Back in the late 1950s, in my early teenage years, just before Castro’s Revolution and his accession to mock-messianic power, I attended an all-boys’ school in provincial Cuba run by the Marist Brothers. First Fridays of the month were rigorously consecrated to devotion to the Sacred Heart, a focus of Catholic piety that at that time was inseparable from the veneration of Christ the King. On First Fridays the whole student body of about 200 would gather in the garth first thing in the morning, and we would rededicate ourselves to the enthralling mystery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. During the almost 70 years of living I’ve done since then, one phrase from the consecration prayer that we all recited in schoolboy unison—like the multiplication tables—has stuck firmly in my memory and gently haunted me: Tuyos somos y tuyos queremos ser: “Yours we are and yours do we want to be.” My mind stored away this formulation as a memorable puzzle, and its singsong rhythm and mystery have never loosened their grip on my heart.
In recent years I think I’ve begun to understand the deeper import of this generous public confession we made corporately, Yours we are and yours do we want to be, which at first may seem but typical religious rhetoric. However, all on its own it has gradually filtered down into my consciousness, to become the guiding light of my spiritual journey, a sort of standard against which to measure my movement. When you delve into it, you can see that the phrase actually conveys the invitation to a complete and profound spirituality because it puts on our lips two essential things: first, faith’s proclamation of God’s most sublime deed in creating us, and, second, our personal affirmation of that deed of God’s. To consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart of Jesus the King, I’ve come to see, means to embrace with every fiber of our being the magnificent truth that Jesus has already made us his own. As a matter of fact and not of vague imagining, we do belong by rights only to Jesus and not to ourselves or to the world or to anything or anyone in it! They sang a new hymn: Worthy are you to receive the scroll and to break open its seals, for you were slain and with your blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation. You made them a kingdom and priests for our God, and they will reign on earth (Rev 5:9-10, NAB).
However, now comes the all-important practical question: Is this factual reality, this condition of gloriously belonging to Another, to our Creator and Redeemer who has given his all for us as expressed by the wound in his Heart—is this belonging what we really want? And do we, consequently, dedicate the bulk of our thoughts and time and energy to cultivating this central and unique reality of our lives? The fool-proof test that reveals the actual and central love-interest of our lives is the answer to two further questions: To what is it that I spontaneously dedicate the greater part of my waking hours? And toward what object do my thoughts and desires instinctually gravitate? One major practical reason for giving ourselves to contemplative prayer is to discover where exactly the deepest love of our heart really lies.
In the article in the Catechism titled “The Battle of Prayer” in Part IV, we read these helpful words: “A distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve” (no. 2729). There you have it: the choice of which master to serve. That crucial choice is what the kingship of Jesus is all about. As Bob Dylan used to sing with his gritty twang, “you gotta serve somebody. Now, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody”. It would be pure delusion for any of us to think that we are not in thrall to some “king” or other. Why not, then, deliberately choose the King of Love and Truth with all our hearts, to serve whom is synonymous with eternal freedom?
The reality of our already belonging objectively to God in Christ takes the form of a solemn hymn of praise in our second reading from Colossians today: All things were created through Christ and for Christ. Christ is before all things, and in Christ all things hold together. Whether we are aware of it or not, each of us, by being included in this all things, has already been swept up from the beginning of our existence into the spiraling process of divine transformation and glorification that constitutes the ongoing cosmic drama of redemption, which is also the true drama of our lives and the only one that ultimately matters. Yet, vast and all-inclusive though it is, such a universal drama is not at all abstract or impersonal because it is, in fact, the careful and love-guided joint work of the heavenly Father and his only-begotten Son, steered at each step in the process by the goodness and wisdom of their Holy Spirit.
St Paul continues: The Father delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the Kingdom of his beloved Son. This is the Kingdom of Light and Life where Jesus alone is King, he in whom all the Fullness [of divinity] was pleased to dwell, through Christ to reconcile all things for God, making peace by the blood of his Cross. Jesus is no merely hereditary or man-made monarch. Here is a King who has earned his kingship over creation literally by the Blood of his brow and Heart, out of sheer love for his Father and for the creatures they co-created and co-redeemed with one generous accord. For us to dwell joyfully and permanently in this Kingdom of peace and love is what Jesus has gained for us by the shedding of his Precious Blood. This is our unassailable birthright as God’s children.
And yet, as that childhood formula also ingrained in me, not only must we affirm Yours we are, but at the same time also and yours do we want to be. The thing we have first been made to be by the immense work of God’s mercy and generosity, that very thing we also need to embrace for ourselves and make our own through the ardent desire by our willing heart and the way we live our daily lives. God’s act of creating and redeeming us, to become complete and vital, has to be reciprocated by our act of desire, assent and conversion of life. Obviously I could not yet understand this in the 1950s when I was 10 and 11 years old, as every month we piously recited our act of consecration. But we human beings do actually possess at every moment the power of becoming forever something unsurpassably magnificent: the Children of the Light, the Children of the Living God in Christ. We must not remain indifferent to this invitation. The crucial thing for each of us in our Christian adulthood, as grace continues to mature us, is to embrace with all our heart and in our concrete lives what we have already been made to be at our creation through Christ, the eternal Word, and again at our redemption through Christ, the crucified and risen Savior.
This urgency to make a radical decision and choose for ourselves what God has first chosen for us is dramatized in today’s Gospel text, from St Luke’s account of Jesus’ Passion and Death. Luke’s first message to the reader concerns the division that arises between the people and the leaders in the face of the crucified Jesus, over whose head was nailed an inscription that read This is the King of the Jews. People and leaders each chose to have a different reaction to the Jesus phenomenon. The people stood by and watched, while the leaders mocked Jesus. The attitude of the people is positive. Luke says that they “stood there”, that is, “they abided”, “stood with perseverance”. These are not people who, passing by, stopped out of mere morbid curiosity. Their being and standing there expresses a decision, a will, an interest, we might even say an involvement. The other aspect of the people’s attitude is expressed by the verb theoreîn, which here should be translated as “to observe reflectively” and not simply as “to see”. When an event is observed attentively, this is reflected inwardly on the observer and it will bring about a transformation. It is in fact from this careful observation, from this contemplation of the “spectacle” of a mocked and humiliated Messiah, that the repentance of the crowds in the face of the crucified Christ will arise.
On the cross Jesus the King is so stripped of himself that he does not respond to insults but remains silent, with only his nakedness as royal robes of state. I would be tempted to say that he responds with silence; but I wonder if his inner freedom and his being now with the Father in the depths of his heart (vv. 34, 46) do not take him even deeper than that, take him to where he no longer even hears the insults, taunts, and provocations, but listens only to the words of truth and humility of the “other criminal”, to whom he spontaneously promises communion with himself that very day in his Kingdom. At the beginning of his public ministry Jesus responded, as any good rabbi would, with words from Scripture to the temptations of Satan, the Divider (Lk 4:1-13), thus expressing his closeness to the Father and oneness with him. Now on the cross Jesus dwells in silence, and this silence is the seal of his intimacy with the Father. Jesus’ silence of compassion and self-surrender is itself the throne of selfless love and peace from where Christ rules as King of all the universe and of all ages. In brief, King Jesus will renew his surrender of himself to us at this very altar.
