Our Eucharistic King Humbly Reigning, Christ the King (C), November 20, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Corpus Christi Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of Christ the King, Year C
November 20, 2022
2 Sm 5:1-3, Ps 122, Col 1:12-20, Lk 23:35-43

To listen to a recording of the homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today we celebrate with great joy the Solemnity of Christ the King. It is 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.
• The reality of the cosmic proportions of Christ’s kingship is attested to by St. Paul in today’s reading from his Letter to the Colossians. Christ the King is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, through, for and in whom all things were created in heaven and on earth and in whom they hold together. He is the beginning, before all things, the firstborn from the dead, and the dwelling place of divine fullness. He is the one who has reconciled both heaven and earth, in whom we have redemption, who has delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us to his kingdom. This the King we celebrate.
• But as we see in today’s Gospel, the last thing that 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 many crowns of gold and diadems. To ridicule him and humiliate the Jews, Pilate had ordered that an inscription in three languages be hammered 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 all of them 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.
• For most Jews at the time, Jesus’ crucifixion was the proof that he was precisely notthe long-awaited Messiah-king for whom they had longed for centuries. In the first reading, we see the beginning of David’s kingship in Jerusalem. The Jews anticipated that when the Son of David finally came, he would rule in the way that his ancestor David had ruled. He would defeat all foreign powers and would be brutal to those who opposed him. When David marched into Jerusalem, right after the end of today’s first reading, the inhabitants of Jerusalem who opposed David told him that even the blind and the lame of the city were united in opposition against him and would defeat him. So when David’s men took the city, they went up and attacked even the blind and the lame. The Jews anticipated that the Messiah-King would use his power to subjugate all those who made themselves his adversaries, rather than take their abuse and die an ignominious death to save his abusers. They were totally unprepared for a king who would serve at all, not to mention serve his executions 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.” When Pilate retorted, “So you are a king?,” Jesus replied by describing 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, like Pilate, 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 and humble like him 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. After James and John pathetically got their mother to go up to Jesus to ask him to do whatever she requested, namely to grant that her baby boys sit on his immediate right and left as he began his kingdom, Jesus used it as a lesson for all the apostles, who similarly were hankering for the same worldly positions. “You know,” Jesus said, “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; whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; for 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. How this came about we don’t know, but I’ve always had a theory: that just as St. Therese of the Child Jesus prayed for the hardened death row criminal Henri Pranzini to convert before he would be guillotined, and he shockingly asked for a crucifix to kiss Jesus’ wounds right before he died, so on Calvary there was another woman praying for a death row convict’s conversion, the one standing, not swooning, before the Cross in the middle, the one who had heard his and the other thief’s taunting of her Son and responded with prayer for their conversion. Whatever the explanation, something somehow happened in the heart of the one on Jesus’ right and he now began to see what up until that point he hadn’t, how special the one being crucified beside him was. The Good Thief could grasp 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 give witness to the truth, to reign is to forgive, to reign is to serve, to reign is to love,. The Good Thief saw that Truth, Mercy, Service and Love incarnate was triumphing beside him. The good thief perceived what almost everyone else was missing, that Jesus, mysteriously through suffering and death, was not about to lose a kingdom, but to establish 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 be possible only if the thief realized that the dying man would somehow still live and be capable of remembering. 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 has reigned 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 try to live with him there, to pick up our own cross and follow him, to live in his kingdom of truth, forgiveness, and service, to make our life a sacrifice of love for God and others, and so to reign.
• This unforgettable lesson of Christ’s kingdom is particularly conspicuous in the gift of the Holy Eucharist. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords is concealed under the humblest appearances of unleavened bread and common wine. He reigns from the altar and from the tabernacle. He reigns even when many don’t even acknowledge his presence, or even when those that do choose to leave him abandoned. Today Christ the King came to the university that for the first 30 years of its existence was called King’s College and the vast majority of the student body were unaware that the Creator of the universe was passing by on College Walk, sanctifying the steps before Low Library, making a visit to St. Paul’s Chapel, and walking with Catholics along the paths Columbia students traverse every day. But somehow that is the humble way that Christ the King has chosen to live and reign. He’s done so that only the meek and humble of heart may find him. He’s done so in order to reinforce that to be his disciple, to be his friend, to be his apostle, is not a means to the fulfillment of worldly ambition, not a path to earthly power, pleasure, popularity and prestige, but to poverty of spirit, purity of heart, pity for others, prayer and sometimes even persecution. But it is the way to the real, real world, to truth, to love, to happiness, to holiness and to heaven. And just like we did today in frigid temperatures, we are the ones who have joyfully made the choice to center our life on Christ and his kingdom, which is the choice to live a Eucharistic life, in which we come with love and gratitude to pay him homage, to spend time with him, to receive his divine counsel, to become one with him through Holy Communion and to be strengthened by him from the inside not just to live in and announce his kingdom, but to live out our vocation as members of the royal family, reigning with him through love on earth until we’re able to rejoice with him and the saints forever around his royal throne.
• As we think about the connection between Christ the King humbly on the throne of the Cross and even more humbly in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, between the Good Thief on Golgotha and all of us on the triumphant way of the Cross through life, it’s impossible to turn to the greatest Eucharistic theologian and poet in history, St. Thomas Aquinas. In the third verse of his famous hymn Adoro Te Devote that we sung during our procession, he unforgettably prayed: In cruce latebat sola Deitas, at hic latet simul et humanitas: Ambo tamen credens atque confitens, peto quod petivit latro paenitens. On the cross, he wrote, only Jesus’ divinity was hidden, but here in the Eucharist, under the appearances of bread and wine, even his humanity is concealed. Nevertheless, each of us, like St. Thomas, journeys today and each day in life believing in this mystery and proclaiming it, asking for what the Good Thief asked for, that the Lord, Christ the King, may remember us, and do more than that, but give us today a foretaste of that paradise to which he has admitted St. Dismas and lived, died, rose, ascended, and transubstantiated himself on the altar so that we might reign with him there eternally. Long live Christ the King!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation.
For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers;
all things were created through him and for him.
He is before all things,
and in him all things hold together.
He is the head of the body, the church.
He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead,
that in all things he himself might be preeminent.
For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell,
and through him to reconcile all things for him,
making peace by the blood of his cross
through him, whether those on earth or those in heaven.

Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying,
“Are you not the Christ?
Save yourself and us.”
The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply,
“Have you no fear of God,
for you are subject to the same condemnation?
And indeed, we have been condemned justly,
for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes,
but this man has done nothing criminal.”
Then he said,
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
He replied to him,
“Amen, I say to you,
today you will be with me in Paradise.”

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