But the word Kingdom is basically social. The first sense of its “social” setting is the familiar “Pater noster”. The prayer is addressed to “our” Father and not just “my” Father. This “social” sense is confirmed in Matthew 25. At the end of time, the flock will be gathered and there will be judgement. The King is not really the “monos-arkhein”, the monarchy. Instead, the King is revealed to be “society”. Who is the King and when have we met Him? For as long as you shelter the poor, give food to the hungry, quench the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner. As long as you perform these actions to “the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me”.
The Kingdom that Christ has come to establish is societal in its expression. It requires that society recognises His sovereignty by resembling what His rule stands for. Thus, the building blocks of the kingdom has to be more than mere individuals. Even the word “individual” cannot stand alone because it is a relational term. No one is an individual without the context of the other. The foundation of society is the individual but rather the family and in our case, the basis for the Kingdom is the Christian family.
We are focusing on the Christian family in the context of the Sacred Heart of Jesus because it is our feast day. There is an act which has fallen out of use but it is related to the family. It is the act of consecration of the family to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
St John Paul II in his apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio (1981) remarked that every person learns what it is to be loved and to love, in the bosom of the family. Family life is crucial to our social development. The Catechism calls the family “the original cell of social life” (CCC2207). Within the family, the foundations are laid for a person to be who he or she is meant to be both through the love of God and of neighbour, that is, the family. Our closest neighbours are our parents and our siblings.
The family plays such a central role in the health of any civilisation. When Malays encounter bad behaviour, what do they say? “Kurang ajar”. The Teochew refers to the family—boh kah si (meiyou jia jiao). Therefore to create a civilisation of love we need to appreciate the truth about man, the truth about the family and only then can we know the truth about society. Without these interrelated truths, "civilisation" can become a merely superficial term which describes an ordered or developed society, where people are polite to one another. We can be polite to one another but that is not necessarily a civilisation. Look at our country. Malays can exist on their own and they do not need us. Chinese can also exist on their own. The indigenous East Malaysians can be happy without us. And we polite to each other but the question is this: is that nationhood?
The core of our being is relational which in our case means that fundamentally man must stand in relation to God. Without God, man will be left adrift because God cannot be replaced by the state or even by himself. As long as God is absent, we will not be able to be who we truly are, the Imago Dei, that is, the image of God.
Man as an image of God is called to responsible and personal collaboration with creation for his good and the good of all. No man is an island. We are called to community which brings us to the basic community, the human family. According to the Pope, "Human fatherhood and motherhood contain in an essential and unique way a ‘likeness’ to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love".
The family brings us directly into the heart of the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity. As a Trinity of Persons, the inner life of God becomes a model for the family. As God the Father loves God the Son in a mutuality of “I” and “thou” or “you”, so too the relationship of a man and a woman in marriage. The mutuality between husband and wife opens itself out to life through the procreation of children. Therefore the establishment of the human family is founded the truth of who we are as persons created in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian God.
This makes sense of the Act of Consecration of the Family to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He commands us to do it because He had revealed the Trinitarian inner life of love. We are invited to live that love. The way to do it is to shape ourselves into that love by consecrating the family to the love revealed in the Heart of Christ.
The family is the means to deepen our love of God and neighbour. To welcome the presence of the Heart of Jesus, is to draw from Him the true love that our families need to craft a civilisation of love. According to Pope Pius XII, the consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is our way of building up the Kingdom. May the love of Jesus Christ of which His Heart is the fountain, take possession of our private and public life so that He may reign over society and home life through His law of love.
