Celestial Monarchy

What were you thinking about last Sunday, the feast of Christ the King? It is hard to get that Palm Sunday earworm out of my head, but our celebrant Joe Sannino introduced a new concept: Christ the friend. You may know that I belong to a small faith community, now an intentional Eucharistic community after years as an underground church. Our congregation of feminists has three feminist celebrants: two married priests, Joe and Joe Ruane, and one woman, Judy Heffernan, whom we ordained in 1980.

To celebrate Jesus our friend, the Community of the Christian Spirit (CCS) heard a different reading from the Gospel of John, Chapter 13, highlighting “Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” Colossians 3 has a similar focus: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony,” and concludes with a reflection about “Jeshua the Anointed,” more like the traditional theme for this day. Joe begins with a translation of the prayer of Jesus from the Hebrew and Aramaic. For the Psalm, he uses a meditation, “You Came As a Friend,” from the Ignacio Larrañaga Prayer handbook Encounter, part of the Prayer and Life Workshop. The songs affirm relationships.

The Colossians selection read at CCS replaces the reading from Revelation 1 read in most churches on this feast. The Quixote Center’s Inclusive Lectionary renders a section of that “To Christ – who loves us, and has freed us from our sins by the shedding blood, and has made us to be a kindom of priests to serve Our God and Creator.” This translation communicates that we are all priests by virtue of our baptism, a rather subtle theological point that might otherwise be lost. It uses the Priests for Equality “kindom” and, for Lord, “Our God and Creator.” Similar substitutions are in the dream of Daniel and the dialogue with Pilate. If your worship site uses the prescribed readings, this resource is a good choice to eliminate sexist language and open up some images with clever rephrasings.

The Comprehensive Catholic Lectionary, developed by Jane Via and Nancy Corran of Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community adds another goal to what Quixote has done: to include all the woman-focused passages in the Scriptures, many of which never make it into the canonically approved readings. For this Sunday, their focus becomes Christ of the Servant and the reading from Daniel is replaced by one from Sirach, including:

I am the mother of love, inspiring awe.
I am Woman Wisdom, imparting understanding.

I am from the beginning, and indwelling hope forever.
I, Wisdom, am undying and timeless.

I am given to all my children,
          to all those named by God.

Like Quixote, they interpret the Revelation reading to say explicitly “all of us priests, serving a Loving God – to that servant leader be glory and honor for ever and ever.” Finally, for the Gospel they extend the Pilate reading to include the mocking homage of Jesus and add the servant passage from Mark:

Anyone who wants to become great among you must be your servant. Anyone who wants to be first among you must serve all. For the Human One came not to be served but to serve, and to pour out life that others may live.

The servant theme extends to Psalm 63 as well: “You raise up servants, those you have called to guide your people.” All this can move the liturgy to a reflection on the priesthood or service more generally.

Now a theology professor, Agnes Brazal takes the readings in an entirely different direction in her homily for Catholic Women Preach, as befits her experience as a community organizer in the Philippines. Suspected of collaborating with the communist New People’s Army guerillas, she was detained and interrogated in an era of military torture and murder. She reminds us that the feast of Christ the King was instituted in 1925 to counter the growing fascism and secularism that alarmed Pope Pius XI. Brazal emphasizes “true Christian leadership” in which those in authority take “into account the common good, and their subjects’ human dignity.  This is also an age when democracies are struggling with autocratic tendencies, she finds, and so many “buy populist rhetoric of us vs them, nationals vs immigrants, upright citizens vs drug addicts and peddlers.” As “one of the first ‘mothers’ of the Ecclesia of Women in Asia (EWA), an association of Catholic women theologians,” Brazal speaks out for the truth of the Gospel in the political arena on the “liberating feast of the reign of Christ.”

Finally, Katie Lacz, the Program Associate at WOC, sent me this from enfleshed.com:

Christ, not on the throne, not king nor queen who dominates on high, but Christ the power-with that builds movements from the streets, that keeps love persisting despite evil’s reign,that turns us towards each other, that has spoken through the prophets age after age, that takes on the flesh of a baby, that shares meals and washes feet, that enfleshes in blossoming flowers and “I love yous” and chants that demand justice. Rulers rise and fall but this Christ is eternal.

It is full of images and the focus is where it belongs: on justice, with love above all.

Today is the very last day of the liturgical year; we begin Advent on Sunday. We do not need to cling to the images the patriarchy has established for Christ as we think of what to carry forward as our model of relationship: friend, servant, priest, political actor, eternal power-with. Happy New Year!