On the Crown of Thorns

A Sermon for the Feast of Christ the King (Last Sunday in October)

What hath Athens Rome to do with Jerusalem? Was Julius Caesar also a forerunner? Was his crown?

One hallmark of Christ's teaching is that He teaches with authority. We hear at the close of the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, “when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were astonished at His teaching, for He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” Jesus, rather than quoting scripture as the Scribes and Pharisees did, would simply say on His own authority, “But I say!” This came as a shock. It was a shock to hear him say “Before you were taught, an eye for an eye, but I say pray for those who persecute you.“ How can he say, “but I say?” All of our other teachers merely say, “it is written?” whence comes his authority? This is what it means when they said He taught with authority. But Him speaking in this way provokes the question: who is He to speak in this manner? Is He, perhaps, the promised messianic king to come? His claim to His Kingdom is, of course, articulated by His unique demonstration of authority.

Yet, almost more astounding than His teaching with authority, and often complementing His but-I-say, a most wonderful hallmark of Christ's teaching, His perhaps more sublime demonstration of authority, is that He, Sovereign King of the Universe, teaches with all things. Surely this too, must have been a subject of conversation as news of His great deeds swept through Judea. It always matters where, to whom, and when He says something. How could St. Peter have ever ceased to take courage from the fact that his call coincided with the greatest catch of his life? So as to cement the meaning into his consciousness, we read in Luke 5 “And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will be fishers of men.” This is Jesus! This is his special manner of communicating to his friends! And Peter needed this harmony between the miracle and extraordinary calling to persevere through the difficult trials he would face in the early days of the Church. Seemingly worried Peter might forget it´s importance, the same fishing miracle is repeated once again after Jesus is resurrected in John 21:6-7. Jesus commanded

“Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and you shall find. They cast therefore; and now they were not able to draw it, for the multitude of fishes. That disciple therefore whom Jesus loved, said to Peter: It is the Lord. Simon Peter, when he heard that it was the Lord, girt his coat about him, (for he was naked,) and cast himself into the sea.

St Peter must have been strengthened for his entire ministry by the thought of that first catch and that last catch, combined with Jesus's explicit calling for him. It is so wonderful. Every detail is always part of the meaning. A normal preacher or scholar has a few ideas they repeat regardless of the context or timing. But when Jesus speaks it is like He's speaking in the midst of his own great symphony, where all things participate and contribute to the meaning, most of all those who try to resist or oppose him!

He is Sovereign King of Creation, and teaches not merely with authority in so far as he says, but-I-say, but He demonstrates His supreme soverignty by composing all things to elicit his intended meaning. Jesus is always acting in a play that He Himself wrote, and since “all things were made through him (John 1:3),“ all things assist Him in His Self-Revelation.

Another example: consider the entire chapter of John 6. One day Jesus works great miracle with bread feeding the 5000, then that evening calms the storm on the sea of Galilee, and only then on the following day holds his, at the time, perplexing or to his audience revolting, Bread of Life discourse where he told his disciples they would need to eat His Flesh. Obviously these extraordinary miracles made the crowds more likely to hear this hard eucharistic teaching, but the miracles themselves also help explain the teaching. When I first communicated or ate the Bread of Life, I would say the overwhelming feeling was one of stillness in my soul. Suddenly the sequence made a lot more sense. And thus I don´t think it's an accident that Jesus did this all consecutively, the bread miracle, then the calming of the storm, then the Bread of Life discourse on the Blessed Sacrament. St John at least seemed to get to the picture that these things need to be packaged together to get the meaning across.

But it's really always the case with Jesus. The Nativity and the Crucifixion are of course the most extreme examples of Our Lord teaching with a setting, with objects and people and animals. There is no wasted word, no trivial object, no unimportant detail in Bethlehem or on Calvary. He is teaching us through everything. But moreover, in His Passion, He is effecting our redemption through these objects. So it makes sense to contemplate them thoroughly. For this feast, the Feast of Christ the King, the Crown of Thorns is more than appropriate to consider. If we marvel over this curious tendency of Jesus to teach with everything, we should expect that no object better clarifies His Sovereignty over the Universe, no object better articulates His Kingship and Kingdom than His Crown itself! This expectation, I assure you, does not dissapoint! If he taught through bread and fishes, what greater things must He teach through his crown?!Considering His Crown is a way of approaching not only our Lord´s Kingship but also His Kingdom.

