CHRIST'S KINGSHIP, AND OURS

CHRIST=S KINGSHIP, AND OURS

Christ the King, Year B.  Rev. 1:5-8; John 18:33b-37.

AIM: To proclaim the redemptive power of Christ=s unconditioned love, and the privileges and obligations he lays upon us.

 

Pilate=s question to the prisoner before him was simple: AAre you the King of the Jews?@ He was exasperated when Jesus refused to give a straight yes-or-no answer. Jesus seldom gave people the clear and simple answers they wanted. In this case Jesus could not answer No, for he was a king. Yet if he answered Yes, he was sure to be misunderstood, for his kingship was totally different from all others.  Jesus is a king whose rule was inaugurated not in glory but in suffering. 

Today=s second reading tells us three things about Jesus= kingship. It says that Jesus Aloves us;@ that he Ahas freed us from our sins by his blood;@ and that he Ahas made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.@

1.       Jesus loves us. Do we really think of Jesus Christ as the representative and Son of a loving God? Or do we think of God as a stern judge who is just waiting to punish us for breaking one of his many rules? And if we do think of God as loving, don=t we sometimes assume that his love has strings attached? that God will love us only as long as we keep his rules, thus demonstrating that we deserve his love?

Both ideas B thinking of God as a stern judge, or that his love for us is conditional on our good behavior B are radical denials of the gospel. AGospel@ means Agood news.@ Is it good news to be told that God is always waiting to punish us for infractions of his laws, or that he won=t love us unless we first do something to earn his love? The good news which Jesus came to proclaim is that God is always loving; and that he loves us as we are, right now. The proof of this astonishingly good news is contained in our second reading=s second statement about our king B

2.       Jesus Ahas freed us from our sins by his blood.@ That statement is good news, however, only for people who believe they have some sins which they need to be freed from. If you don=t believe that B if you are basically satisfied with your life just as it is B then that is your good news: your good moral character.  Congratulations!

Jesus Christ has good news only for people of bad moral character: people who acknowledge that their lives are a tangle of loose ends, of broken resolutions, of high ideals and mediocre performance. The gospel is good news only for those who can say, with the apostle Paul: AThe good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will@ (Rom. 7:19).

Jesus, our king, doesn=t love some idealized version of us, the people we would like to be and keep on hoping we will be one day, when we get all our loose ends tied up and all our bad impulses screwed down tight. No. Jesus loves us as we are, right now. He loved us enough to die for us. And it is a central truth of our Christian and Catholic faith that Jesus= voluntary death on the cross in some mysterious but real way makes up for, and takes away, not only our own innumerable shortcomings and sins, but the sins of all humanity in all ages. The vicious circle of our high resolutions and our too frequent failure to keep them has been broken by a power, and a love, greater than our own: the power and love of Jesus our king, Athe firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth,@ as our second reading calls him. Unlike all other kings known to history, he rules not by power but by love, serving his subjects rather than lording it over them. That too is gospel. That is good news. But there is more.

3.       Jesus Ahas made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and father.@ That sentence from our second reading means that through baptism we share both in Christ=s priesthood and in his kingship. The baptized, the Catechism says, Ashare in the priesthood of Christ, in his prophetic and royal mission.@ [No. 1268]  We exercise our priesthood when we come together, as God=s people, to obey the command of our high priest and king at the Last Supper, to Ado this@ in his memory with the bread and wine. We obey that command collectively. Christ=s ordained minister, a human priest, is necessary to lead us in this greatest act of the Church=s worship. But we all present our sacrificial offering and worship together with the priest, who is the human representative of the one true priest, Jesus Christ, the principal celebrant of every Mass.

In baptism Jesus also gave us a share in his kingship by making us, the first Letter of Peter tells us, members of Aa chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation ...@ (2:9).  We exercise our kingship as Jesus does: by serving people. A religion which is limited to obtaining blessings for ourselves, Asaving our souls,@ with few consequences in daily life, is not the religion of Jesus Christ. Like him, we are called to serve others: at home, at work, wherever we encounter people in need, and whether we find them loveable or not. That alone fulfils the commission given to us when, in baptism, Jesus our King made us citizens and members of his Akingdom, priests for his God and Father.@

We who in baptism have been given a share in the priesthood and kingship of Jesus Christ are called to live amid the darkness of our world in the light of the vision proclaimed in the closing words of our second reading: ABehold, he is coming amid the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him.  All the peoples of the earth will lament him. Yes. Amen.@

Repeatedly the Bible tells us that Jesus our King is coming. That we have not witnessed his return after twenty centuries does not prove the Bible wrong. This is still Athe last age,@ even if its termination is delayed, according to our limited human reckoning.  

How often we hear people say, AWe don=t know what is coming.@ We may have said that ourselves. It is true. We do not know what is coming. We cannot know what is coming. But we do know Who is coming. Our second reading tell us who he is:

AThe Alpha and the Omega, the one who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.@