Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King (C), Vigil
November 23, 2019
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
- This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, on which the Church celebrates the Solemnity of Christ the King.
- The dialogue we’ll enter is the one that took place on Calvary. The first dialogue was provocative. Soldiers, the chief priests, passers-by all cried out, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself!” The thief on his left reviled him saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” But Jesus didn’t respond to their derision with a direct response in words, but with silence, prayer and mercy — “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” But then there was another conversation with the thief crucified on his right. He turned to the one being crucified in the middle, and said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replied to him, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise!”
- The latter is one of the most incredible dialogues of all time, one in which we’re called to echo the prayer of the good thief. Thousands of times a year, we Christians pray, “Thy kingdom come!” As we prepare for the Solemnity of Christ the King, it’s important for us to ponder what type of kingdom we’re praying will come so that we may enter, dwell and rejoice in it.
- When Jesus inaugurated his kingdom, it had nothing to do with the expectations of almost anyone at the time. 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 Jews in general, 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 just mocked him to put on a show and come down from the cross, as if he were a professional wrestler about to make a dramatic comeback. Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power that they could comprehend.
- For most Jews at the time, Jesus’ crucifixion was the proof that he was precisely not the long awaited Messiah-king for whom they had been waiting for centuries. The Jews anticipated that the descendent of King David 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. Every one 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.
- Even the apostles had a false idea about what it meant to be in the service of the king. We see throughout the Gospel that they were competing against each for the greatest positions in the messianic administration as they imagined it would be on earth. After James and John got their mother — how pathetic is that!? — to go up to Jesus to ask him to do whatever she asked and to grant that her baby boys sit on his immediate right and left as began his kingdom, Jesus used it as a lesson for all, who were hungering after the same worldly authority and power: “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 was not lost on everyone. 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 the ability to see 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 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. The good thief 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. So with faith, he turned to the malefactor in the middle — who would breathe his last before even the thief 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.
- St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in a Eucharistic Hymn, “Peto quod petivit latro poenitens.” “I asked for what the good thief asked for.” To pray, “Thy kingdom come!,” as we do thousands of times a year, is to beg for the grace to enter with Jesus into his kingdom. It means to seek to be with Jesus, not in a generic sense, but to be with him in giving witness to the truth even if we should have to die for it, to be with Jesus in laying down our lives in service of others, to be with Jesus in suffering and death, even on the Cross. 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 reign with him by living with him a cruciform life, a life of the true sacrifice of oneself out of love for God and others. This is what we celebrate on Sunday.
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