Reigning Now and Forever with Christ the King, Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, November 26, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, Year A
November 26, 2023
Ezek 34:11-12.15-17, Ps 23, 1 Cor 15:20-26.28, Mt 25:31-46

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily:

• Today the Church celebrates with great joy the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. 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. This is what is alluded to in today’s Gospel and second reading when he see that at Christ’s second coming, he will sit upon his glorious throne, all the nations will be assembled before him, he will destroy “every sovereignty and every authority and power,” put all those who have made themselves his enemies “under his feet,” destroy death, subject everything to himself and at last present the kingdom to God the Father so that God may be all in all. This moment is what is jubilantly anticipated in the famous climax of Handel’s Messiah Oratorio, when we sing: “Hallelujah! (10x) … For the Lord omnipotent reigneth. … Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! (5x) … The kingdom of the Lord is begun, the kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ. … And he shall reign forever and ever! (4x) … King of Kings — forever and ever, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! — and Lord of Lords — forever and ever, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! (3x) …  King of Kings and Lord of Lords… And he shall reign forever and ever! (2x) … King of Kings — forever and ever, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! — and Lord of Lords — forever and ever, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! And He shall reign forever and ever! King of Kings and Lord of Lords! And he shall reign forever and ever. Forever and ever. Forever and ever. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” The first thing we celebrate today is, indeed, that the Lord is king and he shall reign forever and ever! The angels in heaven, as we see in the book of Revelation, now stand around his glorious throne and chant, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen” (Rev 7:12). And today we join them in that hymn of jubilant praise.
• But that eschatological revelation of Christ the King doesn’t change the reality that the Lord Jesus is already king. The Son of God entered the world as the long-awaited Messiah, the descendant of King David according to his humanity, was acknowledged as king in Bethlehem by the angels, shepherds and wise men, in a way that King Herod took as a threat to his own desire for despotic control. After decades of hidden life, Jesus emerged proclaiming that the kingdom of God was at hand and urging people to repent, believe in the Gospel, and enter that kingdom. He taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come” and then revealed to us that the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who receive it on good and fruitful soil, who convert and become like little children, who are “poor in spirit,” who value it more than all the wealth of the world and seize it like a pearl of great price or treasure buried in a field. He stated that it grows like a mustard seed or yeast, imperceptible to people on the outside but with an explosive potential to become huge, worldwide and even other worldly, and that it grows despite evil in the world, just like a net cast into a sea brings in good and rotten fish and a field has wheat and weeds. He added that it is ultimately comparable to a wedding banquet full of joy, just a bride and groom at their nuptials. Summarizing Jesus’ teaching, the future Pope Benedict XVI said in a powerful 2000 homily to catechists from across 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.” The Kingdom over which Jesus rules, the Kingdom into which he invites us to enter, the kingdom he has sent us and the whole Church to proclaim, is one in which each of us relates to God as the most decisive reality in my life, as my Lord and God, as my King and Savior. It’s when we are able to echo in life not just the words, “Thy kingdom come!,” but “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” not as some type of dry, external obedience, but as a desire of grateful, loving adhesion.