The Two Crowns of Ancient Egypt. The white crown is worn by the ruler of the upper kingdom and the red crown worn by the ruler of the lower kingdom. At times, when the kingdoms were unified, the sovereign would possess and wear both crowns.

Crown as Speculative and Practical Sign

So let us turn to this. First, a crown is a sign of a king. If we see a crown we think of a king. We could say a crown points to or points out a king and his kingdom. In ancient Egypt the white crown signified the ruler of the northern kingdom, the red crown, the southern kingdom. The character and shape of the crown signified both the king and the territory to be ruled by the King. Should we not expect the same of Our Lord? Should we not expect his crown to tell us something about His Kingdom?

Jesus was annointed with the costliest perfume according to the Will of God, so it wasn´t out of the realm of possibility that He enter Jerusalem wearing a golden, jewelled crown of incomparable splendor. David wore, it says in Psalm 21, a golden crown. Yet Jesus did not. God could have moved the heart of Pilate to fashion for him a more traditional crown in order to save his own soul had that been the divine plan. It was not given. Instead, Jesus was given a crown of thorns. This seems to hold a twofold significance. Firstly, the crown harkens back the victory laurels of Ancient Greece and Rome. Victors in the greek olympiad were given crowns composed of olive branches. In Rome, Laurels, which take their name from the plant of the same name, were worn in parades after military victory and gradually became a symbol not simply of victory but political power as well. This culminated with Julius Caesar, who wore the simple Laurel as Crown. In this case, the verdant, vibrant ever-green leaves of the Laurel signified the enduring strength and vitality of the potentate. Thus the similitude to the Roman Laurel symbolizes military victory. The similitude to Caesar´s Crown, supreme, universal political authority. On Good Friday, Jesus was crowned as both Victor and Sovereign.

Yet, Jesus was not crowned with a Laurel, which signifies a unity with the green force—what St Hildegaard of Bingen called veriditas—of nature. The crown of thorns suggests wth the Laurel, even at the speculative level, the universal scope of his victory and dominion. Yet, trading verdant leaves for merciless thorns, it signifies a conflict with nature, rather than a simple extension of it´s vitality. The thorn is first and foremost a symbol of fallen nature. It is not a dogmatic certainty that there were no thorns before the fall and that thorns grew only as a consequence of Adams sin, but many have thought thusly. With the fall of Adam, we see that human nature is altered in itself. The punishments of God— i.e. suffering, toil, pain in childbirth, and death—are issued for the good of man, for his redemption. He need embrace these things to be drawn out of sin. Yet, if human nature was transformed by sin, its likely there were also changes to the natural order itself. Pests became more prevalent, disease more potent, and perhaps plants like the rose, which previously stood out for their singular beauty and lovely fragrance now grew with imposing, threatening thorns along their stalks. Thus this crown points to victory over the consequences of sin, it points to God Himself taking the consequences of sin upon himself. A Lauren signifies the Potentates Power and Vitality, a Crown of Thorns signifies His Responsibility, Strength, and Love. As the consequences of sin were universal in scope and cosmic in scope, so too does this crown signify a cosmic sovereign, who rules over all nature by taking the perversions of nature upon himself. This is what the crown of thorns points to, it points to a cosmic Victor, a victor over the consequences of Sin and Death.

We see in the crown the key themes of the Gospel, the crown itself is a sign of contradiction. In it we find Jesus showing forth His strength in weakness, His Wisdom in foolishnes, His Glory showing forth from His Abasement, His Reign through His Submission and Obedience. In His condemnation we find Him conquering through His Crown. This sign points to a conflict with nature shows forth the sublime character of the supernatural end, just as the beauty of Him wearing his crown far superceedes the banality of the throns themselves. The Crown of Thorns points to a supernatural end so far exalted above the natural order, it does so by demonstrating a love so far beyond the natural order. And to comprehend this love we have to turn to considering the sign in its efficacy, in terms of what it was actually doing beyond merely pointing to something.

But there is really something much more significant going with a crown at the point of a coronation. It used to be that the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire would come to Rome to be crowned by the Pope, in so doing they signified their authority came from God. It is, of course, harder for us in a democratic age to imagine. We don't have Kings or Crowns anymore and the ones that still exist have no political power. As a consequence of the democratic revolution throughout the whole world, we instinctively think that political power comes from the people, not from God. This is at least what is written in most democratic constitutions throughout the world today.

