This is the edited text of the Homily For the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe and Investiture in the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 24 November 2024.
Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper follows the lives of two young boys, Tom Canty and Edward Tudor, born on the same day in 1537 and looking strikingly alike. For all the similarities their lives could not be more different: Tom lives in poverty with his alcoholic father and survives on whatever he can beg; while Edward is heir to the English throne and lives in a royal palace where servants cater to his every need.
Now nine years old, Tom and Edward meet by chance at the gates of the Palace of Westminster, and strike up a friendship. They are fascinated by each other’s lives and, noticing their uncanny resemblance, decide to swap clothes “temporarily” to see if anyone notices and to experience each other’s worlds.
Tom, donned as the Prince of Wales, knows nothing of courtly life and expectations and is soon thought by his father, Henry VIII, to be suffering amnesia following a fever, if not going mad. Though he enjoys the comfortable life, Tom discovers a princely existence is not all it’s cracked up to be. Struggling with guilt about being an imposter and behaving too humanely for a Tudor prince, he nearly blows his cover.
Meanwhile Edward, dressed as a beggar, experiences the darkness of Tom’s ordinary life: the hunger and abuse at home, the stark inequalities of London society, the injustices of a judicial system that issues barbaric punishments for minor “crimes” on the flimsiest evidence. After various adventures, including a prison stint, and upon learning that King Henry has died, Edward returns home to prove he is the real prince and assume his new title. As King Edward VI he grants his double a privileged place at court.
Twain’s novel highlights our common humanity and the way accidents of birth and class can define us and set our trajectory in life. Both boys come to realise that their circumstances are largely down to chance and this realisation evokes in them a greater mercy towards others. After experiencing life in Tom’s shoes, Edward decides to use his new power, not just to lift up his friend Tom but to share his privileges more broadly and ensure better law and order in future.
Mark Twain had a complicated relationship with the Christian faith. Born into an austere Presbyterianism, he was, he confessed, “educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic.” But having read the sceptic, Thomas Paine, at an early age, he became a critic of all organised religion. Still, he attended religious services and discussions, funded churches and counted clergymen amongst his closest friends. His writing was generally satirical, including that which touched upon religion, yet his story of the compassionate young king, liberating subjects born into bondage by first sharing in their life, and then mercifully offering them a share in his life, is a thoroughly Christian one.
Like the fictional Edward Tudor who decides to throw off his royal identity and live for a time as a pauper, so too did Christ. As St Paul writes, though he was God, Jesus emptied himself and was born in the likeness of men; assuming the form of a servant, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death on a cross (Phil 2:6-11). But Jesus’ “assuming the form of a servant” was no childish game or social experiment, nor simply the imagination of a creative novelist. It was real. In the incarnation that we will soon celebrate at Christmas, the King of the Universe humbled himself to become fully human, with all the nobility and vulnerability of the human, and let himself experience the dark side of human lives and deaths. Like the boys in Twain’s story, God the Son swapped clothes with us, so to speak, out of friendship, so that his friend—each human person—might experience the glory proper to him and partake in his divine life (Jn 1:12; Rom 8:1,17-18; 2Cor 5:17; 1Jn 3:9; 2Pet 1:3-4).
In our readings today Daniel and John “gaze into the visions of the night” and see one “coming on the clouds” upon whom is conferred sovereignty and glory (Dan 7:13-14; Rev 1:5-8). People of every nation and language—such as we see gathered in this cathedral every week—will be his subjects. But the striking note in these apocalyptic dreams is that this eternal divine Lord is, as Daniel says, “one like a son of man”, or as John says, one who could like us be pierced through with a lance, could die for love of us. To say that a man could sit on the throne of God, or that a God could assume a human nature and die, was a shocking notion to the ancients and still to many today. But it’s true!
And if the implications of this for God are astounding, what it means for us is equally flabbergasting: that we might be made into priestly kings of the very same line as the divine royal family. And so, many of the great doctors of the church, from St Irenaeus to St Athanasius to St Thomas Aquinas, have dared to say what sounds almost blasphemous: that “God became man so that man might become God.”
To be a subject of Christ the King is to be made a sharer in His wealth, power, sovereignty, truth—something like no kingdom of this world (Jn 18:33-37). It is, in the words of the Prophet, to be made and remade in the image of God (Gen 1:27; 9:6; 2Cor 4:4) or in the words of the Psalmist to be made “little less than gods” (Ps 8:5).
And so, dear friends, as we declare out loud our faith in Christ, enthroned now at the right hand of the Father, coming again in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and whose kingdom will have no end, we whisper to ourselves that we are this king’s subjects and submit our minds, hearts and wills to his. To recite the Creed is to commit to living as subjects, friends, even family, to the God made man, the king made slave, the prince made our friend.