• That’s why today’s first reading and Psalm emphasize that the way Christ the King seeks to reign in our life is as a shepherd. It’s not by coincidence that King David was first a shepherd, because in God’s eternal plan, God envisioned his service of us according to the model by which a shepherd serves his sheep. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God tell us of the personal relationship he wishes to have with each of us. He declares, “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…  I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. …  I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak. I will feed them with justice.” In response to those amazing words, we sing in the Psalm, “The Lord — the Universal King — is my shepherd. There is nothing I shall want.” We express our confidence that with him, we lack for nothing, we have it all. We praise him for leading by restful waters, refreshing our soul, anointing our head with oil, and filling our cup to overflowing. We proclaim that even though we sometimes may have to walk through the scariest and darkest pits, we fear no evil, for we trust that the Lord himself is with us as our shepherd and king, conforting us with his strong staff and rod. We profess that as long as we’re with him, we believe that only goodness and kindness will follow us all the days of our life; as long as we stay close to him, we shall dwell in the Lord’s house for millennia to come! All of these Old Testament words find their fulfillment when God himself would take on our humanity and say, in St. John’s Gospel, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (Jn 10:11), and then put that love into body language on Good Friday. Our King loved us so much that he came down from heaven to seek us out when we were lost, to take us back to his fold, and to die for us so that we might have life eternally, so that we might always remain with him in the verdant pastures of heaven. So the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, begins here on earth when we begin to relate to Christ the King as our Shepherd, as we hear his voice calling us and follow him, as we allow him to rescue us, bind our wounds, lead us, feed us, and ultimately to transform us. We enter most into the Kingdom of God when we become like the King himself, when we live by the virtues and values of the King, when we seek to give the king homage by imitating the homage the Shepherd amazingly gives to his sheep. That’s why today’s Gospel is so important for us to grasp if we’re actually going to understand and live Christianity 101. Jesus tells us that when he comes as King to judge the living and the dead, we will be judged on the basis of whether we have served him by feeding and tending his own sheep and lambs, whether we have loved him by loving our neighbors as he has loved us. He makes plain that for us to “inherit the kingdom prepared for [us] since the foundation of the world” — the Kingdom he has wanted to give us since before he created the heavens the earth! — we need to make the choice to spend our time here on earth reigning with him in loving, sacrificial service. God’s kingdom, as Pope Francis has been saying to us throughout his pontificate, is a kingdom in which we care for each other, in which we feel responsible for each other, in which we behave as Good Samaritans crossing the road for each other, inconveniencing ourselves for each other, and sacrificing ourselves for each other’s welfare. At our judgment the King will separate us into two groups, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. This division will be as stark as the separation between light from darkness and truth from falsity. He will place his sheep, the saved, on his right and the goats, the damned, on his left. Then he will say to those on his right, among whom, God-willing, we hope to be numbered: “For I was hungry, and you gave me food; thirsty and you gave me drink; naked and you clothed me; a stranger and you welcomed me; ill and you cared for me; in prison and you visited me.” Those on his right will respond, in effect, “Lord, when did we do any of this for you?” And the King will reply, “Whatever you did for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me!” Jesus did not mean to give us an exhaustive list of good deeds or even very hard things to accomplish, like giving away huge sums of money or making extraordinary acts of heroic sacrifice. He named six simple actions that any of us can do and most of us, especially here in New York, have the opportunity to do almost every day. He said that if we wish to serve and honor him, then we must do so by doing him loving homage in the disguise of the hungry, the thirsty, naked, poor, afflicted, imprisoned, persecuted, and those in any way in need. He said that whatever we do out of love for another he will take personally. Just as the King cares for us as our Shepherd, so we live in his Kingdom as his faithful subjects when we care for him in others as their shepherd. It can’t be more concrete. It can’t be more doable. But the question is: Do we do it? Do we live this way? Or do we live by the standards and values of the world?
• Christ the King makes plain in today’s Gospel that, as straightforward as it is to seize his kingdom and live in it, in this world and forever, it is nevertheless tragically possible to fail the exam of life. It is possible to choose not to live in the kingdom Christ has inaugurated. Some, he declares, by their own free choice will behave in such a way that they will one day hear those terrifying words that will doubtless break his shepherdly and sacred heart to enunciate, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” They will earn those words by failing to live by love, failing to take advantage of the opportunities Christ the King gives them to imitate him in serving others, failing to take others as seriously as he does. These are not necessarily the people we would call evil. To some, they might even seem holy. By their question to the King in today’s Gospel image — “Lord, when did we see youhungry, or thirsty, naked or a stranger, ill or in prison and not attend to your needs?” — they imply that had they known it was the Lord they would have spared no effort. But because all they saw was basically someone else, someone unworthy of their love and sacrifice, perhaps just a beggar or a “nobody,” they did nothing. The great test of whether we’re living in God’s kingdom in this world and are preparing ourselves to live in it at Jesus’ right eternally is our love for each other, especially those people who are hardest to love. The servant of God Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement who was born in Brooklyn and died in Manhattan and spent most of her life serving the poor throughout New York City, once hauntingly said, “We love God to the extent that we love the person we like the least.” We love God to the extent that we love a poor ravenous beggar, or a homeless drunk, or a felon on death row, or an AIDS-infected drug user, or an illegal alien, or a classmate with no friends, or an obnoxious family member. John wrote in his first epistle that we cannot love the God we have not seen if we don’t love the brother or sister we do see (1 John 4:20). And Jesus wants to help us to grow in the capacity for love by making it “easier” for us, calling us to treat others the way we would treat him, since he presumes that if we knew we were caring for him directly most of us would indeed give it our best.