So realizing it is somewhat foreign, we see two aspects of the signification of divine authority upon a King, his anointing and his coronation. In the Holy Roman Empire, these occurred sequentially in the same ceremony. The anointing is, in a sense, like his divine election, his election from God, whereby God selects and blesses the King. Samuel was called upon to anoint the young boy David as King, long before he would ever ascend to the crown. And the coronation is the formal recognition of the Sovereign by the Church and nobility. In the middle ages, the Pope was called upon, in the coronation of the Emperor, to place the crown on the head of the Emperor. In this case, the sign of the specific crown worn by this specific king is not merely a speculative matter. It doesn´t simply point to something, it creates something.

Comprehending this power of a crown rests on the distinction between a speculative sign, a sign that merely signifies or points to something, like a word or map, and a practical sign, a sign that creates something or creates what it signifies, like a stop sign or written law. The case of Our Lord’s crown is no different. All real crowns are practical signs as well, they are signs that create something. Through his anointing and coronation, by being crowned, the King receives his authority from God to rule and is formally recognized by those over which he is to rule.

So what about Jesus? What does His crowning tell us about Him and His Kingdom? First we can ask: who crowned Him? He was crowned by the Romans, By the greatest empire the world has ever known at the height of its power. Few people reflect on how important this is. Obviously, he was crowned by a soldier who represented the Roman authority and a soldier who was mocking Him by crowning Him. But I doubt Jesus missed the meaning. This was the transition from the old to the new and eternal covenant. A transition from a national kingdom (e.g. Israel), to a universal kingdom over the whole world over which he would preside as King. Of course then he needs to be crowned by the greatest universal kingdom that has ever existed. And He was! And of course it must be so. The Eternal Father seems to communicate to His Son with this coronation from the Romans, “You are Crowned by the Romans for your Kingdom will, like theirs, spread over the entire earth. You are Crowned by the Romans for your Kingdom will, like theirs, but infinitely exceeding them, spread peace through justice, not according to mere custom or prejudice but according to reason and right principle.” In the same way God raised up Nebuchadnezzar to humble Israel, we should not hesitate to see how God allowed the great Imperium Romanum to arise to exalt His Son, to elucidate the universal mission and scope of His Son's Redemption and Kingdom.

And here, at this point, with Christ´s coronation, we see the crucial point of contact. At this point, Caesar had fulfilled his divine task. First, Imperial Rome had eradicated hundreds of regional deities through its military conquest throughout North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. This too was a preparation for Christ. Then, secondly, it sought to fill the void created by this conquest and re-focus pieties within the empire upon one man in the universal cult of Caesar. Here too, we see a preparation for the King of Kings. And it´s final work was to coronate the Man who was to truly inherit and fulfill these aspirations for a universal, eternal kingdom. Christ is teaching us through all things! Even the great Roman empire flourished to prepare the way for and to teach of His Kingdom and its character. With his crowning, we can behold their coming together. This great empire would submit to His Rule within three centuries of his coronation on Good Friday.

But what is the meaning of the physical imposition of the Crown of Thorns on the head of Jesus Christ? At first glace, maybe we say, “well, Jesus had to suffer and so its a sort of torture instrument, a total abasement for him.” This isn’t wrong but it certainly misses the deeper meaning. The thorns are not merely signs of what he is doing as if one of the disciples made a gold crown for Him that read “wake up, i'm dying for your sins, friends” in big letters in the front. This would teach us something and point to something true, it would also in an explicit way convey the meaning of the crown of thorns at a speculative level. But this golden crown itself would lack the practical effect on His Kingdom, even if it had the same speculative meaning. In this sense, it would be an imperfect sign and crown for Our Lord and unfitting for Him. Instead, His Crown of Thorns not only symbolizes His message in a speculative way, but practically effects what it signifies. The thorns are not mere signs of what he is doing in order to teach people something, they are what he is doing! He is taking on the consequences of sin itself: the literal thorns on his crown that would not have existed if not for the fall of Adam. And as these thorns were placed upon His Head, His Crown was working to remove the consequences of sin, by being the practical sign of His Kingship, also through the pain and suffering they were causing as they tore into his flesh. This sign discloses the nature of his Kingship and Kingdom, but not only this.

