Christ the King of My Disappointment

Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash

Last weekend, the Roman Catholic Church celebrated the Solemnity of Christ, King of the Universe, more commonly known as the Feast of Christ the King.

This feast was introduced into the calendar by Pope Pius XI in 1925 in his encyclical Quas Primas (“In the First”). Though addressed to the universal church, the encyclical itself was partly a response to a number of local historical factors, which included the rise of fascism in Italy.

As the title suggests, Christ was reasserted as being the first of all things, opposed to the growing sense of putting nation either before or even in the place of God as personal lord and saviour. Christ is, as the Book of Revelation (22:13) says, “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end”

This line has loomed large in my mind, for the grandeur that the feast is meant to communicate juxtaposed with another theme, namely disappointment.

The theme of disappoint became particularly weighty after reading Bryan Stoudt’s moving article on learning of his son’s autism in Desiring God. The story can be extrapolated to a range of other scenarios, and the consistent theme would be the closing of possibility by the circumstances of life.

This raises the question: how does this feast of Christ being King square up with this very visceral experience - this fact - of disappointment? This question becomes especially acute given that this feast also stands at the threshold of Advent, where we wait the coming of the Incarnate Word. If the Word of God is incarnate AND King, does his reign show its limit in the experience of disappointment?

What struck me in reading Stoudt’s article was his wife finding, if not the solution to her problem, at least a response to her question. This she found in the book of Job.

When Job asks God “Where were you in the maelstrom”, God asks in turn (38:4):

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, tell me if you have understanding?

At first glance, this passage smacked of reinforcing the image of the distant king, exercising great power from afar, and refusing to even consider the weight of his subject’s anguish. What corrected this initial impression was the phrase “when I laid the foundations of the earth”.

The image there was that of Psalm 113, where God sits on a throne and yet stoops down to look at the earth. Only he does not simply stoop down. He would lay it down, his fingers working into the earth, leaving his imprint in the very foundations of the ground we inhabit.

His rule is not just from a distant centre. It operates in the dissemination of his imprint in the very texture of creation. In the vein of St Bonaventure, that imprint is none other than God himself in the Word, through whom all things were made.

What does that say of Christ’s rule as King in the midst of disappointment? It means that Christ the Word is part of the DNA of creation, and nothing falls outside the purview of the Word. Every event, every move of every creature occurs under the oversight of the second person of the trinity, because it is operative in everything that occurs.

What then of situations where disappointment or even trauma reign? The passage from Job looked at the foundation of God’s order, so what of the disorder that we see outside and experience inside?

It is here that Stoudt’s article reminded us of a well worn, but no less true, motif of the Christian faith, that Christ suffered on the Cross for us. God’s stooping down meant that His rule extended to having a cross for a throne, the death of God being the font of life for all creatures. Put another way, because of Christ’s passion, God’s rule extends even to the disorder within creation. In the words of the founder of Focolare, Chiara Lubich, because of Christ’s experience of abandoment from the source of order, the seeming abandonment of order, the divisions and separation that comes from it, paradoxically manifests the person of the king and his rule in the foundations of the earth.

Still we return to the question: what does it say of His rule as king?

In the Office of Readings for this feast, the long reading is a passage by Origen, reflecting on the line in the Lord’s Prayer “Thy kingdom come”. Origen suggests that, if we take the words “Thy kingdom come” seriously, the kingdom is already present, especially in the jarring experiences of one’s life.

Furthermore, the Kingdom is not merely an inert presence. As suggested in a previous post, the imprint of the Word imprints also those words in the Apocalypse: I am the beginning…

His rule thus extends to what Aaron Riches and Creston Davis call the imputation of “pure beginning” into the DNA of creation, its events and experiences.

This is why Origen can say in the midst of our disappointment “with God ruling in us, let us be immersed in the blessings of regeneration and resurrection”. The rending of our expectations and plans and the experience of disappointment are therefore, not the limits of the kings reign. They are doorways through which the king enters to claim his dominion.

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