It's the Feast of Christ the King! In our first reading from the Second Book of Samuel this
weekend, David, King of Judah, is approached by the tribes of Israel who want
to make him their king as well: Here we are, your bone and your flesh,
they tell him. It is a relation of
kinship that they describe, a matter of identity based in familial ties. As their king, David will carry their
identity; like a shepherd, he will be the one to whom the flock belongs, and he
will bear full responsibility for their welfare. And Psalm 122 suggests that his judgments
will be based on the wisdom that he gets from God.
The kingship of Jesus is foregrounded in Luke’s Gospel,
first, in the soldiers’ jeering mockery – If
you are king of the Jews, save yourself – and later, in the humble entreaty
of the thief crucified with Jesus – Jesus,
remember me when you come into your kingdom. Only the thief truly understands: through the Cross, we have been brought into
a kingdom that is ruled not as the world rules, because the world’s definitions
don’t include the infinite fullness of God.
Jesus is at once king and kin.
We come before God as Israel came before David. We proclaim, we are your bone and your flesh.
What kind of identity does that proclamation establish for us? Paul’s letter to the Colossians tells us that
Jesus became a man, entering the human realm through incarnation, uniting
himself to humanity on the Cross and taking it through death to
redemption. The Cross is evidence that
kinship gives us life with Christ, paradoxically, through his death: we are transferred
… to the kingdom of his beloved Son. This
is the inheritance of the holy ones in
light: a gift, not earned, kinship
with Jesus Christ, he in whom our identity is found. Like King David, we too have a responsibility
that is ours through kinship: we are to
allow the incarnation to take place in us because he has made us fit to share
in it with him. King and kin all at
once, Jesus is the image of the invisible
God. We, in turn, are to work to be
the image of Jesus on earth, giving flesh to him, serving as his hands and his
feet, his bone and his flesh in the
here and now.
This post is based on Fr. Pat's Scripture class.
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