What is truly thrilling is that, if the normal crown of a King is a practical sign—as I said, his being crowned is what makes him king—Our Lord´s crowning was this too, but also something much more spectacular. It is as if there was a special magical crown, that when one put it on, a volcano would necessarily erupt creating a massive island in the sea over which the King was to be Sovereign. This magical crown would itself at the moment of being rested upon the King's head also assemble a great fleet of ships to bring people from all ends of the earth to this island. Thus the magic crown creates both the land and the people the king will rule at the moment of coronation.

We can imagine a treasure hunter, who stumbles upon a hidden crown in a treasure chest on top of a mountain. And as he puts it on he sees emerging out of the ocean an enormous island, and then he sees people sailing to this island from all parts of the world, ready to submit to his dominion. Consider then the great joy of this treasure-hunter-king as he sees his land emerge out of nowhere in the middle of the ocean, and consider his delight at the sight of the ships full of his future subjects approaching him from the distance, just as he puts on this magic crown! How much would this King love such a special crown, and love this special moment of coronation! Of course he would be thrilled by it!

Yet no such magical crown has ever existed, except one: the Crown of Thorns of Jesus Christ. This is the practical effect of Our Lord's coronation, and this effect is only possible with a Crown of Thorns, as the land and people are created in His Body, and bought by His Blood and suffering. There is no magic here as His Magic is His Atonement, His Suffering, His Merit, His Body being opened, and His Precious Blood being spilled. The Crown of Thorns is not merely a sign of him being a King, nor is it merely a sign of His Sovereignty over the cosmos, nor even merely a sign of His Atonement for the sins of fallen nature. His crown is no mere speculative sign, His crown accomplishes all of these. The Crown of Thorns literally is a perfect sign both signifying and creating His Kingdom at the same time. And it creates the Kingdom through its signifying, which is why it is so important that we try to behold it. Yes, we should actually look at and contemplate and adore His Crown, that it´s signifying power might transform us.

It should bring us to shame and contrition to think how little we honor Our Lord's majestic and wholly unique Crown! We pray in partial ignorance: “Oh Lord, how sad that you had to wear such a crown, such a humiliation, I wish you didn't have to!” More excellent is to glance at Him on a crucifix and fall to our knees in awe, saying “Oh Lord, how can it be that you were mocked by soldiers, that you were rejected by the Jews, that you are regarded with indifference by so many Catholics, while wearing such a beautiful, such a glorious Crown! It is truly the most perfect sign, a sign created not only to reveal your heart but to heal mine. Give me the grace to behold it as I should! Fill me with the awe and love of the Saints who gazed on your Crown and fell into a stupor of love for the most High God and a great zeal for announcing his Kingdom! Forgive me for looking upon it with dumb eyes! In it alone I see your unfathomable love, my horrible sin, in it I see the whole of the Gospel.”

Truly, when we start to consider Our Lord's Crown, we can more deeply comprehend His Suffering. Make no mistake. He loved his crown! What!? Yes! It was painful, but he was tough. He was mocked for wearing it, but that wasn't the worst. He planned to wear it from eternity because it is truly the perfect sign of His Kingdom, it was helping him create His Kingdom! But when Jesus was crowned, an intellectual part of him was thrilled just like the King in the example before. For the first time, he sees the dry land emerging, he sees the ships coming. He is rejoicing! He was making the perfect sign, He is the Perfect Sign, the Eternal Word Made Flesh, itself conquering the world and redeeming mankind. What He was doing was literally Awesome and Perfect and He knew it. Most miss the full meaning of Jesus reciting Psalm 21 during the crucifixion, strictly focusing on the idea of abandonment in the opening verses of the Psalm as Christ laments, “O Lord, why hast thou fosaken me.” It's not impius to think he finished praying this psalm, it's not impius to think he began to taste His triumph as He moved onto the closing verses, saying:

All the ends of the earth shall remember, and shall be converted to the Lord: And all the kindreds of the Gentiles shall adore in his sight.

 For the kingdom is the Lord's; and he shall have dominion over the nations.

All the fat ones of the earth have eaten and have adored: all they that go down to the earth shall fall before him.

 And to him my soul shall live: and my seed shall serve him.

