May Jesus Christ be praised and may his holy Mother pray for
us.
Today we celebrate the feast of Christ the King. This is the last Sunday of the liturgical
year. Next week we will begin the season
of Advent, the four weeks of anticipation and preparation for the great feast
of our Lord’s birth. We are only about
five weeks from the celebration of the New Born King.
Today, however, our readings and the prayers of this Mass
draw our focus to Jesus Christ who is the glorious and reigning king of the
universe. He is the one through whom the
power of evil is broken and all things are made new. Christ is the king, who as our reading from
the prophet Daniel declares, receives everlasting dominion, glory and
kingship. His is a dominion that cannot
be taken away and a kingship that shall never be destroyed. It is Christ the King who is the faithful
witness and the first born of the dead.
He is the one who loves us and who has freed us from our sins. Christ is the King who has made us part of
his kingdom and who will return in glory as we heard in the reading from
Revelation. We celebrate today that
Christ our Lord has claimed dominion over all creation so that he might present
to God our Father an eternal and
universal kingdom, a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and
grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.
And yet, dear brothers and sisters, our Gospel today does not
show us an image of Christ as the triumphant ruler. We do not see him today as the judge of the
nations at the end of history or as the shepherd who protects his flock. Today we encounter the Lord Jesus before
Pontius Pilate. We see Jesus as the one
who is to be scourged and crowned with thorns, nailed to a cross and buried in
a borrowed tomb. We see our King as one
who suffers for and suffers with his people.
Asked by Pilate about his identity as a king and about his kingdom, the
Lord Jesus responded, my kingdom does not
belong to this world. Pilate did not
recognize the kingdom and the world did not recognize the kingdom, because they
didn’t recognize the king.
At the time of Jesus there was great expectation about the
coming of the messiah. They sought a
ruler who would restore the house of David, overthrow political systems, and
with military might establish his reign.
They expected a conquering hero who would bring about his kingdom by
violence, restore the greatness of the City of Jerusalem and make his power felt throughout
the world. And what they expected was
not what they saw. They sought a ruler
and found a shepherd and a suffering servant.
Having preached the message of the love of God, declared the
poor and the peacemakers blessed, fed the thousands upon thousands, and now
before Pilate declares that he had come to testify to the truth, the Lord Jesus
reveals what appears as the greatest contradiction in his kingdom. The King reigns from a cross, and in suffering
is found the redemption of the world. As
we, dear brothers and sisters, share in Christ’s kingdom, we also have a share
in his suffering.
When we were baptized into Christ, we were baptized into his
suffering and death. What that means is
that every event of suffering in our
lives, by our union with Christ, becomes our own privileged share in his sufferings. When we encounter the suffering of illness,
we know the pain of the nails in his hands and his feet. In each and every emotional suffering, we
know the experience and the isolation of Christ in the garden of
Gethsemane. And we know the suffering in
the Heart of Mary, as we accompany those who are dear to us on their own Way of
the Cross.
Yet Christ is King of the Suffering. He is not some far off ruler apart from his people.
He is with us and we are with him. That is the good news of this feast day. In the events and the difficulties, in the triumphs
and the tragedies, in the sorrows and in the sufferings, the Kingdom of God is at
hand. Christ our King desires to reign in
us and to accomplish his will through us. As we now enter into the mystery of the Holy Eucharist,
we present our sufferings to the Lord and we pray that his Kingdom come and his
will be done, in us as it is in heaven.
Preached at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic
Church, Monroe, NC
