The reign of Christ is not like that temporary peace that irrupts when the most recent war is ended, whether it is tinged with placidity or bombast. It does not emerge out of triumph or conquest. No enemy needs to be destroyed. Nobody has to lose. Christ reigns even now, and the peace passes all understanding.
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We hear in our Gospel of Golgotha as one site and one occasion on which this peace breaks out, and Christ is seen as King. This King who hangs on the Cross. This King who is mocked in his weakness. Here is all his dignity, and here his own crown.
Christ will not rule by might, and will not be goaded into violence. He does not claim superiority, and he will not relish victory if it comes at the cost of any one of his sheep.
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We have no analogue for the suffering of Christ. In time even martyrs are forgotten, and while we are moved to act because of the world’s attempts to annihilate them, at some point that passion falls cold. All our victories, the brutal and the kindly, are short-lived.
Christ still hangs on that cross, and that moment hangs eternal in our mind as the portrait of the Ruler of the Universe at his highest. We know Christ in that moment at this impossible intersection of vulnerability and power, of human and divine. Here, it all hangs in the balance. Now, something very real is happening.
God is not only calling us to be galvanized to resist the powers of the world. God is not only showing us the world we have made. We see God in awesome power, willing to die like one of us, and to see in this death something better than victory, and something more final than defeat.
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We careen towards Advent, and Christ has surely been born. We proclaim the Reign of Christ, who is always and already King. There is so much that is inside-out and backwards. There is so much that defies our reason, our linearity, and all our ways.
All of us will die, and right now all of us live. There is a Kingdom to which we will return, and it is also right here and right now. Nothing will be lost or destroyed, and all of us are already in our eternal home. Christ reigns as he did on the day of Resurrection, and on Golgotha. We seem to be waiting for something, and it is something that has already happened, but has perhaps not yet been real enough to us in our lives.
I find it necessary to linger here at the precipice, and at the end of the liturgical year, to try to find some sort of place at which we have arrived, or to gesture at where it is that we are heading.
This is the Kingdom for which we have been searching, and our King rules in what the world mistakes for weakness and suffering. Those who would wish to rule try to increase their power by who they can destroy or humiliate, and somehow that seems to be more and more the tenor of just about everything in the world. We are in the process of giving up on peace once more. There are those who are weary from waiting so long to fight.
I have friends and family who are living in fear in countries all over the world, including this one, and not one of them because of anything they have done wrong. They are not afraid of being found out, but of being made examples of for nothing. I am sure it is like this for someone in your life, maybe many of those who are dearest to you. The world sees the weak and vulnerable as food to be devoured, it sees the gentle as chaff to be winnowed away. Those who seek power and build empires will see them crumble, and their lives will end in emptiness.
I do not know what to do about so many awful things. Those moments seem to hang for me like eternities, too, like dozens of little potential Golgothas. I do suspect that Christ reigns in those places and those moments and those hearts, too.
I am sure that in all the awful torture and killing that can be found on this fragile Earth, our island home, Christ is full of power, too.
We wish that we could make that power be felt with the same kind of efficacy as all the weapons of war. We do have moments, and maybe quite a lot of them, where we are sure that we have enemies, and all the more sure that they must be destroyed. It’s all so sick and futile. It makes us all so very small and weak.
I am a practical person in my way, and I do think that our faith calls us to be engaged in the world, to be affected by events, and to work together for the realization of the Kingdom here and now. In truth, I don’t really think that we can do otherwise once we have even so much as glimpsed the Holy. So it is that we cannot hide behind the spiritual bypassing, the toxic positivity, of saying that the futile power of the world is irrelevant. It is relevant. Christ still hangs on the Cross. We proclaim that it doesn’t win, not that it should be allowed to happen.
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As we wander into the dual reality of Advent, we are being called to maintain this strange and split awareness. We must act in the world, but not be too intoxicated by it. We must not believe the lies of the rulers of the Earth, but neither can we simply ignore them.
Advent is a confrontation with the busy character of the so-called “Christmas season”, even as we are making space within us to be able to live with stillness and silence. That stillness and silence hold space for our confused awe at the suffering of Christ, and the quietness of God. That busyness holds a worthy aliveness, too, and the invitation to connect deeply with one another.
New life is waiting to be born, and it is already here, and already over, and it is not futile for its finitude, and neither are we. We are not all-powerful, and Christ who is, would not, himself, do all that we might think we ought. We withdraw to our humble humanity, and find in it a full measure of the Holy, too.
May we proclaim that even now Christ reigns, amidst our disappointments and distractions. May we give our hearts to the Kingdom for which we live right now, and work towards a better future. May we let ourselves experience everything of our lives fully, and find that somehow God is with us even where God seems silent. May we nurture the new life within us, and love those things which are passing away, even as we let them go.