There shall be declared to the Lord a generation to come: and the heavens shall shew forth his justice to a people that shall be born, which the Lord hath made. (Psalm 21:28-31)

To truly behold his suffering, we must move beyond the surface level pain and mockery, to the deep sadness that no one else understood what he was doing: those he longed to be rejoicing and beholding the beauty of his crown were confused and hiding in fear. No one else was suffering and rejoicing with him! These two movements seem to condition each other. If we imagine him appearing before the Jews in royal garments with this crown, truly, I doubt if anyone other than the Blessed Virgin got the meaning. Think of that. We cannot understand Her true sorrow over the loss and mockery of Her Son if we don´t understand that a profound part of the soul of Our Lady, was rejoicing, saying “this is truly awesome!” as in awe inspiring in its beauty and power. She knew what it meant, she knew what He was doing! And she adored Him as her heart broke. Her deeper sorrow was that she was the only one! “Where are the disciples! How could they miss this?! How could they not be here for this, be with him for this?!” Her heart cried.

The greatest coronation of all time, the greatest King, crowned by the greatest kingdom the earth has ever known, standing in front of thousands of the people (Jews) who were perfectly catechized to understand the symbolic meaning of this action, with a wholly unique crown of immense unprecedented power to effect a Kingdom and create a people, whose meaning was cosmic in scope, signifying and effecting His Dominion over all creation, and only one person there understood what was going on and adored Him for it. Likely also the Apostle John as well but really we get the picture in scripture that the overwhelming majority of the disciples and followers of Jesus were beyond confused and fearing for their lives at this point. The vast majority of those in attendance wished He were dead. This is not an accident, Jesus is teaching with all things in this scene as well, this is also the picture today and it's always been the picture. There are very few souls who get it, there are very few souls who console Him and please Him. These souls need to do little more than show up and behold Him and He does the rest. But this is the deeper sorrow of Our Crucified God, this is the clue to what he meant and truly felt when he said “I thirst“ on the Cross. He thirsts for souls, for souls who want to understand what He's up to, for souls to behold and be transformed by the meaning He desperately longed to communicate to men. He thirsted for souls to save. He finds few who desire to walk with Him.

And worst of all are not the Jews who rejected him, or the protestants who never depict him wearing His Crown or on the Cross (This is not an accident). No, worst of all are the Catholics who spend their whole life in the Church without once glancing at Him and getting the point. Without once being filled with awe, affections of hope and love and gratitude. Without even trying to ponder the significance of His Crown and the grandeur of His Reign. He must suffer tremendously because His Crown itself is so forgotten and neglected. It is a sign that works miracles in our hearts, it is a sign that so clearly teaches us of his Kingdom. It is for us! It is for our good and salvation and we only need consider it! We cannot look at it for long with an open heart and not start to be shaped by His Reign. For his Crown is a Sign that effects His Reign as well as elucidating it! So behold it!

St Catherine of Sienna wears a Mystical Crown of Thorns!

Let Him Reign, Reign with Him

The practical message of the Crown of Thorns to faithful Christians should be twofold. We should let him Reign, and seek to reign with Him. Jesus Christ should reign over the three great societies of men. He should reign in the Church, He should reign in the Family, and He should reign in the Political Order.

The neglect of this final society, the refusal of Jesus Christ´s Social Kingship, has become a matter of fashion in the recent decades and a fashion with the most severe consequence. We would all do well to revisit the Messianic Prophecy of Isaiah, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Let's repeat this once more: And the government shall be upon his shoulder. By refusing to let Christ reign in the political order, Satan has been given a tremendous foothold, a foothold from which he has all too easily attacked and all but destroyed both Church and Family.

It is absolutely unconscionable to confess Jesus Christ as King of the entire universe, as Divine Wisdom Made Flesh, and then pretend His Wisdom would somehow sully the sanctity of the political order, or that offering Him the political order would somehow offend Him. On the contrary, He blesses what submits to his reign, be it Popes, Kings, or Fathers, be it His Church, Nations or Families. It is true, His Kingdom is not of this world, but it does exist in this world in the form of the Church, and part of our struggle as Christians, a “struggle” St Paul said, was ”…not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world” is a political struggle.

