The Feast of Christ the King

2 Samuel 5:1-3 | Colossians 1:12-20 | Luke 23:35-43

Almighty, everliving God, whose will is to restore all things in your Beloved Son, the king of the universe, grant, we pray, that the whole creation set free from slavery may render your majesty’s service and ceaselessly proclaim your praise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This Feast of Christ the King is fairly new to the Catholic Church, new in the sense that we’ve been around for 2,000 years, and it wasn’t until 1925 that the church decided to have a feast day called Christ the King. After the council, when we renewed so many of the issues the church was dealing with, in terms of trying to reach the modern world, we did a lot to change the liturgy. It was the thing that was probably the most dramatic, changed the language from Latin to English, changed the arrangement of the room. We changed, in a way, a kind of mystical experience that we observed to something more personal that we were participating in, the liturgy, the gathering that we do, over and over again, where we listen to a story. I think it’s fascinating that this whole work that belongs to our — our responsibility while we walk this earth is to get to know God, to know ourselves and to know why we’re here, and the best place we can go to find that is not an institution but the story — the story.

The story had two parts, has two parts, Old Testament, New Testament, and from the beginning of the church until the 1970s, we had a way of only listening to a part of the story, the New Testament. The Old Testament was never proclaimed on a regular basis on Sundays in the Catholic Church until 1970s, and so I always had this kind of naïve thought that, well, the Old Testament was wrong, based in kind of law and justice and sin and punishment, and the New Testament is everything. That’s where we should concentrate. So the Old Testament is sort of to be written off as, well, not important. Nothing could be further from the truth, because one of the problems of separating ourselves from the Old Testament is we separate ourselves from a relationship that is the goal of the New Testament. That’s a relationship with God our Father — God our Father. The whole story is about God our Father trying to reach us, the creatures that he created that, in his own mind, he makes clear, that we are by far the crown of his creation. He loves us beyond our imagining. He wants nothing more than for us to grow up and to experience who we have been and who he has intended us to be. It’s called holiness.

We confuse holiness with perfection. Holiness is not perfection. It’s full acceptance of our imperfection. It’s naming our sins, being aware of what they are and what they cost us and the pain they cause others and realizing, when we admit them, there’s this mysterious gift that was won for us by Jesus, the instrument that God chose to save us. And the ministry of Jesus is all about forgiveness, no judgment against us for what we’ve done, just accept what we have done, and we are forgiven. Just accepting it and realizing that it goes against our very nature, the thing that we did that was wrong, is enough to be an opening for God’s grace to rush in and say to us, over and over again, “You are forgiven. You are forgiven.” Not only forgiven, but the sin has actually become an instrument of greater intimacy with God the Father, because he wants nothing more than a real relationship with each of us. He doesn’t want us performing some kind of — I don't know — lobotomy on our human nature so that we pretend we don’t have that kind of selfish side to us, and we’ll present to him something that’s not really ourselves, but it’s something that looks good. It’s like the rich man that came to Jesus and said, “Look, I’m perfect. Is there anything else I need to do?” And he said, “Let go of everything you think, that makes you feel that you’re the cause of your holiness.” Possessions are those things that we own that give us a sense of value. What we’ve done gives us value. What we have gives us value. How we look gives us value. It’s all a lie. No, we are valuable. No performance makes us more pleasing to God. No sin separates us from his intense love for us. That’s the message of the New Testament.

Unless you see the Feast of Christ the King, which incidentally was moved to its present location in 1970, as the feast to end the church year —it made total sense to me, because in a way, when we look at Jesus as our king, the conqueror of all evil, and we recognize that what he has done for us is awakened us to this incredible forgiving love of the Father, and we can talk for a long time about how Jesus actually displayed that in his acceptance of everything about his life that wasn’t what he wished it could have been, accepted his failure as one who could change the church. He said yes to a horrible end to a life that he prayed would be more effective, gave into it, accepted the fact that he failed, in a sense, and when he accepted that, he became everything that he needed to be, the resurrected, loved Christ, who did nothing but then teach people a mystery of forgiveness, reconciliation, love. It’s the heart of the kingdom. So Jesus came to establish this incredibly beautiful, powerful thing called the kingdom of God, which you learn mostly from the Old Testament what the kingdom of humans is like. We know it so well. It’s filled with destructive figures, and when Jesus — excuse me. When God the Father wanted to reveal who he was, he had to use a violent, sort of forceful presence in the world to show the people that he had power over enemies, power over the negative, power over darkness. Whenever there were these groups of people who bought into and, in a way, represented all the darkness and they were about to destroy God’s people, God would destroy them, and if the people chose to be in darkness, like their enemies, then he would destroy them. It was a kind of statement that, “I’m in the world to destroy that which destroys you.” He didn’t make a distinction between our actions and our essence back then. People wouldn’t have understood that. Our actions don’t determine who we are, but at the time that God spoke in the Old Testament, he was talking to people of a certain level of consciousness, and they did not know much about human nature. They knew about good and evil. They knew about having food or starving, being free or being destroyed by an enemy. They knew those basic things, and so God worked with them as they were to describe to them he was a God who wanted to save them. The whole story of the Old Testament is a God entering into people’s lives, freeing them from a slavery to that which robs them of who they truly were meant to be.

