Knowing what Christ the King Knows

Christ is the faithful witness.

Jesus said, ‘For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.’

Christ has born faithful witness to the great and enduring truth. We need to grasp this truth, if we are to make any sense out of our lives. But we could never have figured it out, if Jesus had not born faithful witness to it and testified to it.

Christ bore witness faithfully. In other words, he testified without swerving, without fudging, without prevaricating, without betraying the truth. That Christ bore ‘faithful’ witness does not mean that He testified to His own personal “faith.” He testified to what He knows and has always known, namely God. Christ knows the great, enduring, and transcendent truth. He knows; we believe. We have faith in the knowledge of Christ.

With me? Good. Now, how did Christ bear faithful witness? How did He testify to the mysterious truth of God?

He did it by His every act and His every word. The world has no royalty as royal as Christ, and His royalty consists in nothing other than this: That His entire Person has always submitted itself entirely to the will of the Father.

He submitted to being born of an obscure Jewish virgin. He submitted to growing up in a poor family and working hard with His hands. He submitted to every jot and tittle of the Old Covenant, in order to fulfill it. He submitted to a hardscrabble, vagabond ministry of long wanderings and cold nights sleeping on the desert ground. He taught and worked miracles precisely as His Father would have Him do, not for His own personal adulation, but to glorify the One Who sent Him and to reveal His truth. He chose Apostles and disciples, trained and instructed them, not on His own hook, but precisely as the Father willed. He instituted the Holy Sacrifice of His Church, and He gave Himself over as the innocent Lamb to reconcile mankind with God Almighty. He rose from the dead, walked the earth for forty more days, ascended to heaven, and poured out the Holy Spirit—all in perfect accord with the Father’s plan.

In other words, Jesus Christ is the king of harmony with God. He bore faithful witness and testified to the truth precisely by this perfect harmony.

Now, the next question: With what, exactly, has the Christ harmonized? To harmonize requires the original melody, with which one proceeds to correspond. That original is the content of Christ’s testimony. The original is the will, the plan, the truth, the love to which the Son submitted Himself, the One from Whom Christ the King received His royal inheritance, the One from Whom Christ came and to Whom He returned in glory, once His work was done—the One of Whom Christ is the image, the One Whose invisible face we see when we see Christ, the One Whose Spirit Christ pours out upon mankind.

It is no mean co-incidence that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are…wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, piety, fortitude and holy fear. All of these involve direct interior contact with the transcendent, invisible, unknowable Origin, to Whom Christ bore witness and testified. By these gifts we, too, like Jesus, harmonize with the Origin, the Source, Maker, Governor, and Reason of all things.

And gifts they are, because we ourselves, humble lumps of earth, can neither see, nor know, nor grasp, nor domesticate, nor reduce to our level this Great Father of our existence. The clay cannot say to the Potter who molds us, “We’ve got you! We see it! We have your number! We know your game!” No.

That’s what I am trying to say here: Only Christ and His saints in heaven see the Almighty Potter of this clay. But our royal King of Harmony with the Maker pours forth spiritual gifts upon us who believe. Despite our human weakness and ignorance, then, we do have genuine interior communion with the unseen God. We are wise to His grand plan; we understand and know Him; we hear His commands and deport ourselves as His children; we have His strength to endure difficulties, and we truly fear the prospect of grieving Him.

In other words, through faith and the gifts, we stand firmly on the undying Ground that nothing can rattle or shake; our spiritual houses are built on that solid rock; our home is nothing other than God. Indeed, by faith and the gifts, we reign right alongside the eternal King, Jesus Christ. Having in our minds His mind, we share in His sublime royalty; we enjoy the state of being crown princes of the cosmos right along with Him—because we, too, harmonize with the Father.

The first and last note of Christ’s harmony with God is adoration. Eternally, infinitely, and intimately, the Son adores the Father. The harmony = the act of love that submits completely to the divine Beloved. The glory, the honor, the pomp and circumstance of the true King? Spreading out His arms on the cross to fulfill the divine love. We celebrate this sacrifice, our King’s eucharist, at the holy altar—and all the spiritual gifts He gives us come to fruition.