A Kingdom of Priests For His God and Father, Christ the King (B), November 24, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of Christ, King of the Universe
Official Mass of Thanksgiving for My Time as Catholic Chaplain at Columbia
November 24, 2024
Dan 7:13-14, Ps 93, Rev 1:5-8, Jn 18:33-37

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• For every Christian, but especially for young Christians, it is crucial for us to come to know who Jesus Christ really is and what he expects of us. Today’s Solemnity of Christ the King helps us to do both. This year’s celebration is particularly special. The Solemnity of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI on December 11, 1925 in the encyclical Quas Primas. Twenty days later, on December 31, Pope Pius celebrated it for the first time, to conclude the 1925 Jubilee. For the next 44 years it was celebrated in the traditional Latin liturgy on the last Sunday of October. Since 1970, in the new order of the Mass, it has been celebrated on the last Sunday of the liturgical year in November, as today we do for the 55th time. One doesn’t have to be a math whiz to know that 1+44+55 equals: 100. And so we rejoice to mark for the 100th time today the Solemnity of Christ the King. It is a chance to celebrate what Christ’s kingship means and, as Pius XI suggested in 1925, to commit ourselves to let Christ our King reign in our minds, wills, hearts, and bodies. His papal motto was Pax Christi in Regno Christi, that the peace of Christ comes in the Kingdom of Christ. For us to have the peace that Christ the Prince of Peace came into the world to give and to leave us, for us to have that peace for which our hearts yearn and our anxious age needs, we must enter into, we must live, the reality of his kingdom. Today we have the chance to focus on how.
• It’s common when we celebrate this Solemnity to give our attention to the cosmic and eschatological dimensions of the manifestation of Christ as King, when, as Daniel saw in his vision in today’s first reading, we will see “one like a Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” to receive “dominion, glory and kingship,” whom “all peoples, nations and languages” shall serve, whose “dominion will be an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, [and whose] kingship shall not be destroyed;” the one whom the Book of Revelation today describes as the “ruler of the kings of the earth, … coming amid the clouds of heaven;” the one whom the Psalm indicates “has made the world firm, not to be moved,” whose “throne stands firm from of old,” who is “everlasting,” enrobed in majesty and splendor. These dimensions are an important part of today’s celebration and a key aspect of Christian faith and hope, as we live out the consequences of what we profess in the Creed, that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.”
• But it’s also helpful for us to remember, today and always, that, through his incarnation, that majestic King and Lord has come into the world to make it possible for us to enter into his kingdom not just later but now. The first words of Jesus’ public ministry were, “This is the time of fulfillment. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Later he said, “The Kingdom of God is among you” and sent out the apostles, and then the 72 disciples, to proclaim, “The kingdom of God is at hand for you.” The Kingdom, he said, was not a spectacle you’d point to, “Here it is!” or “There it is!,” it wasn’t meant to be a reality fundamentally in the future, but it was something that was both now and not yet. He announced the kingdom with an urgency. He showed it was near. And he wanted us to enter into it right away and help others to enter it.
• In his preaching, Jesus gave many parables about the Kingdom, how to become part of it, live in it, and help grow it. It’s important on this feast of Christ the King to ponder with fresh wonder Jesus’ words. He said that the Kingdom starts small like a mustard seed but then becomes huge; that that seed of the kingdom is meant to be received on good and rich soil that bears fruit 30, 60 or 100 fold; that it grows like wheat in the midst of weeds or like beautiful fish in the midst of rotten; that it positively influences everything around it like yeast in dough, and needs to be treated like the richest pearl one has ever seen or a treasure buried in a field, readily selling everything else we have to obtain. He reminded his contemporaries that many tax collectors and prostitutes were entering the Kingdom before most of the Scribes and Pharisees, because these notorious sinners were far more willing and eager to leave behind their old lives to seize it and experience newness of life. Jesus reminded us in his other preaching that to enter the kingdom, we must seek it first above other things, convert and become like children, be poor in spirit, be born anew from above by water and spirit, long for it like wise bridesmaids awaiting the Bridegroom, work for it like laborers in a vineyard setting our hands to the plow and not looking back, keep our baptismal wedding garments clean and fit for the banquet, violently cut ourselves off from what is incompatible with it and be willing to suffer for it. On this Solemnity, therefore, it’s essential for us not just to look ahead to when Jesus will come on the clouds, but to recognize that the kingdom is already among us and to make the choices necessary to orient our whole life to it. As Catholics on Columbia’s campus, we are called to be living in Christ’s kingdom now. While we go to the same classes as everyone else, eat in the same dining halls, and climb the same stairs before Low Library, Christ the King summons to do things, in fact do everything, differently. We’re called to do them as citizens and subjects of the Kingdom. If Columbia’s motto is, In lumine tuo, vidibemus lumen, “In your light, we will see the light,” taken from Psalm 36:10, we are the ones called in particular to see, walk and radiate that light, the light of the Kingdom and of its King, the true Light of the World.
