Christ the King Sunday

Tomorrow is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the church year. Also, my favorite ordinary (i.e., not-a-major-feast) Sunday. And I'm not entirely sure why. The picture in my head when I think of Christ the King Sunday is a big tangle of the beginning of the second part of the Te Deum ("Thou art the King of glory, oh Christ/Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father . . .") and the Christo Pantokrator icon and the music of "Crown Him with Many Crowns" and vaguer pictures of what the last judgement will be like.

I think my affinity for the day goes back to the first time I really celebrated Lent, when I chose as my meditation for the forty days C.S. Lewis' essay "What if this Present were the World's Last Night?" and the John Donne poem from which it took its title. It's a great essay (the poem's good too) that I recommend to everyone, and Lewis made in it the point that the main two things that Christ said about His return was that He would certainly return and that we certainly would not know when, leading to the third point: because we do not know when He will return, we ought always to be doing what we ought to be doing, so that He will find us doing it when He comes back.

So, on Christ the King Sunday, I think both about the greatness of our Lord, His absolute righteousness, and the absolute obedience He expects from us.

And yet, somehow it's heartening, and not disheartening. Because He's going to come back for us, and - as one of my college professors told us - He always gives what He demands.

So Christ the King Sunday is, to me, the most comforting Sunday, because it is the one where I remember that everything is going to come right. Christ will surely come, He will judge the world, He will judge us. But, as Michael Card said, we will look into our Judge's face, and see a Savior there.

Thanks be to God!

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell