The Church’s liturgical year ends this week, and a new one begins with the First Sunday of Advent. This last Sunday of the liturgical year is the Feast of Christ the King.
This is also a notable week in the secular order. Two hugely influential men died on November 22nd, 1963, and Friday we observed the 50th anniversaries of those deaths. The more noted was President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but considerable attention was also paid to C.S. Lewis.
If you can take a step back and look objectively at Kennedy as a cultural icon, he only appears more extraordinary. Kennedy the icon is revered totally out of proportion to the facts of his life and presidency, to what he actually did. I mean no disrespect in saying that. I’m pointing out that he somehow became the focus, the distillation, the icon of something larger than himself. There was something about America that he captured and captivated. The thing that he captured they called Camelot.
Camelot? It’s more than a little ironic that, the American Presidency having been founded on rejection of the authority of George III, the highest compliment paid to an American President is a comparison to a legendary English King.
But Kennedy captured something built into human nature: call it the royal impulse. Like it or not, humans seem to be hard-wired for royalty. Israel expressed it when they insisted to Samuel “we want a king like the other nations!” Nations around the world express it today in royal families, some of which have no public function of real influence, but who become the focus for national identity. Our country has never had a royal family, though the Kennedy’s are something very close. I wonder if that’s one reason our cult of celebrity is so bizarre. Having no King or Queen, our royal impulse lands on the most glamorous actors and singers and, in a mystery no human mind can fathom, Snooki.
Why this impulse? You could chalk it up to a defect in human nature. Like we’re afraid of independence, like we insist on finding a reason not to stand on our own. Or, you could suppose that we were made for a King. You could suppose that our built-in desire for Kingship corresponds to the way things are. That our common identity, our common aspirations, are meant to be personified.
And that brings us to C.S. Lewis. Lewis was an English philologist, and the sort of incredibly brilliant person who can manage to make a living as a philologist. He was most famous, though, as a disciple of Jesus, and as someone with an extraordinary ability to explain Christian faith clearly, delightfully, and inspiringly.
Lewis wrote about who Jesus was and how we relate to him by what he called the “tri-lemma.” Like a ‘dilemma’, but with three options. Looking at the things that Jesus said, who would we say this man was? A man who said things like “if you do not love me more than your father and mother, you are not worthy of me,” and “I AM the way, the truth, and the life,” and “no one can come to the Father except through me?” Well, Lewis said, you could dismiss this man as a liar, which would make him the worst sort of scoundrel, a very bad man. Or perhaps, giving him the benefit of the doubt, you could call the man who said such things crazy. Deluded. Deranged. Not a bad man, just a crazy man, like the man who’s totally convinced that he is a chicken, or Napolean, or a toaster.
Or, Lewis said, you could take him to be the Son of God.
What you can’t do, Lewis explained, is take him to be merely a great prophet or moral teacher or inspiring teacher. A man who claims equality with God is not a prophet but a blasphemer. A man who demands devotion before even your family is not a good man. No, someone who said the things that Jesus said is either a liar, or a lunatic, or the Lord of all.
That’s why there really isn’t any middle ground with Jesus, why he said “whoever is not with me is against me.” There is patience while you find your way, mercy while you waffle back and forth, but in the end a decision must be made. Discipleship of Jesus Christ doesn’t make sense as a halfway thing, it won’t work. There is no hedging of bets, no playing it from both sides, no contingency plan or backup. No domesticated Jesus. No cupcake feel-good Jesus who we keep around to tell us how fantastic we are, and toss aside when we find his demands a little unreasonable. He is not a fairy tale we tell ourselves to make us brave. He is not a blank canvas on which to project whatever makes us comfortable. The Jesus we meet in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is alarming. He says shocking things. He places categorical demands that seem completely impossible. He goes off to die and asks us to follow. He is gentle with the people the world despises, and fierce with those who despise them. He is subversive and countercultural and, eventually, condemned and executed as a criminal. If our religion is comfortable and safe, it certainly shouldn’t bear this man’s name.
C.S. Lewis’ great allegorical Christ-character in the Chronicles of Narnia is the lion Aslan. The first time the Pevensie children learn of this great lion, they ask if he’s safe. “Of course he’s not safe,” comes the answer, “but he’s good.”
If Christ is not a lunatic or a liar, than he is our true King. He is the proper object of everything within us that wants to worship, that aspires to find someone really worth following. He is the personification of our common identity, our common aspirations. Following him is serious, but never gloomy. Light-hearted and joyful, but never frivolous. Sometimes we need to be reminded of the challenge of discipleship; sometimes we need to be reminded of his mercy when we fall short. Sometimes we need to get real, sometimes we need to relax. But front and center of everything we do is the One in whom we live and move and have our being: our Lord, our brother, our Captain, our King.
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