Christmas pudding and the orb of kingship
There’s no point making Christmas puddings tomorrow, “Stir Up Sunday”. It’s far too late for them to mature – unless they are for Christmas next year.
“Stir Up”, of course, comes from the collect in the Book of Common Prayer, “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people...” It remains as the postcommunion prayer in Common Worship, in practice the Church of England’s default service book, which marks tomorrow as the festival of Christ the King.
This festival looks like a bit of an accident, and many people seem hazy about what it celebrates. It had been instituted for the Catholic Church in 1925 by Pope Pius XI (reigned 1922-39), who deserves to be better known. He was not only clever but also a bit of a tough-nut, climbing the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc. He also tried to counter the deadly influence of Stalin and Hitler, and, in denouncing Nazism, even published an encyclical in German,
Mit Brennender Sorge.
In the sandwich of history between the First World War and the Second, the kingdoms (or dictatorships) of this world seemed a pattern of inhumanity. Pius XI built on the social teaching of Leo XIII, 40 years on from his great encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), but Christianity was systematically excluded from state ideologies.
Pius sought, he said, “the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ”. His ideal was not primarily earthly. In 1925, the year that he instituted the feast of Christ the King, Pius canonised six saints, who by their very lack of political power exemplified the kind of challenge he was making to the totalitarian battalions. Among them was Thérèse of Lisieux (following her “Little Way”) and Jean Vianney, (who spent his last 40 years as the village priest of Ars).
Christ, as king of everything, answers to the clause in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come”. There, come is a subjunctive expressing a hope. But what is such a kingdom?
For a start it refers to two things. One is a kingdom (as in “United Kingdom”) or collection of people under a common rule and sharing a patriotic affinity. The other thing is the act of reigning that we call upon God to exercise.
The next clause in the Lord’s Prayer says: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It is reasonable to suppose that God’s kingdom ( just as much as his will) should be sought on earth. But it has been generally accepted that those who recite the prayer also ask God to reign in their hearts, which is to say, in their decisions and thoughts.
There’s a figure of speech that puts a different perspective on this. “It’ll blow us all to kingdom come,” says the pirate putting a match to the powder-keg fuse . That kingdom is one over which Christ will reign when this world ends. It is the same Christ that St John’s Gospel represents as coming into his glory on the cross.
Jesus often talked about the Kingdom. He likened it in parables to the seed sown by the sower, to the leaven in a batch of dough, to a pearl of great price. Those parables speak of a kingdom in the hearts of those assembled in the Church.
Other parables, such as those of the wise and foolish virgins, the wheat and the tares, or the wedding feast refer to a final establishment of God’s kingdom.
The festival of Christ the King on the Sunday before Advent, sets the tone for considering the end of this world, about which the liturgy of Advent speaks a surprising amount. It is a correlative of the birth of Christ at Christmas, the archetypal “Off with the old, on with the new.”