of others, we must first allow him to reign in our own, because the apostolate results from the overflow of our interior life.

One way we can do this is to receive the Eucharist more fruitfully. As St Thomas Aquinas wrote in his beautiful hymn Adoro Te Devote, one drop of the blood of Christ can free the entire world of all its’ sins.

There’s no lack of “power in the blood”, but some of us would rather remain king of our own lives than accede the throne to Christ. But when we do, when we receive our Eucharistic King and allow him to have more of us, as St John the Baptist did (“He must increase, I must decrease”), we will discover that Jesus makes us emissaries of the Kingdom. Like John, we can point others to Christ, even Christ in the Eucharist: “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of he world.”