We have been hearing about the end times the past few weeks in the Gospels; the ultimate end of all the readings we’ve heard is the sovereign lordship of Jesus Christ. Over the past year of the Church’s liturgical year, we have celebrated the great mysteries of the life of the Lord; and so now, the Church brings its liturgical year to an end with the Solemnity of Christ the King. The Church does this in order to remind us that our life too, will come to an end before this King of all Kings. So just as the entire Church year is a type of preparation for this great solemnity, so too our entire life should be a preparation to be ready to stand before Christ the King when we die. Our late beloved Holy Father Blessed John Paul II, taught that,
“While the feast of the Epiphany, Easter, and the Ascension all relate to Christ as King and Lord of the Universe, the Church has desired to have this great feast to be a special remembrance to modern man, modern man who seems somewhat indifferent to truth and his supernatural destiny, that his earthly life and all earthly kingdoms will end in front of the Kings of kings.”
So on this special feast day, we now contemplate Christ in his glorified state as King of all creation and as King of our bodies & souls.
This feast day serves as a reminder to us then that the Lord should truly reign in all aspects of our lives. The Lord Jesus needs to be sovereign over our hearts, minds and our bodies, by our allowing Him to be present in our families, among our friends, neighbors, and even with our colleagues at work and school. Christ’s kingship in our daily lives should be a witness against those who would either reduce religion to a set of negative “thou shall nots”, or to some kind of “pick and choose” cafeteria Catholicism.
Sadly, there are many who would like to limit Christ’s sovereignty to just a corner of their lives and make their faith solely a private affair, claiming that they can’t or shouldn’t take their faith in Christ into their personal relationships or out into the public sphere. Some would like to impose this same limitation on all Catholics, especially on us priest. Oh yes, they will say we can talk about faith from the pulpit but we should not speak out against moral evils occurring in the political arena. Against this type of mentality, this feast day is a call to all Catholics and to each one of us that we must affirm to the world, both with our words and by our deeds, that we aspire with our full heart, mind and strength of our will to make Christ the King reign indeed, over all hearts beginning with our own.
Now it’s true that in our democratic way of thinking, the ideal of a sovereign King can easily seem foreign to us. We can think of a sovereign king, even Jesus as a sovereign King, as an absolute monarch or dictator, who commands without question and so takes away our freedom our liberty. We can think about all the crimes against humanity, the many injustices that tyrant kings have committed and as a result we can wrongly conclude that any sovereignty is a bad thing. Certainly, the foundation of our own country was against a sovereign. We celebrate this in just a few days as give thanks for the blessings of freedom in our country.
Jesus is a sovereign, it is true, but not in the way of earthly tyrants. Jesus established a kingdom of divine love and truth, whose demands go much farther than mere justice. Jesus does not take over hearts by force but by the power of His divine love. And so, King Jesus’ demands are demands of love because love demands that we give our all to the one we love, without ever counting the cost. This is of course difficult for us, because it means that we must give up our own self-importance, opinions and self will and conformed ourselves to the way things really are, to reality, to the truths of God. And so, Jesus’ Kingdom is kingdom of truth because only when we accept God’s truth by freely conforming our lives in obedience to it are we truly free, free to open our hearts in order to receive more fully His love. This is know as the obedience of faith—By accepting the fullness of God’s truth with our minds we are given the freedom to choose with our wills to live rightly, in order to receive God’s love more fully.
Because so often we wrongly think we lose our freedom if we give ourselves fully to God, the call to make Jesus our sovereign King can make us hesitate. This call goes against the modern mentality, which is so steeped in error and which for all practical purposes has dethroned God. Our world really no longer sees God as Almighty, for an almighty God has a claim on our lives, a claim that demands absolute obedience to His Will and to His truth which comes to us through the teachings of the Church.
And so, our world has all but abandoned God as almighty, and has especially abandoned Jesus Christ as King, maybe not in word, but in deed. If anything at all, it pays Jesus lip service. It is a world that for the most part not only no longer searches for the truth, but also has abandoned any notion of absolute unchanging truth. For our modern society, which is based on radical individualism, truth has now been replaced with feelings and opinions; it is all about one’s personal “feelings” or one’s personal opinions. Where once people would say they think this way or that way, now they say, “I feel this way or that way”. Deep within our modern society is a current of hatred for the very notion of the kingship of Christ and serving Him in love through obedience to His truth and to His Church. The cry of our age of disobedience is “I want to be king; I want to be served, I want to define truth.” It is no longer about obedience to the Will of God, it is now about the “will of the people,” about our own will over and above the Will of God and others—“non-servium, I will not serve Christ the King!” is too often the cry of our age.