• Therefore, the great question for us on this Solemnity — in fact, the single most important question of our life — is whether we have been serving or ignoring Christ in our brothers and sisters. The last thing our beloved King wants to do is to judge us. In St. John’s Gospel, he makes crystal clear that he came not to condemn but to redeem us, but he also emphasizes that we will essentially judge ourselves by our actions, by whether or not we conform our choices and actions to his word. “I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them,” he tells us, “for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my word has a judge; on the last day the word that I have spoken will serve as judge” (Jn 12:47-48). The judgment will be nothing more than a revelation of how we have used our freedom to live by Jesus’ words or not, how we have chosen to love Christ our King or to reject him directly or in disguise. Jesus tells us all of this now so that we might use our freedom to learn to reign with him.
• If we sincerely proclaim Christ as our King, if we cry out in prayer, “Thy Kingdom come!,” if we sing “To Jesus Christ our Sovereign King who is the world’s salvation” and “Crown him with many crowns,” then we must make a decisive choice to live by the principles of his kingdom here on earth, what the Eucharistic Preface today says is a “kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace. Even if most other people live according to the values of the world and strive to hallow their own name, to build their own kingdom rather than the Lord’s, to do their own will rather than God’s or anyone else’s, and basically to do the little or nothing for others, we Christians are called to be Christ-like and live in truth, holiness, justice, peace and sacrificial love — and to do so without delay, without excuses and without apology. We remember what happened when Jesus was on the Cross. He was needy in all of the ways he described in tonight’s Gospel. He was hungry and cried out, “I thirst!” He was stripped totally naked and exposed before all (the loin cloth with which he’s vested on the Crucifix is merely for our sense of decorum). He was a stranger even in the world he created, kicked out of his own city of Jerusalem to die as a malefactor at the place of the skull. He was sick and wounded, having had his flesh ripped open by a brutal Roman scourging, having been beaten and crowned with thorns. He was imprisoned not only in the high priest’s dungeon but pinned to the cross with nails. And the vast majority of those present did nothing. The Blessed Mother, Mary Magdalene, John the Evangelist, Salome and the wife of Clopas were there at least to pray and console. The Good Thief did what he could to stick up for Jesus and begged to be remembered when Jesus entered his kingdom, and Jesus, with the largesse of a king, gave him so much more, promising him paradise. The more we enter into that scene of the King on the Cross, the more sensitized and responsive we’re supposed to become to the sufferings of others, the indifference of so many, and the need for us, not someone else, to respond with the love of the Good Shepherd and for the Good Shepherd.
• Tonight at Mass, we ask the Lord Jesus, whom we will soon behold under the appearances of simple bread and wine, to help us to recognize him in the disguise of the poor we’ll meet later this week. We thank him for the way he, our King and Shepherd, has never failed to are for us in our need. To the hungry, he gives his own flesh to eat. To all of us who are thirsty, he quenches us with his own blood. To all of us who are alienated from his kingdom, he welcomes us and reconciles us to the Father. To those of us are were ill and afflicted, he comforts us by joining us to him in our sufferings and gives our sufferings infinite redemptive value. To those of us imprisoned by sin, he not only visits us, but frees us from our cells, breaking down the bars once and for all and showing us the way out. Jesus repeatedly fulfills each of these corporal works of mercy by giving himself in love. This shows what the fulfillment of human life is: to give of ourselves out of love to God and others in such a way that this self-gift of ours becomes the gift of Christ himself to others. He calls us to give not just bread and water, not just medicine, welcome, care and clothing, but ourselves together with him. This is the way his kingdom will reign in us. This is the way our prayer, “Thy Kingdom come!,” will be fulfilled. So let us now commit ourselves wholeheartledly to respond to the saving graces Christ gives us today to reign with him by serving others, so that at the end of our earthly pilgrimage, we will see the King of the Universe, the great Shepherd of the sheep, my shepherd, wave us to his eternal right and say those extraordinary words he’s been waiting to declare since before he said, “Let there be light”: “Come, you — you! — who are blessed of my Father: inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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