Personally Celebrating, Adoring, Thanking and Service Christ the King, Solemnity of Christ, the King of the Universe (B), November 24, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Solemnity of Christ, King of the Universe
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: 

• Today we celebrate, for the 100th time in the Church’s liturgical history, Christ as King of the Universe. The Solemnity of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925. He celebrated it for the first time on December 31 that year, to conclude the 1925 Jubilee. For the next 44 years it was celebrated in the traditional Latin liturgy on the last Sunday of October. For the last 55 years, since 1970, in the new order of the Mass, it has been celebrated on the last Sunday of the liturgical year in November. And so today is the 100th time this Solemnity is being marked. It is an opportunity to celebrate what Christ’s kingship means and then, as Pius XI suggested, 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 Christ the Prince of Peace came into the world to give and to leave us, we must enter into, we must live, the reality of his kingdom. This Solemnity is the privileged occasion for us 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, [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,” robed in majesty and splendor. All of that is true, and it’s an important part of today’s celebration.
• But it’s also helpful for us to remember that, through his incarnation, that majestic King and Lord came into the world to bring us into that kingdom. 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.” There was an urgency to the Kingdom, an exciting nearness we were called to embrace and seize, and a need to believe in it and turn away from other means by which to order our life. Jesus gave us many parables about the Kingdom, how to become part of it, live in it, and help grow it. 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, 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. He reminded his contemporaries that many tax collectors and prostitutes were entering it before many of the Scribes and Pharisees because these notorious sinners were far more willing and eager to convert and seize it, appreciating its value and leaving behind their old lives to become new. Jesus reminded us that to enter the kingdom, we must seek it first above other things, convert and become like children, be born from above of water and spirit, keep our baptismal wedding garments clean and fit for the banquet, be poor in 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, do violence to cut ourselves off from what is incompatible with it and be willing to suffer for it. The solemnity of Christ the King, therefore, is an opportunity for us to remember what Jesus said about the Kingdom and orient our lives to this way of life he indicates.
• In the Gospel today, taken from Jesus’ dialogue with Pontius Pilate on Good Friday morning, we get a glimpse into the kingdom Christ has brought into the world and how it’s supposed to impact us. In it we learn two essential aspects of the kingdom and what our response must be. Pilate begins his conversation with Jesus by asking the question that Jews had been discussing, and trying to answer, about Jesus 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 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. 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, 100 out of 100. It’s not enough for him 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 to proclaim him sovereign Lord or to dedicate Churches to Him and whole religious institutes under the title of Christus Rex. It’s not adequate, in other words, even that the whole Church in heaven and on earth acclaims him as King. 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 in the Gospel, and to live by the parables and instructions Jesus has given about the kingdom. Jesus died to become your king and my king and wants us to ground our entire life in the reality of the Kingdom, of the life-giving relationship the King wants to have with each of us. The future Pope Benedict once told the catechists of the world, “The kingdom of God … 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 the most decisive reality in our life. Therefore, the first response we’re called to have to the reality of what we celebrate today is to ask ourselves honestly if we’re acclaiming Christ the King on the basis of what others, including the Church, say about him, or because that’s what the liturgy today celebrates, or whether we are saying this on our own. And if Christ is our king, then we will obviously be striving to make him the most present and decisive reality in which and every act of our life. He will be King of our time, our affections, our work and leisure, our family bonds, loves and friendships, our mind, heart, soul and strength, all we are and have.
• 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 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 his kingship 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, 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. Each of us need to answer existentially Jesus’ question to Pilate, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?”
• That leads us to the second point that Jesus emphasizes about his kingdom during his interrogation by Pilate. After Jesus stated 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,” in other words, “That’s what you call me,” but he wanted to change very much the meaning of kingship. He said, “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 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, as the philosophers teach us, but ultimately 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 us, urge us, have us ground our entire existence on our relationship with him. 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. 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.
• 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, they were attempting to distort human anthropology made in God’s image and likeness and reorder 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, which they propagandistically 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, the revolutionaries claimed, the churches and Christians were just seeking greater foundation for their competitive 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 particularly 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 the basic facts of 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. They claim that we are whoever we want to be, whoever we say we are. We should always 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 likewise someone who believes he, she or it is pangender, or genderqueer, or one of the scores of other so-called “gender identities.” We know such people need help, Jesus died out of love for each of them, and they deserve our love, too. But we do them no service to pretend with them that they’re not male or female, that there’s no meaning to this foundational biological and human truth, that the emperor, to recall Hans Christian Anderson’s short story, is well dressed and living sanely in the real world. Gender ideology, in fact, harms individuals and all of society by facilitating those with gender confusion to believe and live a lie about themselves and to try to force all of society to become 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, the voice who in the beginning said, “Let us make man in our own image,” and then “male and female he created them.” 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 helping others to live it in the context of powerfully ensconced untruths that will injure people not just in this world but beyond.
• In the Book of Revelation today, we see one more truth about living in Christ’s kingdom. 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, but to our common priesthood by baptism. In the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, the 60th anniversary of which we marked on Thursday, the Church 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, 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 sacrifice. 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 my ministerial priesthood, to offer the Eucharist and together with Christ offer ourselves. As we prepare to do so on this Solemnity for the hundredth time in the history of the Church, we cry out to Christ the King, “Thy kingdom come!,” asking him to bring every part of us that is not with him in the kingdom into it. We ask him to help us make him king of all parts of our life, to live fully 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.” We also ask him to strengthen us so that we might be his emissaries going out to the whole world to help them recognize that now is the time of fulfillment is, the Kingdom of God is at hand, and help them seize the kingdom, remain in it and with us extend it. This is the way to the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ. Long live Christ the King!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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