Jesus, through his life on this earth, gives us the cure for our modern culture of opposition to God’s Holy Will, which only leads to our unhappiness. The mysteries of Jesus’ life manifest the will of His Father by Jesus’ total obedience to the Father’s Will even to the point of accepting death, death on the cross. In fact, the cross is Jesus throne, the crown of thorns his royal diadem. While all those at the foot of the cross expected Christ to show a spectacular demonstration of His Royal claims by coming down off the cross, Jesus instead shows forth his obedience to the Father’s will by commanding the forgiveness of sins, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”. While Jesus in his sacrifice atones for all of the sins committed by mankind, he chooses to manifest the greatest act of sovereignty the world as ever seen by being concerned with just one man, and a criminal at that. “Jesus, remember me when you come into Your Kingdom.” And Jesus says to him, “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
I would propose to each one of us that the most important question each one of us must ask on this great feast of Christ the King, is not whether Christ does or does not reign in the world, but does he or does he not reign in me?; we should ask not if his royalty is recognized by states and governments, but is it recognized and lived by me? In other words, is Jesus Christ truly King and Lord of my life? Who reigns in me, who sets the objectives and establishes the priorities in my life: Christ or another? Is it really Jesus that I serve? Since Jesus gave His life so that we might live, life is no longer about living or dying, but about either living for our selves, or living for the Lord! And to live "for the Lord," means to live in view of him, solely for Him, for His glory, and for the spreading of His Kingdom on earth, in the minds and hearts of men and His Kingdom on earth subsist fully in the Catholic Church.
The reign of Christ extends then, only in the hearts and souls, minds and bodies of men, where there are men and women who understand themselves to be children of God, who are nourished by Him through His Church and her Great Sacraments, children who live only for Him and want others to share in this Family of God under the Kingship of Christ. It must be clear then, that the reign of Christ extends only as far as there are those who realize that it is only in being obedient and loyal to Christ’s Church, to her leaders and to her teachings that one is truly obedient to Christ the King and so serves Christ the King.
To serve Christ and His Catholic Church through obedience to His Truth is the only path to true freedom and life; it is what it means to have faith and live it. The martyrs and all the saints have taught us that the truest act and so the freest act is to give one’s life totally for Christ, not just in death but in life…living one’s life totally for Him in love; and then out of love for Him, living one’s life in service to neighbor out of Love for Christ. Only in this is true and authentic happiness found.
It’s interesting that this solemnity of Christ the King was instituted only recently. It was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 in response to the atheistic and totalitarian political regimes that denied the rights of God and of His One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. The climate in which the feast was born was, for example, that of the Mexican Masonic Marxist revolution, when many Christians went to their deaths crying out to their last breath, “Long live Christ the King!” One of these Christians was a priest named Fr. Miguel Pro, who risked his life to bring Christ in confession and in the Holy Eucharist to his parishioners so that Jesus could reign in them.
St. Miguel Pro, actually became an expert in disguises in order to go undetected by the communist. Eventually, he was arrested. As He was led before the firing squad he held out his arms in the form of a cross, clutched the rosary in his hand and shouted his last words, “Viva Cristo Rey”…Long live Christ the King. As the shots rang out, he fell to the ground and his soul entered into paradise. A picture was snapped as the shots rang out and we still have that picture today.
As the Church gives us this feast at the end of the Church year, this end of the year should be a type of spiritual death for all of us, and a rising to a new beginning, to a new life, a life of greater holiness. And just as natural death brings with it the prospect of seeing and standing before Jesus Christ our Sovereign King, the end of the Church year brings us this opportunity to stand before Christ the King who is truly, physically, substantially present in the Holy Eucharist and allow Him to renew His divine Kingship over us. Let us offer our heart, mind and bodies fully to Him, so that at the end of our life we will be prepared to stand before this same Eucharist unveiled who is Jesus Christ our Lord and our King and hear Him say to us, “This day you will be with me in paradise.”
Let us turn to Our Lady for Help: Holy Mary, Mother of my King, obtain for me the grace to give my Fiat, my total Yes to Jesus and so serve Him fully in truth in order to be truly free to love Him and serve Him. As we receive your Son at this Mass and return to our pews, help us in the silence of our hearts to cry out to Him, “SERVIUM, I will serve you my Lord and my King to my last dying breath! “Viva Cristo Rey!” “Long live Christ the King!” Amen!
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