• That requires a choice. Today’s Gospel, taken from Jesus’ dialogue with Pontius Pilate on Good Friday morning, helps us to focus on that choice. Pilate begins his conversation with Jesus by asking the question that Jews had been discussing, and trying to answer, for the previous three years: “Are you the King of the Jews?” They were debating whether Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Jesus didn’t reply with a “yes” or a “no” but with a question. He said to the Roman procurator, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” Pilate tried to deflect the query, saying, “I am not a Jew, am I?,” but the question cannot be ducked, and it cannot be answered by just regurgitating what others have told us. Jesus came into the world as King to establish a personal, saving relationship with every person he has created, from Pontius Pilate, to our Lady and St. Joseph, to you and me. As the Good Shepherd who would leave the 99 behind and go after the one sheep who is lost, he is interested in every one of us, every one of our friends, and each person we’ll meet. It’s not enough for Jesus to be the King of “others” or even the King of the “universe.” It’s not enough for the pope, or the bishops or the Catechism, or our parents, grandparents and godparents, to proclaim him sovereign Lord. It’s not adequate even that the whole Church in heaven and on earth acclaims him as King and dedicates Churches and religious institutes to Him under the title of Christus Rex. Jesus wants each of us personally and intimately to say with sincerity and desire, “Thy Kingdom come!,” rather than just doing so because others have told us about this reality. He wants each of us to recognize that now is the time of fulfillment, to repent and believe, and to live by the parables and instructions he gives about the life of the kingdom. Jesus died to become your king and my king and wants us to ground our existence in the reality of the life-giving relationship the King wants to have with us. The future Pope Benedict once told the catechists of the world words I’ve never been able to forget. “The kingdom of God,” he stated, “is not a thing. The Kingdom of God is God. The Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our — in my — life. God is not a faraway ‘ultimate cause,’ God is not the ‘great architect’ of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it. On the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of history.” Christ the King wants to become not just part of our life or even an important part of our life: he wants, as Cardinal Ratzinger tells us, to become the most present and decisive reality in our life, in each instant of our personal history. Therefore, the first choice we’re called to make today is not to live just by what we’re inherited from the Church and those who have passed on to us the treasure of the faith, but to make those values personal and intentional. We’re called to celebrate this feast not just because it’s what the Church has put into the Missal and missalettes for November 24, 2024. Today, rather, we mark what we strive to live each day, here on Columbia’s campus and beyond: that Jesus is the most present and decisive reality in every act of my life, that I want Jesus to be King of my time, my affections, my study, my work and leisure, my family bonds, my loves and friendships, my mind, heart, soul and strength, all I am and have. When Jesus asks, “Are you saying this about me yourself or have others told you about me?,” he wants us to say, “I am saying this about you my deepest personal conviction, by faith, and with all my mind, heart, soul and strength.”
