Exploration into Christ

On this final Sunday of the liturgical year, once again we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King.  Every year I find myself asking: what is this day about?

Many of the principal feasts of the year commemorate either an event in the life of Christ (Annunciation, Christmas, Epiphany, Baptism, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost) or of Our Lady (Immaculate Conception, Birth, Presentation, Assumption) or a person (an angel or saint, or Our Lady under one of her titles).  By contrast, I have heard other feasts described as celebrating an idea.   Examples would include Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, Sacred Heart and Christ the King.  The implication seems to be that these latter are more recently established and less ‘pure’ from a liturgical standpoint.

The USCCB website describes the liturgical year this way:
“The Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ—his suffering, death, and resurrection—is continuously proclaimed and renewed through celebrating the events of his life and in the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints. … The mystery of Christ, unfolded through the cycle of the year, calls us to live his mystery in our own lives.  This call is best illustrated in the lives of Mary and the saints, celebrated by the Church throughout the year.  There is no tension between the mystery of Christ and the celebration of the saints, but rather a marvelous harmony. The Blessed Virgin Mary is joined by an inseparable bond to the saving work of her Son, and the feasts of all the saints proclaim the wonderful works of Christ in his servants and offer the faithful fitting examples for their imitation.”

So, if the whole of the liturgical year is centered on the praise of God for the gift of his Son, Jesus Christ, for our salvation, just as celebrating Our Lady, the saints and angels point to Christ as their source and goal, then these so-called idea feasts find their place as elaborations upon the person of Christ, as explorations of who he is.

We end the liturgical year with an invitation to enter the mystery of Christ, King of the Universe, the source, “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15) and the goal “the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might be preeminent” (Col 1:18).  “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rv 22:13).  “For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Rom 11:36).  Our liturgy points us to the Apocalypse, the full revelation of Christ in glory, in order to prepare us for the new beginning that will be coming soon, in the staggering simplicity and intimacy of his human birth.

I would like to draw your attention today to a work of art which expresses this magnificently.  No doubt you have heard of the Book of Kells, that manuscript of the four Gospels, illuminated around the year 800 by monks at the monastery founded by St Columba on the Scottish island of Iona, and then brought to the monastery of Kells in Ireland where they took refuge from Viking raids.  The Book of Kells is widely agreed to be the most beautiful book ever made.  It represents the full flowering of the insular style of Celtic art, distinctive to Britain and Ireland in the post-Roman era.  The manuscript includes ten surviving full-page illuminations and many more marginal illuminations and decorated initials, which are believed to be the work of three artists and four scribes.


The Gospel of Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus, followed by a portrait of Christ enthroned.  We were given a copy of this last year, and it hangs in our library. In it, Christ is dressed in red and blue, with golden-red hair in intricate curls, and is flanked by peacocks.  Peacocks function as symbols of Christ throughout the book. According to Isidore of Seville and Augustine, their flesh does not putrefy, which points to Christ’s Resurrection.  He is surrounded by intricate designs characteristic of this artistic style.

But it is the next image in the book that really takes one’s breath away.  The ‘second beginning’ to Matthew (after the genealogy) was given emphasis in many early Gospel books, and it opens the narrative of the life of Christ with the words Christi autem generatio (“Now the birth of Christ . . .”) (Matt 1:18).  The artist represents the Holy Name of Jesus with a monogram, consisting of the Greek letters chi (Χ), rho (ρ), and iota (ι), the first three letters in the word Χριστός, Christos.  In Insular Gospel books the initial Chi Rho monogram was enlarged and decorated.  In the Book of Kells, it has grown to consume the entire page, the single most lavish miniature of the early medieval period.


One commentator writes: “The chi-rho monogram is accorded special dignity in Christian art.  Here the chi takes up nearly the whole page, its arms and legs extending to the four corners, exuding a kinetic energy.  It reaches, it leaps; it blossoms and enfolds.  It is beautified with intricate interlaces, spirals, and lozenges, and it’s teeming with life!  Creatures of the land, air, and sea dwell within and around—cats and mice (nibbling on a Eucharistic wafer!), birds and moths, an otter and a fish, humans and angels.  There are vines and flowers too, and the whirling gears of the cosmos—all of it spilling out of the precious name of Christ.”

The rho is nestled underneath, with a golden-red-haired man peering out, which many think represents Jesus.  The firstborn of creation and the firstborn from the dead, is born of the Virgin Mary.

Another commentator notes: “The decoration of the text of Christ’s birth suggests the identification of Christ incarnate with Christ the Creator-Logos … Christ as the divine Word is here revealed in a word, a single letter, concealed within the design. Similarly, commentators meditating on the name at this point in Matthew’s gospel, described his divinity as lying hidden in his creation, beneath his human flesh at his Incarnation and beneath the literal letter of the scriptural text.”

What is the purpose of this image?
What is the purpose of this feast?
What is the purpose of our whole liturgical life?

- To set our hearts on fire with love for Jesus Christ.

In the recent encyclical, Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis quotes Bonaventure saying that “faith is in the intellect in such a way as to provoke affection.  In this sense, for example, the knowledge that Christ dies for us does not remain knowledge, but necessarily becomes affection, love” (DN 26).  We know well St Bernard’s teaching that God’s intention in becoming incarnate was to draw us to himself through the beauty and lovableness of his humanity in Christ.  Pope Francis again: “The eternal Son of God, in his utter transcendence, chose to love each of us with a human heart.  His human emotions become the sacrament of that infinite and endless love” (DN 60). This is how we meet him and come to know him, person to person, and how we gain access to ourselves, to the depth of the mystery of our own hearts.  As Benedict XVI puts it: “All of us, when we pause in silence, need to feel not only the beating of our own heart, but deeper still, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible with faith’s senses and yet much more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world” (DN 81).

Today’s feast offers us a way into Christ, to his full divinity – the beginning and the end of all creation – expressed in a human nature like our own, a heart fully present and attentive.  Let us worship and give him thanks.
 
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells (History and contents)
https://artandtheology.org/2024/08/20/the-book-of-kells-by-howard-nemerov/ (Commentary, interpretation, animation)
https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/concern/folios/6395w7327?locale=en (Full resolution image with zoom capacity)
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/20241024-enciclica-dilexit-nos.html (Recent encyclical on the Sacred Heart)
 
Images
Christ Enthroned & Chi-Rho Monogram, Book of Kells, circa 750–early 9th century.