WE COME TODAY to the end of another Church year. Today is also the 34th and last Sunday of Cycle C in the Church calendar and we complete the three-year cycle of readings from the Old and New Testaments. Next Sunday we will go back to the beginning of Cycle A. We used to celebrate this feast of Christ the King on the last Sunday in October but in more recent times it was moved – more appropriately – to the last Sunday of the Church Year.
The core of the message
During this past year we have listened to many readings from Scripture and heard many sermons commenting on them. But, through it all, there remains one constant theme, namely, that of Jesus, our Lord and King, as the centre of all our living. The purpose of having all these readings from Scripture was to help us to have a deeper understanding of Jesus, our Lord, and the God of whom he is the incarnated and tangible presence. The Word of God is truly an essential sustenance for our Christian living. It is also the Bread of Life.
What kind of king is Jesus? We tend to associate kings with power and prestige, with noble birth and great wealth. Kings are supposed to live in great palaces surrounded by a dazzling court.
Contrasting images
In fact, there are two highly contrasting pictures of Jesus as King given in the readings today. There is the highly triumphant picture give in the Second Reading from the letter to the Colossians:
“[The Son] is the image of the unseen God
and the first-born of all creation,
for in him were created all things…
all things were created through him and for him…
The Church is his body,
he is its head…
God wanted all perfection to be found in him,
and all things to be reconciled through him and for him…
when he made peace by his death on the cross.”
A contrasting picture
And it is in that last line that the link is made with the Gospel passage, which is from Luke. Here we are given a very different picture indeed. For we are presented with a man being executed in shame and ignominy, bleeding and battered on a cross, one of the most cruel and degrading punishments ever devised. Over his head are the mocking words: “This is the King of the Jews.” Did anyone ever look less like a king?
It is not exactly the image of Jesus which we usually conjure up when we think of him as King. We rather prefer those triumphant pictures where Jesus wears a crown and an expensively embroidered cloak with a sceptre in his hand as he looks down benignly on his subjects.
A disturbing picture
The Church has chosen quite a different picture for today’s feast. If we read it carefully and try to re-create the scene it could be quite disturbing and surely it is meant to be. It is to help us wake up out of our complacency and to become more aware of how Jesus came to be our King and what he expects from his subjects.
If Jesus is our King, we may ask, where are his subjects? Where are his ministers? Where are his courtiers? Where is his palace? Instead we are shown this desolate hill outside the city of Jerusalem. It is a place of execution for the very worst of criminals. He hangs shamefully in his nakedness. No disciples are to be seen. Luke mentions no friends, not even women, at the foot of the cross. “All those who knew Jesus personally, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood off at a distance to see these things” (Luke 23:49). His only companions are two gangsters, also crucified, and a jeering crowd. “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself! Ha, ha!”
Intense dignity
And yet here precisely Jesus is at his most kingly. And it is of the utmost importance that we can see this. At the moment of his birth, Jesus was found among the poor and the outcasts as he was greeted in the manger by the shepherds. “I have come that they may have life and have it in greater abundance.” To give them that life, he sacrificed his own. His power is precisely in his ability to let go of his own life for the sake of others. This is a power few of us have even in a partial degree.
Only one can see
The community leaders who stand there mocking cannot see that. The only one who can see is, ironically, one of the criminals crucified with him. “Jesus,” he says, “remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” He takes seriously the headboard over the cross written in three languages: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” And this is a king who does not have to be kowtowed to and addressed as “Your majesty”. He can be called familiarly by his own name, Jesus. The answer is immediate: “This day you will be with me in paradise.” Who else but the King of Kings could make such a promise and to such a person? “I have come that they may have life – in abundance.”
Blind onlookers
The others present have closed their eyes and laugh at their King. “He saved others, he cannot save himself,” they say mockingly. They have totally missed the meaning of his words when he said that only those who are prepared to lose their life will find real life, that unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains just that – a grain of wheat. But if it falls into the ground, it becomes totally transformed. The grain of wheat is lost but in its place comes a flourishing plant with many more life-giving grains.
This is the power of Jesus our King, his power to generate life in others. And we are called to follow him in doing exactly the same. This is how we are truly his subjects.
The King’s realm
As King, Jesus has a kingdom, the Kingdom whose coming we pray for every time we recite the Lord’s Prayer. It is a Kingdom described in the special preface to the Eucharistic Prayer today:
“An eternal and universal Kingdom:
a kingdom of truth and life,
a kingdom of holiness and grace,
a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”
Subjects and partners
The strange thing is that we are not merely subjects of this Kingdom and our King. We are also his partners in the making, in the bringing about of his Kingdom. In the Second Reading we are reminded that, while he is the head, we are his body. That means that, as part of the body of Jesus, we share in his kingly power and priesthood and all the responsibilities that brings!
Agents of justice and peace
In Jesus, as the Second Reading says today, “we gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins”, our total reconciliation and union with him. But with him, too, we are to work that “all things be reconciled through him and for him”. “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven [by God].” With him we are to bring about that peace on earth which he inaugurated by his dying on the cross. We have a long way to go before the Kingdom in that sense becomes a reality. There is so much reconciling, so much peace-making to be done, so much to be done in brining truth, freedom, justice, love and peace into our world.
Today’s feast is both a challenge and an opportunity for us to become aware of our call to become truly both subjects and partners of Jesus our King. Long live the King! May his Kingdom come!