• To accept him as King of our whole life and to resolve to order everything in our life to him is conceptually straightforward, but morally hard. For us to denominate Christ as King is, in this world, not to be a fair-weather fan of Jesus, like those who root for a championship team simply because they are triumphing. That’s why today’s Gospel scene of the King of the Universe before a Roman procurator is so important. By worldly logic, the last thing Jesus looked like as he hung upon the Cross on Good Friday was a conquering king. He was bathed in blood, not clothed with royal purple. He was hammered to a Cross, not seated on a bejeweled throne. He was crowned with thorns, not capped with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and Jews in general, Pilate would order that an inscription in three languages be placed above his head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Rather than pay him homage, most in the crowd mocked him, as did the chief priests, Roman soldiers, passers-by, and even the thief on his left. They all derided him in the same way: “If you’re truly the king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, come down from that Cross and save yourself.” Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power that they could comprehend. To name him as our King is to recalibrate everything to his way of reigning. He told Pilate, “My kingdom does not belong to this world” and “is not here,” but we often try to frame his kingdom in earthly categories. Until the resurrection, the apostles all had a false idea about the kingdom and what it meant to be in the king’s service, incessantly competing against each other for the greatest positions in the royal administration they imagined Jesus was about to inaugurate. But Jesus said to them and to us, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men make their authority over them felt. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” To proclaim Jesus’ kingdom, to enter into and share his kingship, means to be willing to give our life as a ransom for God and others, to serve rather than be served, to give rather than get. That’s why it’s not sufficient to listen to what others are saying about Jesus, because to live in his kingdom, each us of must undergo a moral revolution in which we live by the King’s values rather than by the world’s. We have to proclaim him king ourselves not just by our thoughts and words but in our actions.
• Jesus’ interrogation by Pilate in today’s Gospel also points to another reality that’s essential for us to live in Christ’s kingdom here on campus and wherever our future paths take us. After Jesus stated that his kingdom was not of this world and Pilate followed up by querying, “Then you are a king?,” Jesus replied, “You say I am a king.” In other words, he said, “That’s what you call me,” but Jesus very much wanted to distinguish his kingdom from all earthly realms. He stated, “For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Jesus was stressing that his kingdom, the reason for which he had entered the world, was to witness to the truth, to help everyone enter the real, real world. Once again Pilate tried to duck the personal thrust of Jesus’ words by asking, rhetorically, “What is truth?” But we can’t escape the meaning of Jesus’ words. His whole mission was to remind us of the real, real world, the world God created and holds in existence, the world that goes far beyond what might appear in the morning newspapers, with the relatively minor details of who happens to be president, or the richest person in the world, or the latest movements on the stock market or the battlefield. The real, real world is the realm where the saints live, in the world but not of it, acknowledging Christ as King, storing up for themselves a treasure that can pass through a needle’s eye that rust can’t corrode, thieves rob, or the IRS tax. Jesus came to witness to this truth, that the real, real world is his kingdom. Earlier in the Gospel of St. John, Jesus had said, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Knowing the truth, in other words, is the difference between slavery and freedom, between living a lie and living in the light. A little later Jesus would further specify that truth isn’t just a correspondence — or as the philosophers teach us an “adequation” — between what is in the mind and what is outside the mind, but ultimately is a moral correspondence, a personal relationship, with him. He said during the Last Supper, “I am … the Truth.” He came not just to teach us various truths, but to invite and urge us to ground our entire existence on our relationship with him the King. The big battle in the world, the war between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death, is between truth and falsity, between Christ the Truth and Satan, whom Jesus calls a “liar and the father of lies.” To proclaim Christ as King is not just to announce the truth but to commit ourselves to seek the truth, find the truth, know the truth, love the truth, live the truth and share the truth in a context in which “Prince of demons” tries to seduce us to live a lie. Satan’s lair is a dominion of lies, spin, slander, deception, and self-deception. Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of truth. To live in his kingdom is to stop pretending, to stop treating life as if it’s a game or a dream, and to commit ourselves to the reality of his Kingdom and to live maturely, full-time, in every aspect of our life, with the King. This is so important on college campuses today because various professors, explicitly or subtly, are relativists, proclaiming, in a self-contradictory way, the truth that there is no truth. It’s key at a time of even more pernicious moral relativism, which says that it’s wrong to believe that there is right and wrong. But now we are facing a particular cultural assault on the truth unprecedented in human history, based on sentimentalism or emotivism, in which people are trying to argue that there’s no truth even to the incontestable facts of our biology, to our having been made by God as male or female. They are claiming that male and female are just social attributions and mental states, and are trying to get everyone else in culture, at the price of being cancelled, to pretend that the naked emperor is well-dressed and living sanely in the real world. As Christians, human beings, friends and fellow citizens, we do no favors to anyone, especially to those who are suffering a profound anthropological confusion, to enable them to live in a made-up world far from the kingdom. Christ and we love them too much for that type of cowardly omission of truth and charity. Christ the King came to testify to the truth and says that those who belong to the truth listen to his voice, the voice who in the beginning said, “Let us make man in our own image,” and then “male and female he created them.” In the context of powerfully ensconced untruths that will injure people not just in this world but potentially forever, the Solemnity of Christ the King is the occasion for us to reaffirm not just the fact of his kingdom but to commit ourselves to living the truth in every way, and to help others to live the truth, too.
