CHRIST THE KING – NOV 25, 2018 + RDNGS: Dan 7:13-14; Rev 1:5-8; John 18:33b-37.
“My kingdom does not belong to this world … I came into the world to testify to the truth … Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
The Kingdom of God is found in every home where parents and children love each other. It exists in every country that cares for its weak and vulnerable, that welcomes strangers, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free;”
God’s kingdom is in every church, synagogue and mosque that reaches out to the poor and needy regardless of race, color or creed.
Dorothy Day put it well when she wrote, “I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.” Then she quotes Christ the King himself, “Inasmuch as you have not fed the hungry, clothed the naked, sheltered the homeless, visited the prisoner, protested against injustice, comforted the afflicted, etc. you have not done it to Me.” “Christ,” continues Dorothy, “identifies Himself with the poor.” (The Catholic Worker, November, 1949, as quoted in CW, Nov, ‘18) Then, in one of his twenty-nine letters to Dorothy Day, our own Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote, “If there were no Catholic Worker, and such forms of witness, I would never have joined the Catholic Church.” (Hidden Ground of Love, p. 151) Both Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, in their own way, reflect today’s gospel: As Christ the King within us says to the Pilate within us: “I came into the world to testify to the truth.”
Normally kingship is associated with power, prestige, and wealth. Christ’s presence and kingship are found in his suffering and death for our sakes and in the tension within our own lives as we struggle to align ourselves with the truth of the kingdom of Christ our King.
Today we celebrate Jesus Christ as our King, but St Bernard of Clairvaux reminds us, that … “Just as Jesus is Lord and King, Mary is Lady and Queen because she is the Mother of the Lord, the Mother of the King. This entitles her to be ‘queen of the world’ … Mary is queen because her Son is King. “Our queen’s diadem,” says Bernard, is lit up with twelve stars and Bernard invites us to contemplate the ‘queen wearing the diadem with which her Son crowned her’. Sharing his glory, she is raised upon a royal throne. We are her serfs, and she is our ‘gracious queen.’ “The Virgin,” says Bernard, “is the road which the Saviour came to us, but she is also the means, the path, by which we are to go to Christ”.
The whole of the New Testament makes it clear that response to the reign of God and the kingship of Jesus has everything to do with how we live out our earthly citizenship – how we work, pray, pay, buy, sell and vote. In this we honor Jesus (to use the words of today’s reading from Revelation) as “faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth.”
In other words, Mary’s Son, Christ the King, who lays down his life for us, will be known only through us, through our lives of self-sacrificing love. Only in this way will the world come to know and believe. This feast of Christ the King, then, is a challenge to all of us: Do we, or do we not, reveal the God who is Love?____________________________________