Solemnity of Christ the King (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 20, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King (B), Vigil
November 20, 2021

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 privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we celebrate him as King of the Universe and enter into, and seek to learn from, the dialogue he has with Pontius Pilate on Good Friday morning.
• I’d like to focus on two points. Pilate begins his conversation with Jesus by asking the question that Jews had been asking, and trying to answer, about Jesus for the previous couple of years: “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus replied, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” Pilate tried to deflect the question, saying, “I am not a Jew, am I?” But the question cannot be ducked and it cannot really simply be answered by what others have told us. Jesus came into the world to establish a personal, saving relationship with everyone he has created. As the Good Shepherd who would leave the 99 behind and go after the one sheep who is lost, he is interested in 100 out of 100. It’s not enough for him to be the King of “others” or even the King of the “cosmos.” It’s not enough for the pope, or the priests, or the Catechism to proclaim him sovereign Lord. It doesn’t suffice that we dedicate Churches to Him or whole religious institutes under the title of Christ the King. It’s not adequate, in order words, even that the whole Church in heaven and on earth acclaims him as the Savior and Lord. Jesus wants each of us personally and intimately to say and mean, “thy Kingdom come!,” rather than just doing so because others have told us about this reality. Jesus died in order to become your king and my king and wants to have that life-giving relationship with each of us. He wants to become the most decisive reality in our life. And so the first response we’re called to have this Sunday is to ask ourselves honestly whether we have that relationship with him. Is he King of our time, not just Sunday but each day? Is he king over our family and love life? Is he king of our work? Is he king of our leisure? Is he king over our money? Is he King of our mind, heart, soul and strength? He is objectively the one through whom all things are made, it’s a fact that he’s King and Lord of all, but have we subjectively, freely, wholeheartedly, lovingly chosen him to be our King, to submit to and follow him with trust, with love, with joy? If we have not established him as a King of all parts of our life, then we really do not have the relationship with him that is right and just.
• This thought is conceptually simple, but morally hard. For us to name Christ as King is, in this world, not like rooting for a championship team because they’re the winners. By worldly logic, it might indeed seem crazy. 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 bejeweled throne. He was crowned with thorns, not capped with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and Jews in general, Pilate would later 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. The chief priests mocked him. The Roman soldiers and passers-by mocked him. Even the thief on his left mocked him. And all of them mocked 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. That’s why St. Paul would later say that Christ Crucified, Jesus crowed with thorns and mounted upon the throne of Calvary, was a scandal to the Jews and utter lunacy to the Greeks, but nevertheless was the full manifestation of God’s power and wisdom. 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.All the way until the resurrection, the apostles 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 messianic administration they imagined Jesus was about to inaugurate. After James and John had asked Jesus for the privilege to be his prime ministers, to sit on his immediate right and left as assumed his reign, Jesus used it as a lesson for all the apostles who similarly were hungering after the same worldly positions, as well as for all of us. He said, “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.” To proclaim his kingship, 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. That’s why it’s not sufficient to listen to what others are saying about Jesus. We have to proclaim him king ourselves, and this is not just a notional or verbal consent, but something we live.
• The second part of the dialogue I’d like to examine comes later. After Jesus said 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. 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.” 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. Jesus’ 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 right. 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, but a personal relationship, saying during the Last Supper, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” He came not just to teach us truths, but to ground us in the real, real world by allowing us to enter into relationship with him as the foundation of our entire existence. 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, “A liar and the father of lies.” To proclaim Christ as King is not just to announce the truth but to commit ourselves to the truth in a context in which “Prince of demons” tries to inseminate and seduce us to live the lie. If those in Christ’s kingdom are those who belong to the truth and listen to Christ’s voice, then we must seek the truth, find the truth, love the truth, live the truth and share the truth. Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of truth; Satan’s is a dominion of lies, spin, slander, deception, and self-deception.
• When Pope Pius XI established the Solemnity of Christ the King 96 year ago in 1925, he did so to counteract the virulent falsehoods being propagated by the communists, militant atheists who in proclaiming that God doesn’t exist were essentially announcing that truth doesn’t exist. Without God and the truth anchoring human existence in reality, they were capable of distorting human anthropology made in God’s image and likeness and reordering 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 in God, which they mendaciously claimed was a 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, they stated, the churches and Christians were just seeking greater foundation for their 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 emotivism. It is happening in gender ideology, with which many are trying to indoctrinate our culture and especially our kids. Gender ideology says that essentially our identity has nothing to do with the fact of our biology, because, they claim, male and female are just social attributions. We are whoever we want to be, whoever we say we are. There is no real truth about what sex we are, what age we are, what our attributes are. If we want to be the Pope or the Queen of England, we shouldn’t let reality stand in the way. This is not to say that we shouldn’t 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 a pangender, or cisgender, or a genderqueer trapped in either. We know such people need help and they deserve our love. But we do them no service to pretend with them that they’re not male or female, that there’s no meaning to that biological truth. We, in fact, facilitate their living a lie about themselves, and make all of society 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, who in the beginning created us male and female. 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 and helping others to live it in the context of powerfully ensconced untruths that will injure people in this world and beyond.
• This Sunday let us say on our own that Christ is King, receive the full truth about the human person he entered the world to enflesh and proclaim, and then, with his help, live it, love it and share it. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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