Christ the King (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 23, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, B, Vigil
November 23, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we celebrate him, for the 100th time in the Church’s liturgical history, as King of the Universe. The Solemnity of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925, when he celebrated it for the first time on December 31, to conclude the 1925 Jubilee Year. For the next 44 years it was celebrated in the traditional Latin liturgy on the last Sunday of October and since 1970, in the new order of the Mass, it has been celebrated in November on the last Sunday of the liturgical year. The Solemnity is an opportunity to celebrate what Christ’s kingship means and then, as Pius XI suggested, to commit ourselves to let him reign in our minds, wills, hearts, and bodies. This Sunday, as we enter into Jesus’ dialogue with Pontius Pilate on Good Friday morning, we get a glimpse into the kingdom Christ has established and how it’s supposed to impact us.
• Pilate begins his conversation with Jesus by asking the question that Jews had been discussing, and trying to answer, about Jesus for the previous couple of years: “Are you the King of the Jews?” To ask that question, was to ask whether Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Jesus replied, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” Pilate tried to deflect the question, saying, “I am not a Jew, am I?” But the question cannot be ducked, and it cannot really be answered by what others have told us. Jesus came into the world to establish a personal, saving relationship with everyone he has created. As the Good Shepherd who would leave the 99 behind and go after the one sheep who is lost, he is interested in 100 out of 100. It’s not enough for him to be the King of “others” or even the King of the “cosmos.” It’s not enough for the pope, or the priests, or the Catechismto proclaim him sovereign Lord. It doesn’t suffice that we dedicate Churches to Him or whole religious institutes under the title of Christ the King. It’s not adequate, in other words, even that the whole Church in heaven and on earth acclaims him as the Savior and Lord. Jesus wants each of us personally and intimately to say and mean, “Thy Kingdom come!,” rather than just doing so because others have told us about this reality. Jesus died to become your king and my king and wants to have that life-giving relationship with each of us. He wants to become the most decisive reality in our life. Therefore, the first response we’re called to have is to ask ourselves honestly whether we have that relationship with him. Is he King of our time? Of our family and love life? Of our work, leisure, and money? Of our mind, heart, soul and strength? While he objectively is the one through whom all things are made, the King and Lord of all, have we subjectively, freely, wholeheartedly, lovingly chosen him to be our King, to obey him and follow him with trust, with love, with joy? If we have not established him as a King of all parts of our life, then we really do not have the relationship with him that is right and just.
• This thought is conceptually simple, but morally hard. For us to name Christ as King is, in this world, not to be a fair-weather fan of Jesus, like those who root for a championship team because they’re the winners. 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 later 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. The chief priests, Roman soldiers, passers-by, even the thief on his left mocked him. 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. All the way until the resurrection, the apostles had a false idea about the kingdom and what it meant to be in the king’s service, incessantly competing against each for the greatest positions in the messianic 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 his kingship, to enter into his kingdom with him, 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. We have to proclaim him king ourselves, and this is not just a notional or verbal consent, but something we live.
• There’s a second point I likewise think is key. After Jesus said he was king of a kingdom not of this world and Pilate followed up by querying, “Then you are a king?,” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. 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.” 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 and help us to live in it. 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 between what is in the mind and what is in the world, but a personal relationship, saying during the Last Supper, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” He came not just to teach us truths, but to allow us to enter into relationship with him as the ground of our entire existence. 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 the “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 inseminate and seduce us to live a lie. Satan’s is a dominion of lies, spin, slander, deception, and self-deception. Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of truth.
• When Pope Pius XI established the Solemnity of Christ the King in 1925, he did so to counteract the virulent falsehoods being propagated by the communists and militant atheists who in proclaiming that God didn’t exist were essentially announcing that truth doesn’t exist. Without God and the truth anchoring human existence in reality, they were capable of distorting human anthropology made in God’s image and likeness and reordering all existence to power. Just eight years before Pius XI instituted the feast, Bolshevik communism had arisen to “free” the people from the “opium” of faith in God, which they mendaciously claimed was only a means to keep people subjugated. In Mexico, there had been a similar revolution against the “old order” and one of the first results was anti-clerical persecution based on a militant atheism. Religious orders were banned. Churches, monasteries, convents and other religious buildings were confiscated by the State. The Church needed to go underground and many Catholic priests, religious and lay people were martyred. Since there really was no God, they claimed, the churches and Christians were just seeking greater foundation for their pursuit of political power.
• Over the course of the last century, attacks against the truth have grown, for example in the philosophical movement of relativism, which in a self-contradictory way proclaims as a truth that there is no truth, and particularly in 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 based on sentimentalism or emotivism. We see it in particular in gender ideology, with which many are trying to indoctrinate our culture and especially our kids. Gender ideology says that there’s no truth to our biology, no truth to our having been made by God as male or female, but that male and female are just social attributions and mental states. We are whoever we want to be, whoever we say we are, they claim. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be full of compassion and love for anyone who sincerely, but erroneously, thinks he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body or a man trapped in a woman’s, or someone who is pangender, or a genderqueer, or one of scores of other so-called gender identities. We know such people need help and they deserve our love. But we do them no service to pretend with them that they’re not male or female, that there’s no meaning to that biological truth, that the emperor is well dressed and living sanely in the real world. We, in fact, facilitate their living a lie about themselves, and make all of society complicit in living that lie. Christ the King came to testify to the truth and says that those who belong to the truth listen to his voice, who in the beginning created us male and female. The Solemnity of Christ the King, which this year we mark for the 100th time, 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 helping others to live it in the context of powerfully ensconced untruths that will injure people in this world and beyond.
• This Sunday, as we publicly celebrate Christ as King the Universe and together cry out, “Thy Kingdom Come!,” let us commit ourselves to make him king of all parts of our life, to live in the truth of his kingdom, which, as we’ll pray in the Preface on the Solemnity, is a “kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace,” and to help all others come to recognize, enter, remain in and extend that kingdom. Long live Christ the King!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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