“In the Lord’s hand the king’s heart is a stream of water that he channels toward all who please him.” (Prov 21:1)
The feast of Christ the King has always been an important day for Regnum Christi and the Legion. We are arriving to the half way mark of our Jubilee year and coming up on our actual anniversary as we celebrate this feast, so I wanted to share a personal reflection about what it means for me to have Christ, as my King, in the Regnum Christi movement.
Usually for a king to rule, he would have to lead a battle over some land or a nation and therefore integrate those conquered as his subjects. Since God is God, He could have just chosen over whom He wanted to rule; instead, more than merely choosing us and fighting to conquer us, He also decided to fight for us. This battle took place on the cross, and continues to be fought each day, so that we belong totally to Him. Therefore, the cross is the instrument through which Christ conquers and reigns.
On the other hand, Christ chose the cross as the means to unite Himself to us. There, Christ was exposed in His weakness; in no other occasion was He in more need of help. He was defenseless. As St Paul tells us, “he was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God’s power. Likewise, we are weak in him, yet by God’s power we will live with him” (2 Cor 13:4). As the cross opened His heart to us, so our cross opens our heart to Him. The cross is the key which allows us to let Christ in, the catalyst which transforms our suffering into a deep expression of love. The cross touches us in the most intimate part of our existence, where Christ wants to reign. Therefore it is clear that through the cross Christ establishes His Kingdom. For Christ to be King, it means that He intimately unites Himself to us.
Since the cross is an expression of love and He reigns from the cross, His Kingdom therefore is a Kingdom of love. He invited us to be His friends, “no longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15). He has invited us through this kingdom into a relationship of love, love expressed through the cross. We can call Him “King”, because we are in love with Him, it is an expression of our love for Him.
Christ wants us to reign with Him, “if we endure, we will also reign with Him” (2 Tim 2:12). He was made King through the cross, and it is through our own cross, which we are given, that we are able to reign with Him (cfr Gal 2:20). The cross, both His and ours, is the battlefield where God wins our hearts, and where He will continue to win many others.
The cross is both the experience and expression of love. The cross is where Christ expresses His love for us, and where we both experience His love and express our love for Him. The cross has been concretely present for us in the movement. These past 75 years of the Legion have been marked by the cross, and therefore by God’s love. In the movement, He reveals His love and we both experience His love and express our love. This means that for us the movement has become the place where this encounter and exchange of loves takes place.
Regnum Christi is an apostolic movement dedicated to nourishing Christ’s Kingdom in society. So for us, the mission can’t be separated from our promise to love Christ, just as Peter’s mission to tend Christ’s sheep cannot be separated from his promise to love Christ (cf. Jn 21). He pours out His love to us in the movement, and our fidelity to the mission opens the floodgates of His Heart so the rivers of His love can reach many other souls. “In the Lord’s hand the king’s heart is a stream of water that he channels toward all who please him” (Prov 21:1). Christ has chosen the movement for us to experience His love, and it is this love that we are called to bring to others. Through the cross, He establishes His Kingdom in us, and it is in the movement the cross becomes a concrete reality of a personal encounter with Him, by living out our mission and bringing His love others.
