O Rex Gentium
“O King of all nations and keystone of the Church:
come and save man, whom you formed from the dust!”
~~~
O come, Desire of nations, bind
in one the hearts of all mankind.
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
and be Thyself our King of Peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel!
1. O King of All Nations
Long ago, God had told Abraham his intention to make out of him a “great nation,” to “bless” him, and yet also to “bless those who bless [Abraham],” and in this way in fact to bless “all the families of the earth.” In the second “chapter” in God’s great story, in the book of Exodus, we see a bit further into God’s intentions with the Israel he built out of Abraham. This ‘nation’ is not ordered according to the politics of other nation states. It will eventually have a king, yes, but the priest and the prophet will factor equally significantly in terms of the authority which brings order to this peculiar nation.
Exodus 19:5-6 Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall become my treasured possession from all the peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6 and you shall become to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
The verses in Isaiah which inspire us to sigh with hope, “O Rex Gentium,” “O King of Nations,” are even more specific in how they describe the role this peculiar nation God has built will fulfill in relation to other nations:
Isaiah 2:2-5 It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, 3 and many peoples shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” . . . 4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. 5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD.
There will be a house of God to which all peoples from all nations—including ourselves from our own secular nation—will stream; that is, we will need to decide to “leave” our nation behind in order to “travel” to a different place where there is a house in which we will worship. We Catholics do this when we leave the nation in which we were born and in which we are [in a secular sense] “citizens” to go on pilgrimages. Yet in a less dramatic but no less real way, we “leave” our nation just as surely whenever we step into the house of God to go to mass. And our path on this journey from one secular nation into the one holy nation God has built, will be illuminated by “the light of the LORD,” who is Jesus Christ.
2. O Jesus, King of All Nations
Jesus, the Christ—God’s Anointed King, presents a “Constitution” for this “nation” throughout his teaching, most centrally in his “sermon on the mount,” where he presents the proper understanding of the law he (!) had given to Moses on another mountain long ago. This constitution—what we could call the “politics” of Jesus—is summarized poignantly by the theologian Stanley Hauerwas:
[Jesus] gathers people around his law so that a society comes into being like no society the world has ever seen . . . . It was a society which, counter to all precedent, was mixed in its composition: it was mixed racially with both Jews and Gentiles, mixed religiously with fanatical keepers of the law and advocates of liberty from all forms, with both radical monotheists and others just in the process of disentangling their minds from idolatry, mixed economically with members both rich and poor. When he called his society together, Jesus gave its members a new way of life to live. He gave them a new way to deal with offenders: by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence: by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money: by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society: by building a new order, not smashing the old. He gave them a new pattern of relationship between men and women, between parent and child, between master and slave, in which was made concrete a radical new vision of what it means to be a human person. He gave them a new attitude toward the state and toward the enemy nation.
~~~
“O King of all nations and keystone of the Church:
come and save man, whom you formed from the dust!”
~~~
O come, Desire of nations, bind
in one the hearts of all mankind.
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
and be Thyself our King of Peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel!
3. Prayer & Meditation
As we “leave” our homeland to move toward Jesus our King in the house of God, to worship and adore him, he will cast his light with perfect wisdom on areas we need to ponder. He may comfort some of us who need to be comforted about the relationship we have with the secular nation in which we live, given that our most fundamental identity is as citizens of a different, multinational people. And he may unsettle others of us who perhaps need to be unsettled about how much of this secular nation’s ideals we have absorbed into our lives, at the expense of the ideals of the holy nation in which we have been made citizens.
Jesus, King of all nations, shine your light on all my allegiances, and show me how they should be ordered. Help me to serve your nation—the Church which you built out of Abraham and founded on Peter—better than I have. Show me how and where to devote myself and my abilities.
December 22