Biblical Meditation: The Invisible Kingship of Christ the King

Sunday, November 20, 2022, feast of Christ the King of the Universe,
four texts will be read.
First Reading Second Book of Samuel (2 S 5, 1-3).
Psalm 121.
Second reading Letter to the Colossians (Col 1, 12-20).
The Gospel according to Saint Luke (Lk 23, 35-43).

Luke 23, 35-43 2-4.9-14

At that time, they had just crucified Jesus,
and the people stood there watching.
The leaders mocked Jesus and said:
“He saved others: let him save himself,
if he is the Messiah of God, the Elect! »
The soldiers also laughed at him;
approaching, they offered him vinegar drink,
saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself! »
There was also an inscription above him:
“This is the King of the Jews. »
One of the malefactors hanging on the cross insulted him:
“Are you not the Christ? Save yourself, and us too! »
But the other reproached him sharply:
“So you don’t fear God!
Yet you are a convict, too!
And then, for us, it’s just:
after what we did,
we get what we deserve.
But he didn’t do anything wrong. »
And he said, “Jesus, remember me
when you come to your Kingdom. »
Jesus said to him, “Amen, I say to you:
today, with me, you will be in Paradise. »

The notions of “king” and “salvation”

The choice made by the liturgy to have this text read for the Solemnity of Christ the King may come as a surprise. How does this painting of Jesus on the cross have something to say about his royalty over the Universe? In fact, it is very exactly this one that is in question in this passage, which repeats two different cultural names to designate the same reality: basilicus, king, designates in Greek the first personage of the State; messiah, anointed, who since David evokes the king of Israel, enthroned by an anointing. As “Christ” is the Greek translation of “Messiah”, we agree that the whole scene turns on the attribution to Jesus of this royal title.

The most striking thing is that it is the others who give it to him: the leaders, the soldiers, the inscription, the bad thief. Jesus is mute. And all of them (apart from the inscription) make a connection between this title and salvation, in an association that is more natural than it seems. Soter, Savior, is one of the titles of the Emperor of Rome, because this term designates a political reality before a religious reality: “salvation” covers in Antiquity all that we expect from a modern State, it is that is to say security, prosperity, running water and thermal baths, justice, in short a system of protection against the vagaries of life.

Salvation is the tangible part of authority, which is underlying and requires obedience (while salvation requires gratitude). However, Jesus is not able to accomplish in the eyes of all an action either in his favor or in favor of others as the bad thief asks. Riveted to the instrument of torture, he is powerless. It is the contrast between this declared omnipotence and the observable reality that gives rise to what the text calls derision.

The attitude of the good thief: seeing beyond appearances

Quite different is the attitude of the good thief. He does not stop at the visible and speaks of Jesus in the field of justice. He and the other robber are “convicts”, that is to say individuals on whom a court has ruled, and this one has done his job well. (“It’s fair”, “We get what we deserve”.)

On the other hand, Jesus is not in his place. The translator, to make it clear to us, renders in moral terms (“he did nothing wrong”) which, in fact, is a spatial adjective: atopos, which is not in its place. Jesus did nothing “inappropriate”. He adds : “Remember me when you come to your Kingdom. » He is not talking about the title and its visible consequences, but about the invisible reality. “Kingdom” is an abstract word, because it is impossible to see concretely to what extent the authority of a sovereign covers, which often requires the placement of terminals or the erection of walls to materialize borders.

In the garden of beginnings

The kingship of Christ supposes that we recognize it, it is of the order of the relationship, which explains this strange request: ” Remember me ” : keep a part of me in you, in the privacy of your memory. Jesus finally comes out of the silence and responds on the same line: the thief will be well ” with him “. And he gives a spiritual definition of this Royalty by affirming that it is about paradise, this garden of the beginnings from which the human being was driven out and which could not be found on earth.

Regis Burnet is professor of New Testament at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). He notably published Decode a religious painting.
New Testament and the Book of Revelation (editions of Cerf).