Viva Cristo Rey? A Reflection on the Advent of Christ the King

 “We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”

These words were spoken by the failed priest in Graham Greene’s great novel The Power and the Glory (1940). In the midst of the priest’s moral fall he is thrown into a deep and sustained reflection on his life, his clerical career, his very understanding of Christianity. Persecuted and on the run from the violently anti-Catholic Marxist revolutionary government in 1930s Mexico, the veil of self-deception is violently rent in twain to reveal the petty pride, self-regard, and vainglorious attachment to luxury which led to his moral ruin. “It had been a happy childhood, except that he had been afraid of too many things, and had hated poverty like a crime; he had believed that when he was a priest he would be rich and proud—that was called having a vocation.” In the midst of this spiritual-existential crisis, the “whiskey priest” is brought for the first time to confront the smallness of his soul and in so doing discovers the real meaning of his religion: the reign of divine love in the human heart.

The heart which lies to itself by turning this great truth—that “God is Love”—into a platitude and the religion based upon it into a mere social-ethical system will be in for a rude awakening. To such betrayal the living Christ gives a devastating response. As the prophet Hosea hears the Lord say with respect to Israel the unfaithful spouse,

“I will hedge up her way with thorns;
    and I will build a wall against her,
    so that she cannot find her paths.”

If we could manage a moment of real honesty, we would admit that what we so often mean by “love” (at least when we consider ourselves as would-be receivers of it) is the other’s unconditional acceptance, affirmation, warm sentiment, and limitless interestedness in our worldly contentment. It often means the other’s need for us which would naturally intensify the unconditional acceptance which we demand from “love.” Graham Greene’s sinful priest finally comes face-to-face with the love of God in its disinterestedness—that is, the God who does not depend upon us or desire us for self-completion—and what a violent and shocking revolution it is. He learns that divine love is more likely to appear as divine wrath, as “hate”, to the failed lover. When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer (Ps 32:3-4).

“When man encounters the love of God in Christ, not only does he experience what genuine love is, but he is also confronted with the undeniable fact that he, a selfish sinner, does not himself possess true love” (Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Only Love Is Credible). 

The divine love is a fire that both warms and burns. God’s love cannot comfort man until it sears away the scar tissue that smothers his heart so that it can beat strong and steady, as an organ of true humanity. Christ is the one who possesses the truly human heart. We, on the other hand, are failed humanity, and we fool ourselves while we imagine otherwise. St. Augustine famously said “love, and do what you will.” We are so very accomplished at the “doing what we will” part of this command, but so mediocre and empty of courage when it comes to loving. And so, when we cannot love, we find ourselves simply under the law, that is, not in love but under the judgment of love. The law, says St. Paul, condemns us, because once we are aware of it we are also aware of our failure to live up to it (Romans 7). The law of God is the structure of his love come out to meet me in my loveless state.

 We can transfer this meditation on the drama of our encounter with the divine love across every sphere of human life—to politics and the social question, for instance. If every human being must come under the reign of divine love in order to attain to full humanity, then so, ultimately, must human society. This is what Christ means when he says “the Kingdom of God is at hand, and it is among you and within you” (Luke 17:21). The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of the heart. We cannot bring about this kingdom by systems of our own device. The divine kingdom comes to us when we confess that our human project is a failed one, when we open our hearts to the advent of flesh and blood Love Itself.

 But do we really desire the arrival of love? I can measure my own desire to be ruled by love in my willingness to accept, to desire the burning away of the dead flesh that stifles the beating of my heart. This is what it means to live a life of penance: to take on the responsibility of love. To take responsibility for love means earnestly to long for crucifixion, and Christ has showed us the way. With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you (Luke 22:15). Baptism is nothing less than an initiation into the universal death that alone can recreate the loveless. In this love that goes to death, the heart of Christ calls out to mine: will you allow me to reign in you?

The Christ of God comes into this world as a helpless child. But he does not remain so. He becomes a fully-fledged man who embraces with all his “heart, soul, and strength” (Deut 6:5) the full inheritance that belongs to him “from the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8). He takes possession his inheritance by drinking the cup of love to the dregs, to the very end, to death (John 13:1). We too must drink of the chalice which he drained (Mt 20:22-23), or else stand outside of love and remain subject to its judgment—for love is terrible to behold for the heart set against it. We cannot receive the consolation that comes from gazing upon the lowliness of God in a manger until we have first laid open our hearts to the reign of Christ the King of Love.
 

Fr. Byron S. Hagan is the Parochial Vicar of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Northeast Minneapolis.