Christ the King (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 19, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, C, Vigil
November 19, 2022

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 joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Christ the King wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we celebrate the last Sunday of the liturgical year and, in many ways, the culmination of everything we have marked up until now — the goal of Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, Pentecost and Corpus Christi and of all the Sundays and feasts throughout the year. They have all pointed toward this reality, that Christ is the King of the Universe, the Lord of all, the judge of the living and the dead. All of time, all of history, is heading toward this climax when Christ will be revealed to people of every race, nation and religion as the universal King of Kings.
• This feast is relatively very young. It was instituted only 97 years ago by Pope Pius XI during the 1925 Jubilee at the request of many bishops and faithful from around the globe in response to a militant atheism that was trying to repress belief in Christ and suppress Christian presence in the world. Just eight years earlier, Bolshevik communism had begun to show its evil head and was seeking to “free” the people from the “opium” of faith in God. In Mexico, there had been a revolution against the “old order” and one of the first results was anti-clerical persecution based on a similar militant atheism. The Church needed to go underground. Catholic priests like Blessed Miguel Pro, whose feast we will celebrate on Wednesday, risked their lives and donned various disguises to try to bring the sacraments to those in need. After Blessed Miguel was arrested and hastily brought before the firing squad, he pronounced, as the soldiers raised their rifles and took aim, his emphatic valedictory, “Viva Cristo Rey!” — “Long live Christ the King!”
• Christ the King. The last thing that Jesus seemed at the moment that Blessed Miguel was murdered was to be reigning, but in fact he was, even though it did not correspond to anyone’s idea of what a king’s reign would look like. Similarly, when Jesus inaugurated his kingdom, it had nothing to do with anyone’s expectations either. The last thing Jesus looked like as he hung upon the Cross on Good Friday was a king. He was bathed in blood, not clothed with royal purple. He was hammered to a Cross, not seated on a throne. He was crowned with thorns, not with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and humiliate the Jews, Pilate had ordered 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 mocked him. The Roman soldiers and passers-by mocked him. Even the thieves crucified with him mocked him. And 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 they could comprehend. And a crucifixion would be proof that he was precisely notthe long-awaited Messiah-king for whom they had been waiting for centuries. The Jews anticipated that when the Son of David came, he would rule in the way that his ancestor David had ruled. He would use his power to subjugate all those who made themselves his adversaries, not take their abuse and die a horrible death to save his abusers. They were totally unprepared for a king who would serve at all, not to mention to the point of death.
• The Romans were likewise unprepared for a king like Jesus. When Pontius Pilate interrogated Jesus, he asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would be fighting that I not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not of this world.” Then Pilate retorted, “So you are a king?” Jesus replied by describing more specifically what type of king he was and what type of kingdom he was establishing. “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” The Romans thought that kingship meant having the power to crucify or pardon. They thought it was associated with force. Jesus said it is associated with truth and that the meek would inherit the earth.
• Even the apostles had a false idea about the kingdom and what it meant to be in the king’s service. We see throughout the Gospel that they were competing against each for the greatest positions in the messianic administration they imagined Jesus would inaugurate. Jesus used it as a lesson, saying, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. 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.” That is Jesus’ kingdom. To enter into his kingdom with him, to be his right hand, to be his cabinet ministers, 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.
• Jesus’ true regality, however, was not lost on everyone. After initially joining in the mocking of Jesus, the criminal on Jesus’s right — at arguably the worst moment of his up-to-then bad life, during his excruciatingly painful public execution — had a change of heart. He now began to see what up until that point he had missed, how special the one being crucified beside him was. The Good Thief could understand in his own body the incredible, biting pain Jesus would have been experiencing a few feet away, and yet he could see that in Jesus that pain had not gained the upper hand. He was able to glimpse that for Jesus, to reign is to serve, to reign is to love, to reign is to give witness to the truth, and to reign is to forgive. The Good Thief saw that Love, Mercy, Service and Truth incarnate was triumphing beside him. He grasped what almost everyone else was missing, that Jesus, mysteriously through suffering and death, was not about to lose a kingdom, but to establish one. He wasn’t about to experience an ignominious defeat but a glorious triumph. With faith, therefore, he turned to the Malefactor in the middle — who would breathe his last before even the thief himself would! — and humbly begged, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom!” He was asking a dying man to remember him, something that would only be possible if the thief realized that the dying man would somehow still live and be capable of remembering. And the King turned to him and promised that he would do more than remember him. With the largesse befitting the most magnanimous monarch, he declared that he would take him with Himself into the eternal kingdom of paradise. We learn here a very valuable lesson. The ancient Christians used to say, Regnavit a ligno Deus! “God reigns from the Cross.” To say, “Thy kingdom come,” to seek to enter his kingdom, is to resolve to pay him true homage on his throne, to pick up our own cross and follow him, to make of our life a true sacrifice out of love for God and others, and so to reign. It’s to live in the truth of his kingdom. It’s to learn how to serve others and give our life as a ransom to set them free from slavery. It’s to live with the courage that befits the kingdom and be willing to suffer if we have to, just like Christ the King suffered on the Cross.
• As we prepare on Sunday to receive Christ the King within, we turn to him and ask what St. Thomas Aquinas asked in one of his famous Eucharistic hymns, “Peto quod petivit latro poenitens,” “I ask for what the Good Thief asked,” to be with him not only in a paradise to come but in a loving communion that begins now. Viva, Cristo Rey!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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