That’s the whole Old Testament, and Jesus comes then to show us how that freedom is accomplished. And he did it for us. Jesus did it for us. He believed in God. He hoped in God. He knew God would take care of him. He wouldn’t destroy him. His greatest longing was to know the truth of who God the Father is. He spent 30 years growing as a human being into that wisdom, which is a sign to all of us. It takes years and years to understand the fullness of who we are, who God is and why we’re here. It takes an evolution of consciousness that is a gift to those who are open to it, and it’s been earned by centuries of people making this transition from an autonomous, self-sufficient lifestyle that is shown to us in the Garden of Eden so clearly. That was Adam and Eve’s sin. “I can do this on my own. Just tell me what to do that’s right, and tell me what to do that’s wrong, and I’m fine. I don’t need God.” So God the Father let them go into the world to struggle and find out that they couldn’t do what their nature is created to enable them to do. They couldn’t do it on their own, and that’s the whole point of the Old Testament. You can’t.

In the New Testament, we have a model of how it works. We have a model of God entering into a human, and his name is Jesus. The name means God saves. How does God save the world? By partnering with you and me. He enters into us, and that’s an amazing experience, to allow that to happen. It is not something you earn. It’s something you have to believe in, something you have to trust in and something you have to be open to enough to begin to feel it, and many people, like myself, when we first begin to feel something that powerful inside of us, we run from it. It’s too much. It’s too big. I can’t deal with something that powerful, because we don’t really understand the power of God is not his force, not his overwhelming ability to accomplish things. No, the real power of God is his ability to look at you and look at me and say, “All I see is beauty. All I see is something so beautiful. I see a seed in you like I placed in all creation, but you’re the only thing that I created that has the potential to become fully what I’ve always intended life to be, loving beings filled with divinity, saving the world, and they save it not by becoming perfect but by owning their need for me, their weakness for me.”

So look at the first reading about a king, King David, and it’s basically about King David being the best king. The thing that’s interesting about his kingship in that first reading is the fact that he is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. So we want a king who is like us, who knows us. We can surrender to someone who knows enough about us to know what we really need. Then Paul is just giving praise to God the Father for doing the thing that he has done, teaching us that this image of Jesus is an image of us and that we’re to become like him, not perfect, because if you see Jesus as God, as I always have, then it’s really hard to say, “I want to be like Jesus,” because it means I’m sinless. Anybody that tries to be sinless in order to be loved by God is going to be in a dead end. You can’t do it. It backfires. If you’re successful, you think, “I — I — I have made myself loveable.” No, that’s not true love. If you think people love you just because of who you are, how you perform, you’ll never experience intimacy. It’s when they see you in your worst and love you. That’s intimacy.

So we see then in Jesus on the cross there’s something here that’s like the heart of his ministry, because it’s the last act he did before he died, other than the most amazing thing he said at the very end was, “Father, all these people, you love them. I love them. I’ve learned to love them. They don’t know what they’re doing. They are unconscious of the choices they’re making.” And the Father said, “I know, and they are forgiven. But they’re always forgiven, thanks to what you’ve shown them.” Jesus has shown us how to be engaged in him, which is to be engaged in a relationship of total, complete acceptance and love. If we don’t believe in a God who does that for us, then we can’t ever become like Christ. We can never participate in the work that Christ established for us to do. Jesus is, in a way, the clearest statement to us as to who God is, a God who enters into us.

So we go back to the cross, and we see what Jesus is doing to the good thief. He’s saying — one thief says, “Okay, save me if you’re so strong.” And the other one says, “Look, I know, I think, who you are, and all I ask is that you forgive me, because I deserve this punishment. I’ve failed.” And Jesus said, “If you can say that you’ve failed and that you accept love, today, today you’re in paradise.” And what is paradise? Being loved? Yeah. Not only being loved but being acceptable as you really are, being forgiven, being embraced by a God who seems so powerful that it seems terrifying to have him that close to us, but if we really see him as he is, as Jesus has showed us who he is, as the effectiveness in the life of Jesus is the effectiveness you give to each of, then we can overcome that fear and live in this thing that is won for us. In this great feast, we’re celebrating it. It’s the kingdom of God, a place of peace and joy and, most especially, the most amazing, sweetest experience of freedom and dignity and worth and importance, all of which our nature, true nature, thrives on. So thank you, God, for your kingdom.

Father, your kingdom has come. Your presence is among us. Your promise is to fill us with the strength that we need to live in a world that is a strange mixture of goodness and beauty and evil and corruption. That’s your plan, for us to live in these two worlds and continue to find, in a way, to become your partner and illuminating the darkness and destroying it as we move closer and closer to the holiness of our fullness that you’ve intended us to be. Thank you for this kingdom. We praise you. Amen.