My Arm Shall Judge the Nations: a Reflection on Christ the King

What struck me about the passage we hear from Matthew 25:31-46 at Mass today is that when the Son of Man returns in his glory "all the nations will be assembles before him" for judgment (v. 32). We often think of the God's judgment, if we think of it at all, as an individual thing, which isn't wrong. Last week we heard the parable of the talents, in which Jesus tells us that we will be questioned about how we used, or failed to use, the natural abilities and graces we were given in life in service of the Lord (vs. 14-30). But there is this other dimension, the communitarian, which is also involved. We are members of families, civic and parish communities and well as citizens of nations. There is an individual call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked, but also a public responsibility to seek the common good, and we can't hide behind our relative lack of power if the government isn't fulfilling its responsibilities, especially we who live in representative democracies.

All earthly power has its origins in God. In a way the old Divine Right of Kings wasn't as crazy as we may think. Today we look at the abuses of such a claim. We might point to instances of a tyrant justifying injustices by claiming it was God's will. Since he or she was God's "chosen" ruler all their decrees needed to be followed, no questions asked. But it's better to think of it as a responsibility that a king or queen had as opposed to a privilege. A given king may or may not have been "God's candidate,", but as soon as they took the royal oath they were charged with governing conscious of their responsibility before God: their very souls were at stake. Built into this system was the idea that God was the ruler and the king or queen wasn't God, but a placeholder exercising vicarial power.

This Solemnity of Christ the King was instituted in the 20th century, at a time after many royal houses had been deposed, and whatever kings and queens remaining were reduced to figureheads. The levers of government were in the hands of secular functionaries. In the extreme there were dictators who were claiming all power and authority independent of God. In fascist nations God was an afterthought and in communist states God was proclaimed a superstitious fantasy. All power was held by the leader, and any pretense of divine sanction or responsibility were done away with. The body count that such "unaccountable" governments piled up is in the hundreds of millions. How much the citizens of the individual nations will be held accountable for their governments' actions will vary, I would suppose, on a number of factors. How much control did they have over these governments assuming power? Did they know what was going on and cooperated, and was the cooperation coerced or willing? Just as circumstances can mitigate individual guilt, the same applies to nations.

But what of those of us who live in liberal democracies? The United States Constitution says that ours is a government of, by and, for the people. The leaders we elect are proxies for the will of the governed. We can argue that senators and congressmen have the right, even the responsibility, to vote their conscience when they believe that their constituency is wrong. Ours is a republic, after all and not a direct democracy. In the end the ballot box will win the day, and the continued bucking the popular will eventually lead to unfavorable consequences for the office holder. The main point is that We the People claim sovereignty over the government. Do we understand that we then assume the judgment of God when we elect immoral and corrupt leaders? We can no longer hide behind the king or the dictator, claiming cohesion or impotence, allowing him to take the blame. 

We long ago declared that character doesn't matter when evaluating candidates for public office. It's all about the economy or else national security. What we want is competence, and if the president is a moral disaster we compartmentalize it. It's his private life, we say, and it has nothing to do with keeping the economy booming and the nation safe. Things have gotten so bad that we aren't simply judging between who is decent and who is corrupt. We're left now playing the lesser of two evils game, and we lose every time. We are not electing saints or pastors, this is true. No one is perfect, without sin. And we need competent people running the government. But if we entrust our government to low character individuals we shouldn't be surprised if we have a corrupt system. If an office holder doesn't respect the laws of God, what are the chances that he will respect the laws of men?

In all this we are complicit. We can't hide behind claims that we were following orders or helpless serfs under the tsar's thumb. We have grasped at the royal prerogative, assuming the responsibility for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Our presidents aren't the first born of a previous sovereign, the congress isn't made up of princes and princesses who gained their title by the accident of birth. We gave them the authority to rule. If the poor go hungry, if the prisoner is abused, if he unborn are treated like medical waste, if the migrant is harassed it falls on us. We need to ask ourselves, when the Son of Man comes in his glory where will we be, both individually, but also as a nation: on His left or on his right? Are we a nation of sheep or goats?