Minds thinking Thanksgiving and Christmas, many churches did a great service to worshippers by observing yesterday as Christ the King Sunday. So much energy goes into observing the events and teachings of Christ’s ministry in the first century, like His birth and in a few months His suffering and death, that we easily forget reality: Jesus Christ is King now.
“The modern world quite literally “manages” without God. We can do so much so well by ourselves that there is no need for God, even in his church. Thus we modern people can be profoundly secular in the midst of explicitly religious activities. Which explains why so many modern Christian believers are atheists unawares. Professing to believe in supernatural realities, they are virtual atheists; whatever they say they believe, they show in practice that they function without practical recourse to the supernatural…. The call to follow Jesus Christ runs directly counter to this deadly modern pressure toward secularization.” (Os Guiness, The Call, 149)
Christ the King Sunday was decreed by Pope Pius XI on December 11, 1925. He cited troubling trends in that time, including the removal of Christ from public life in many nations, natural religion replacing revealed religion, “insatiable greed which is so often hidden under a pretense of public spirit and patriotism, and gives rise to so many private quarrels; (and) a blind and immoderate selfishness, making men seek nothing but their own comfort and advantage, and measure everything by these” (24). Has the world gotten better in the almost 100 years since the encyclical?
Pius XI: “It is necessary that the kingship of our Savior should be as widely as possible recognized and understood, and to the end nothing would serve better than the institution of a special feast in honor of the Kingship of Christ. For people are instructed in the truths of faith, and brought to appreciate the inner joys of religion far more effectually by the annual celebration of our sacred mysteries than by an official pronouncement of the teaching of the church. Such pronouncements usually reach only a few and the more learned among the faith; feasts reach them all; the former speak but once, the latter speak every year—in fact, forever. The church’s teaching affects the mind primarily; her feasts affect both mind and heart, and have a salutary effect upon the whole of man’s nature.” (21)
“Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King.”