A Reflection on Christ the eternal and universal King, at the Feast of Christ the King, on 24/11/2019

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

It is Our Lord Jesus Christ as the eternal and universal King that we are celebrating today !

@1  God is King, eternal and universal King. But Christ the living Son of God is God. Therefore Christ the living Son of God is eternal and universal King.

@2 To be a King is to be a Ruler that reigns from a throne over two categories of his royal subjects, namely his people and his ministers, in the two categories of  his royal things

namely  ‘his royal objects, namely  his royal space as the aggregate of his royal places or domain or territory’  and ‘his royal events as the royal  acts and actions and activities taking place in his royal time, period, term, of office’.

@2a) To reign is the King’s  act and action and activity of using his sovereign powers to govern his subjects in his things, i.e. to use his authority to legislate, i.e. make laws, leges, as rules of order, regulae ordinis, and use these rules  (that should regulate, order, his  rights and duties towards his governed people and  ministers as his subjects and of his people and ministers towards himself and his co-governing, i.e. legislating and executing and judicial, body elected  by his people and ministers to collaborate with him in the government) to protect or guard or conserve or secure the life and property and place of the people and ministers over whom he is governing, to feed or nurture or pasture his people and ministers, and to propel, promote, direct or guide the pace of, the movement, development, advancement, progress, of his people and ministers in that place towards perfection, the fullness of life, the full life, a truly as completely fulfilled life.

@2b) God the King is the Ruler that reigns from His throne in the highest of the heights 1) over the two categories of his royal subjects, namely  1a) over humans as his people, and 1b) over the Angels as his ministers, 2) in  the two categories of his royal things, namely 2a) in the Universe as his royal object, namely  his royal space as the aggregate of his royal places or domain or territory, the universe consisting in the unity resulting from the mediated union of heaven and earth  -  heaven meaning the preternatural world of invisible creatures, and earth meaning the natural world of the ‘some directly’ and ‘some only indirectly’ visible creatures  - through ‘the Sun as  that third component of the universe which  is at the middle  and mediates between the preternatural half and the natural half of the universe that it binds together to one another’  and 2b) in ‘History as the aggregate  of  his divine-royal events, namely divine-royal  acts and actions and activities taking place in his divine-royal time, period, term, of office that but has no end, since, being divine, both his acts and actions and activities and his time  are all eternal, i.e. have no beginning and no end.

@3 Therefore when  we celebrate today Our Lord Jesus Christ as the eternal and universal King, we are celebrating both His person as God and King and His reign as King, as that Ruler i) whose throne is infinitely higher than the throne of the created kings, and ii) whose reign, having neither a beginning nor an end, was there before the reign of the created kings came to be, and shall continue to be there after the reign of the created kings have each come to an end, and iii) whose people are - supposed to be. - more all-embracing and infinitely more in numerical strength and broad mindedness and deeper and higher in spiritual and moral quality through the action of the therein dwelling, teaching, guiding, illumining,  all-uniting,  vivifying and sanctifying Holy Spirit  than the people of the created kings of this world, and iv) whose ministers are -  supposed to be - more efficient and unimpeachable authoritative servants, through the same Holy Spirit operating in them, than the ministers of the kings of this world.

@4 The above distilled points are to be taken into consideration when we are celebrating today our Lord Jesus Christ as the eternal  King of the universe, and have to thereby do so with the same religious sentiments with which the Church as Bride of Christ instituted this solemn Feast of her beloved Spouse. For it was in the wake of nationalistic and secularist ideologies of the time  between the late 19th century and the early twentieth century that the Magisterium instituted this Feast to get the faithful focused on Christ as the proper King that can save the world. For during that period, different  nations were setting up their own kingdoms rampantly and kings were being made indiscriminately and the people began to live according to the rule of order ‘the religion of the king of each region is to be the religion of the people of that region’ (cuius regio, eius religio’). So it came that the peoples of many nations lost sight of God and of Jesus and began to forget “God our Saviour” and that “there is only one God and there is only one Mediator between God and mankind , Jesus Christ” and that God our Saviour is our only one King”, and drastically began to dwindle the popular focus on the only one uncreated King of created kings, on the God-made-man-without-ceasing-to-be-God-for-the-salvation-of-mankind, namely on the Godman Jesus Christ, truly God and truly Man in one person and the only one adorable King, the King of kings and the Lord of lords (cf Rev 17,1), most worthy to be exalted as the sovereign King of the universe (cf Dan 7,14). It was Pope Pius XI who got the Feast of Christ the King instituted in 1925, so that the Church as the royal people of God might proclaim Christ a universal King in the public, like those children with palms and branches of plants proclaimed him King during his triumphal entry into Jerusalem shortly before his passion, thus so that the Church as the new royal people of God  might move from worshipping Christ privately in their hearts to worshipping him publicly  in the Most Blessed Sacrament in which the heavenly Jesus Christ the King is really, truly and substantially present here on earth. The title given to the feast by Pope XI was “Jesu Christi Regis”  which can read  as ‘(the Feast) Of Jesus Christ the King’ or as ‘’(the Feast) Of King Jesus Christ’. But since the intended emphasis on the universality and eternity of the Kingship of Christ as what distinguishes his kingship from the kingship of the created kings in such an era of proliferation of the secular kings of the nations of this world was not reflected in the formulation of such a title, that was why in 1969 Pope Paul VI lightly modified that old title by inserting the missing point. So came the new title of the Feast to the following till today: “Jesu Christi universorum Regis”, - “(Feast) Of Jesus  Christ the King of the Universe”. Thereupon the Pope, Paul VI , raised the Feast to the status of a solemn feast, hence to a Solemnity, and he decreed that celebration of this particular Solemnity should be done on the last Sunday of each liturgical year, and among other reasons for that practice  is the christological one of great systematic interest: it was after Christ had finished the Wortmeldung that the Father had sent him into the world to do among men that he asked the Father to glorify him as he had glorified the Father through, with and in his missionary acts, actions and activities on earth.

@5 The hilarity and jubilation with which we are today to celebrate this Solemnity like those little children of God during Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem goes back to the good news brought to us that we, who since we received the Sacrament of Baptism have entered into the Kingdom of God, have furthermore and more intimately been received into the interiority of the God of the Kingdom through the Sacrament of the Eucharist and become soldiers of the Army of Christ  led by the Holy Spirit as the General Commander to defend the Kingdom of God and be fighters of the enemy of Christ, the devil and its army of demons with which it has, since the days of John the Baptist, been attacking the  Kingdom of God into which we have entered since baptism and in which we exist and are living with joy at God and with thanks and praise and glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit in whose name we were baptized as were immerse in the water of the infinitely deep and high Ocean that the Father is, the infinitely broad Sea that the Son is and the infinitely long running River that the Holy Spirit is.

Fr. J. Egbulefu CCE