• Today on this great Solemnity that we’re celebrating for the 100th time, we’re likewise thanking the Lord for the last two-and-a-half years that I’ve had the privilege to serve as your Catholic chaplain, and for the Lord’s 25 years of faithful help as I have sought to serve him as a priest. The work of a Catholic priest is always to try to proclaim and prosper the Kingdom of God and, by what he says and how he lives, to help people come to embrace that kingdom. That’s what I’ve sought to do here.
• I remember one of the first conversations I had with members of the board of Columbia Catholic Ministry (CCM) in the summer before I arrived. Normally when people reach out to you before your arrival, it’s more than just to get to know you, but they have a hope to influence some of your priorities. Fair enough. I was talking to one student, the CCM retreat chair, who got right to the point: “Father, I’ve been praying that the new chaplain would increase opportunities for Eucharistic adoration.” I asked her, “How hard have you been praying?” She replied, “I’ve been praying every day for it for now several months.” I told her, with a smile, “God has been listening.” She said, “What?” I said, “How about adoration every weekday?” She couldn’t believe it. But that’s what we’ve done together. It’s obviously a priority for a priest to facilitate the encounter of Christ’s beloved faithful with him the King, to give them a chance to come to be with him, to listen to him, to befriend him, to love and adore him. In another pre-arrival conversation, I asked the officers what they thought about moving the daily and Sunday Masses from St. Paul’s Chapel on campus here to Notre Dame, so that we could offer more easily what I call “full-menu Catholicism,” with daily confessions, adoration, kneelers and more that wouldn’t be possible at St. Paul’s. They were very supportive, but asked me if I’d be open to keeping two things, Ash Wednesday ash distributions at St. Paul’s to make it easier for students who couldn’t come to Mass that day and to continue Eucharistic Processions on campus, both of which I was very eager to do. Everything I’ve tried to do as chaplain has been ultimately to foster life in the Kingdom. I’ve heard every semester about 140 hours of confessions, because the call to live in the Kingdom always involves repenting and believing. I’ve celebrated and prepared people to receive the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, Penance, First Communion, and Marriage, and helped people discern to follow God to seminary and to religious life, because to live in the Kingdom is to encounter the King in the Sacraments and to receive his help to order our whole life to him. Together with others at the Merton Institute and with the FOCUS Missionaries, I’ve sought to provide some high-quality formation in the faith, so that you can learn the about Christ the King and about living in his kingdom at a level commensurate with your aptitude and what you’re getting in your various classes at Columbia. I’ve endeavored to catalyze the charity that is characteristic of the Kingdom, as we remember that Christ said that those who will enter into his eternal kingdom will be those who recognize him, the King, in those who are hungry, thirsty, sick, a stranger and otherwise in need. And I’ve tried to foster the common life of the Kingdom, as Christ the King came not just to save us as individuals but to form a real family, a royal family. What a great joy it was to me to be able to be present for the opening of the Merton Institute on February 11, 2023, the first fully dedicated center for Columbia Catholics in Columbia’s 270-year existence, and a place in which all of these aspects of life according to the Kingdom can happen far more effectively.
