Christ the King

Christ the King, also called Christ the King Sunday, is kept on the Last Sunday after Pentecost, the Sunday closest to November 23, the day that closes the church year before Advent begins its new cycle. The feast is comparatively young: Pope Pius XI instituted it in 1925, fixing it first to the last Sunday of October, and the 1969 revision of the Roman calendar moved it to its present date at the year's end. Anglicans received the day in this later form; the ACNA BCP 2019 appoints it under the heading "Christ the King," with a collect adapted from the 1925 Roman text and readings that turn each year on a different scene of Christ's reign, from the sheep and the goats before his throne to his crucifixion beneath the mocking title "King of the Jews."

The feast began as a direct response to a particular moment. In the encyclical Quas Primas, issued December 11, 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King and named his reasons plainly: the "plague of anti-clericalism", the rise of aggressive nationalism in the wake of the First World War, and a spreading refusal, in Pius's words, to let the "empire of Christ over all nations" be so much as named in the councils of governments. He placed the new feast on the last Sunday of October, just before All Saints', and gave it a collect that echoes Ephesians 1:10 ("to unite all things in Christ," ESV): God's will to restore all things in Christ. The claim of the feast was not a political program but a counter-claim: that a kingship the world had stopped acknowledging was, in fact, the only stable ground under it.

The feast's date did not stay put. In 1969, as part of Pope Paul VI's revision of the Roman calendar (the motu proprio Mysterii Paschalis), it moved to the last Sunday before Advent, closing out Ordinary Time rather than punctuating October, and was raised to the rank of a Solemnity under a fuller title, Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. The new placement gave the feast a structural role it had not had before: it became the hinge on which one telling of Christ's story swings shut and another, Advent's watching for his coming, swings open.

Anglicans took up the feast in this later, hinge-shaped form. The 1979 American Book of Common Prayer carried the collect, adapted from the 1925/1962 Roman text, under the plain heading "Proper 29," without naming the feast explicitly; the explicit designation "Christ the King" arrived with the adoption of the Revised Common Lectionary. The ACNA BCP 2019 preserves both: the same contemporary English collect, and the feast named outright. The collect itself sharpens its Latin original at one notable point, adding the title "King of kings and Lord of lords" (Revelation 19:16) to a prayer that already spoke, from Ephesians, of a will to restore all things in Christ.

What the feast asks the church to hold is a kingship of a particular, non-obvious kind. Pius XI's own encyclical is careful on this point: Christ's reign is not the sort the twentieth century's nationalisms were fighting over. It rests on the same ground the Gospel gives it, in Jesus's own answer to Pilate: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36, ESV). The kingship the church confesses on this day was declared before a Roman governor, exercised from a cross, and is still, in the world's ordinary reckoning, mostly hidden. Advent's first candle, lit the following Sunday, watches for the day that hiddenness ends.

The lectionary assigns a different Gospel to each of the three years, and together they trace the arc of the kingship the day proclaims. In Year A, the Gospel is Matthew 25:31-46, the sheep and the goats gathered before the Son of Man's throne, where the King identifies himself with "the least of these my brothers" (Matthew 25:40, ESV); the Old Testament reading, Ezekiel 34:11-20, supplies the prophetic image behind it, God himself searching out and shepherding a scattered flock. In Year B, the Gospel is John 18:33-37, Christ's exchange with Pilate and the declaration that his kingdom is "not of this world" (John 18:36, ESV), paired with Daniel 7:9-14, the vision of one like a son of man given "dominion and glory and a kingdom" that will not pass away (Daniel 7:14, ESV). In Year C, the Gospel is Luke 23:35-43, the crucified Christ mocked as king and answering the penitent thief with a promise of paradise, read alongside Colossians 1:11-20, Paul's hymn of Christ as "the image of the invisible God", by whom, through whom, and for whom all things were created (Colossians 1:15-16, ESV).

Taken together, the three-year cycle refuses to let the feast settle into any one picture of kingship: judgment, testimony, and the cross each get a Sunday. The throne the church confesses each year is, in every version the lectionary gives it, a throne reached through service, truth telling, and suffering rather than around them.

The day keeps the ordinary shape of a Sunday Eucharist, with the Preface of Christ the King said or sung at the table and, where a parish marks the day with any particular note, a hymn of Christ's reign rather than any added ceremony. What the feast changes is not the rite but the register: for one Sunday a year, the church says out loud what it otherwise mostly assumes, that the crucified Jesus is also, already, the reigning one.

For an ordinary worshipper, the day's usefulness is exactly its timing. It falls at the point in the calendar where a year of remembering Christ, his birth, baptism, teaching, death, and rising, comes to its close, and it asks a plain question of that whole remembered year: to whom, in fact, does it all belong? The lectionary's answer each year is different in its details and constant in its shape: a king known by mercy toward the least, by truth spoken to power, by a promise kept from a cross. Whatever allegiance a year has been building, one way or another, ends up measured against that king.

Christ the King closes the long Season after Pentecost (also called Trinitytide), the church's plainest, least-marked stretch of the year, and does so with a burst of comparative solemnity: white vestments, the Preface of Christ the King, and, in many parishes, hymnody chosen for the day rather than drawn from ordinary stock. "Crown Him with Many Crowns," Matthew Bridges's hymn built on the crowned rider of Revelation 19, and Charles Wesley's "Rejoice, the Lord Is King" are both genuinely associated with the day and appear regularly in Christ the King hymn lists across traditions that keep the feast.

The Sunday's real work, though, is structural rather than ceremonial. It is the last note of the church's year-long telling of the story of Christ before Advent restarts the cycle at its beginning, in watchful expectation rather than remembered fact. Coming immediately before Advent Sunday, it turns the church, in the space of a week, from looking back over a completed year of Christ's story to looking forward to his coming again.