Note: please bear with me as I come leaping back into this project after a fallow season. I don’t know what future I can conceive for these essays, as 2020 has upended my plans like many others’, but when an essay appeared for this Sunday I had to pursue it. Thanks for reading.

For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. 1 Cor. 15:15

The liturgical year ends a month early, today, with the feast that celebrates the eternal reign of Christ. After the drama of the Lord’s foretelling (Advent), incarnation (Christmas), manifestation (Epiphany), suffering and death (Lent and Holy Week), resurrection (Easter) and presence in his church (Pentecost), we end with the proclamation that Christ is now what he will be forever—Lord of all. It is, for me, among the most joyful feasts of the year.

The Bible is full of stories of kingship, but the one that haunts me at the moment is that of the founding of it all, the origin of the Israelite kingship with Saul. Settled into their promised land, the Israelites are not content to have God as their king. They demand he provide them with a human authority, a tall and imposing man to whom they can pay fealty as their neighbors do to their own kings. Grudgingly, God obliges. Glory and suffering follow, the suffering in at least equal measure to the glory.

Human beings are king-seekers. We do not long tolerate a situation like that described in the book of Judges, where every man does what is right in his own eyes. We need someone to glorify, somebody to tell us what to do, somebody to whom we can ascribe worth-ship. Much as we may seek it in contemporary liberal democracy, true equality—the total flattening of every hierarchy—cannot be attained. It’s simply not the way we work.

Please do not take me to be endorsing some form of authoritarianism. Equality is a noble goal that we must pursue insofar as we can. Yet I do believe that the human ecosystem is more like a forest—with some large life forms disproportionately creating the conditions for others—than a monocultural field of equally-sized soybean plants. Forests, of course, can be more or less healthy, with a more or less beneficial balance between trees, shrub, and understory plants. To clear-cut the forest and establish an evenly distributed field is not the road to health; rather, we need to manage the ecosystem asymmetries in a form that conduces the good of all.

I take it that in 2020 we are in a Judges-type situation. Many petty kings compete for our loyalty, and the effects of this chaos have been dispiriting. To speak frankly, dear reader, many of my hopes—in the garden and otherwise—have been dashed this year. The work I hoped to do even in these essays has been called into question by the turmoil of American culture today. In the rolling crises of this year, it is clear that each of us believes himself to be, not only his own lord and master, but his own source of truth and determiner of reality. The effects of this fragmentation are dispiriting. Culture-building work like perennial gardening, writing literature, and creating place can seem futile in a climate of suspicion and fear, callous indifference and preening judgement.

Yet this is why I need to proclaim the reign of Christ. I need a king who can and will “put all enemies under his feet”—not a strongman to enact my preferred political program, but an eschatological Lord of lords to proclaim his victory over all this foolishness, wickedness, and spite. I need hope grounded in one who will draw all things to himself, just as surely as we have pulled them all apart. I have no hope else.

When I need reassurance of that kingship, I listen to Handel’s Coronation Anthems, particularly this recording by The Sixteen. Though composed for the coronation of a human king, George II of England, they are in fact a thrilling proclamation of the kingship of Christ, with all the wonderful bombast Handel can typically muster. In particular, I am thinking now of the third movement of the anthem My Heart Is Inditing, culminating in a lyrical and gorgeous phrase adapted from Psalm 45: “The king shall have pleasure in thy beauty.” As the bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so the king looks, in Handel’s telling, upon his queen. Her beauty delights him, even as it returns to find its source in him.

In such an ugly time, then, I find the true testimony to Christ’s kingship in the beauty of the world. The kings of squalor deserve not even a moment of my attention. I strive against all my baser instincts to turn my mind and my eyes away from the flickering images towards the true king of beauty.

I find such beauty in my garden, though at this time of year it is a spare beauty, reflected in the good bones of the land and not its limbs and outward flourishes. My trees have shed their leaves, most vegetables have ended their season, every flower has toppled and dried. Yet amid this seasonal triumph of death, I take comfort in the hidden life of cold-hardy cilantro, still green under cover, and in the coronation of bare peach branches angled upward toward the sky.