We fight against the forces of darkness with just laws, we defend the Church by insisting upon her rights to teach the Truth, furthermore we honor the King of Kings by recognizing His Reign and Church at the political level. It was Blessed Pope Pius IX in his encyclical Quanta Cura that he spoke of the consequences of the political order losing its orientation toward God. He writes: “But who does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?” We´ve had the temerity to run the experiment and the words of Pius IX have proved to be true. Now is the time to repent of this error. We ceased to even desire the political reign of Christ the King due to a false notion of the liberty of conscience which has been condemned by the same Pontiff in the strongest terms. He affirmed the idea that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society” was an “insanity.” And he was right.

Because we are entirely deprived of Christian States at this point in history, partially because this insane idea took hold, we would do well to take the early Christians in the Roman empire as exemplars. Contrary to popular opinion, Rodney Stark, in his book on the subject, noted how they, even as a small, poor, insignificant sect had their eyes on winning the entire empire for the cause of Christ. They hoped for it, and really it was their expectation that this would inevitably occur. They had this conviction because they knew their King was almighty.

A second practical consequence is that Christ's crown is an invitation to reign with Him. Jesus Christ reveals through his crowning is not merely His Kingdom but also the means of His Sovereignty. He reigns in suffering and through suffering. And those who serve in His Kingdom do the same. They do not reject His Way but work and walk with Him in suffering. This need not be considered as a terrifying or grim view of the Christian life, as all souls who accept their crosses are given joy and consolation in abundance. They live in the confidence and camaraderie of those who know they are friends of Christ, they live in the communion of Saints. Suffering in this case needs not be physical suffering, in fact the greatest forms of suffering are spiritual. Simply to know the great Goodness of God and who He is, and to see how few know Him, or how little we ourselves are filled with His Goodness or please Him, this is an extraordinary suffering the Saints speak of. Someone like St Teresa of Avila spoke of this suffering being so overwhelming that she could only find consolation in death or suffering for Christ.

In contrast, the near unanimous sentiment of Christians today in deed if not word is that Christ suffered so that we don't have to. The message of the Crown of Thorns says, in contrast, Christ reigns so that we can reign with Him. But only according to His Way, His Truth and Life. He commands His disciples that they “deny thyself, take up thy cross, and follow me.“ Through His Suffering, we can suffer with Him for the redemption of our souls and for the expansion of His Kingdom. No one understood this better than the Apostle Paul, who writes in 1 Colossians 1:24

[I] Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church:

We will not reign with Christ without suffering for and with Him in this world. This is the flip side of the deep consolation expressed by St Paul in Romans 8:37-39 writing,

”Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

St Paul took the Way of the Cross, therefore he conquered as Christ did. Herein lies the foundation of his great consolation and assurance. St John speaks throughout his Gospel of the “word” which Christ gave his disciples, and then only at the end of his Gospel finally reveals it. This word is: “The servant is not greater than his Master.“ Jesus Christ, Our Master, His Way is not beneath us, we ought not to excuse ourselves from it, as if we found a better way than His, or as if it is too far above us in a false, demonic humility. The persecuted Christians in the first centuries of the church confessed repeatedly to one another this scripture from Acts 14:22 in the midst of their suffering and persecution “through much suffering do we enter into the Kingdom of God.” I don't imagine they said it to one another without joy, they said it in the knowledge they were conquering the world with and for Christ. Within 300 years the improbable occured, the Roman Empire itself had been conquered by what started as a small jewish sect. The Crown of Thorns superceeded the laurel of Caesar.

To close, to restore His Reign over our lives and to reign with Him in this life and the next, we need to learn to behold His Crown. To do so, we should take the scene in Jerusalem on the day of His Coronation as normative. Jesus Christ is and was teaching with all things. For those who wish to behold Him as King, there is only one sure option. We can only know with certainty one person in the audience was getting the picture. This person was His Mother. This was not an accident, it is a grace. It was the Blessed Virgin Mary who penetrated the meaning of His Act that day, It was the Blessed Virgin whose very soul was penetrated by that meaning. Recall the words of Simeon to Mary: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Considering her sorrows on that day are most edifying. Finding her gaze on that day is the surest way to behold Him. She lends us her eyes to behold Him when we ask. And shares the thoughts of her Heart as well. If we do try to find her in the crowd, if we do seek out her eyes to look at Him being crowned—amongst the crowd chanting, “we want Barabbas, we want Barabbas, we want Barabbas”— I see a lone Woman fighting back sobs to chant, “Viva Christo Rey! Viva Christo Rey! Viva Christo Rey!” It´s high time we joined her chorus.

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