• I’ve spent altogether ten percent of my 25 years as a priest here at Columbia, and I have to say that while I’m grateful to God for all of my assignments, for the work that has been entrusted to me, and for the people I’ve met, served and learned so much from, these last five semesters with you have certainly been among my happiest years. For the rest of my life, I’ll cherish the memories I’ve had here, especially the way I have seen so many of you grow not just physically and intellectually but especially spiritually. The conversions that I’ve witnessed in our OCIA program, on our retreats and recollections and in the confessional, the spiritual upgrades I’ve behind as people made commitments to daily Mass (for some before they were even Catholic), or adoration, or learning the faith, serving each other and caring for those in need, have filled me with joy and hope. I thank you for your faith in Christ the King and the way your faith has inspired and buttressed my own. I want to thank in a particular way the generosity of the founders of the Merton Institute for making all of this possible for all of us; the FOCUS Missionaries and the Merton staff for being my trusted and diligent collaborators; and the CCM officers for their love for the faith and their spiritual maturity in making the decision to serve their fellow Catholics at Columbia. It’s been so great for me to see what we’ve been able to accomplish together in such a short time.
• The essence of a chaplain’s work, of a priest’s work, is summed up in today’s second reading from the Book of Revelation. St. John tells us that Jesus Christ, “ruler of the kings of the earth, … has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.” To live in the kingdom is to live as “priests” for God the Father. This is referring not to the ministerial priesthood of the New Covenant, which 407,000 men across the world with me share, but to our common priesthood by baptism that all 1.3 billion Catholics share. Three days ago, we marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, referring to Jesus as the Light of the Nations. In that foundational document, the fathers of the Second Vatican Council underlined the role of the ministerial priesthood in catalyzing and facilitating the priesthood of the baptized and clarified what the baptismal priesthood means. They taught, “Christ the Lord … made the new people ‘a kingdom and priests to God the Father.’ The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, [in other words, by the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation,] are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, in order that through all those works that are those of the Christian they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the power of Him who has called them out of darkness into His marvelous light. Therefore, all the disciples of Christ, persevering in prayer and praising God, should present themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” Our common baptismal priesthood, which is the way we live in the kingdom, is a life of prayer and offering our lives as a loving oblation. Lumen Gentium continues, “The common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ. The ministerial priest, … acting in the person of Christ, makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice, and offers it to God in the name of all the people. But the faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood, join in the offering of the Eucharist. They likewise exercise that priesthood in receiving the sacraments, in prayer and thanksgiving, in the witness of a holy life, and by self-denial and active charity.” Therefore, the supreme act of the Kingdom of God that Christ came into the world to inaugurate is, for us — as “priests for our God and Father,” through our baptismal priesthood and through the ministerial priesthood that supports it — to offer the Eucharist and together with Christ offer ourselves. That’s what I’ve tried to facilitate as your priest chaplain, to help us all make Jesus in the Mass, the source, summit, root and center of our life, so that we might live each day with Christ the King, reigning humbly at Mass and in the tabernacle, who wants to set up his throne in each of us through Holy Communion.
• As we today, for the hundredth time in the history of the Church, prepare to celebrate this supreme expression of our adoration of Christ the King and the apex of our life as a kingdom of priests for our God and Father, we ask Christ the King whom we are about to welcome on this altar and many of us receive in Holy Communion to help us to make him “the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of [our] life, in each and every moment of history,” especially every second of our blessed time here at Columbia. As we prepare to cry out in the Our Father, “Thy kingdom come!,” we ask God the Father and Christ the King to send the Holy Spirit to help us bring every part of our existence into the kingdom, the kingdom of truth, “of holiness and grace, … of justice, love and peace,” as we will soon pray in the Preface. We also ask him to strengthen us so that we might be his emissaries going out to the campus and indeed the whole world, joyfully and courageously proclaiming that we believe in, love and serve Christ the King not because others have told us about him, but because we have come to know him, to be changed for the better by him, and now can’t wait to help others come to know, love, serve and reign with him, too. Now is the time of fulfillment. The Kingdom of God is truly at hand. Let us make haste to enter! Long live Christ the King!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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