Psallam​​ TIBI​

NOLITE ASPICERE NOBIS

 

 

IT IS NOT FOR US to decide where Christ reigns. His sovereignty extends beyond time and space, beyond all minds that would accept or reject His Kingship, beyond our feeble mortal knees and tongues that would confess or otherwise Him as Lord. For you, Lord God “have taken to yourself your great power and have reigned” (Rev. 11:17) like no earthly monarch known to man. His people are all nations, led by the saints of His Church on earth; a loyal and holy people who would bear witness to His rule of love even unto death, so that the light of the Gospel which abides in all creation, though hidden to those whose eyes have not been opened, may be made manifest in all its glory through the lives of those who have been transfigured by His love.

 

For here is the true meaning of the Church Militant: not to charge and rout but to be charged and routed in His name and so to witness to the love God bears for all men in Christ; a sovereignty that manifests as the complete emptying of self for love of the other. So it is, brothers, that we are cannon fodder in this war for souls and in the daily battle to make the reality of the rule of Christ the King made known to all people. For it is a rule established in submission and in sacrifice, in humble witness to a resounding truth that evil shall not be repaid with evil, nor the depravity of the world overcome the goodness of God’s creation. For our armoury is the love of God, and our weapons and our King His Word, whose Kingdom shall be proclaimed so that the ends of the earth know to whom they owe their homage; who created them and gives them life; who seeks their good by ways of peace in this world, for He took all violence, all hatred upon himself and made them impotent in His rising, so that no more should men be slaves to sin and death but rejoice in His peace for all eternity.

 

And yet the world has never been a place of peace, our own times no less harrowing than in all the ages passed. Is it then, that Christ has abdicated His sovereignty? Or do we believe man capable of usurping His rule, while year by year we relegate the Kingship of Christ to a realm not of this world? Shall we not heed the call of this solemn feast that announces, “Lo, the kingdom of God is within you” (Lk. 17:21)? For although the late, great Monsignor Ronald Knox was right when he said that, “we are here to colonise heaven, not make things better on earth,” this still does not diminish the sovereignty of Christ in the here and now: in the hearts of those who seek to colonise heaven through their witness to the Faith, Truth, and Love gifted to us by God and made manifest in this world of sin upon the crosses we bear in His name, and upon which we should die if it meant one soul would return to God.

 

Today we indeed have a King, and by God He reigns; for He is our God, and we the people through whom His reign is made manifest in our darkened days, even though the enemy connives to deceive us that he will be victorious. The victory belongs already to our King, and it is ours, who stand undefeated against evil. It is Bernard Then’s; it is Hélène Muyal-Leiris’; it is her husband’s, who stood defiant in love in the face of the most heinous expression of hate and declared, “So no, I won't give you the gift of hating you.” Christ is King in their hearts; may His sovereignty enrapture ours too with His love, that His Kingdom may be made known in us and that we may see its glory at the gates of the New Jerusalem.