Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe - Cycle A 2019-2020

Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17 | 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28 | Matthew 25:31-46

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 of sin may render your majestic 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.

I feel like a professor who is now having his last class with his students at the end of a long semester of studying one particular aspect of Christianity, and what we’ve been studying these last twelve months is the gospel of St. Matthew.  So we’re finished with it, and one of the things that it ends with is a very hopeful note, in a sense, if you pay attention primarily to the second reading, because it’s about Paul’s understanding of what Jesus actually brought into the world: hope, forgiveness, compassion.  He’s basically saying that what’s happened is God has come into the world, or Jesus has come into the world as God incarnate and is there to save us, to save his sheep, to tend them, to care for them.  And what we all struggle with as sheep following our master is sin, this thing that came into the world, we say, through Adam, but Jesus has come to free us from sin.  That’s what the cross is so clearly in our tradition as Roman Catholics and as all Christians.  The cross is our hope, our hope for the future, because it means that every sin we’ve ever committed has been taken on by this figure, God/man, and he says, “I will take the punishment that is due to you.  I will take it on myself, and I will destroy the negativity of sin in your life, and I will free you from it.” 

It’s a powerful, beautiful image, and so what it’s also saying is what Paul is realizing is that there’s going to come a time, when the work of Jesus, who came to free us from sin, when finally sin is completely subjected to him and no longer is sin necessary, because it’s done its work, because — the interesting thing about our relationship with God is our struggle with sin, and God has allowed sin to be present in the world, because it has a very, very crucial purpose and reason for being there.  It’s what we deal with in order to evolve and grow into a much higher consciousness, more like God the Father who created us.   We’re on this journey of struggling with our darkness as we continue to move into the light, and the more the darkness is exposed, the more light comes in.  The more we admit the darkness that is in us, the more likely God is able to infuse it with light and transform it. 

So there’s a hopeful thing in this second reading, so beautiful that we are on a journey, and basically the world is getting better.  I believe that with all my heart, yet we live in a time of such amazing exposure to everything that’s dark.  It’s like the underside of everything is being turned over, and we’re looking at sin in situations and places we never expected it to be.  We had a kind of naive, at least I did, a very naive notion that there is good institutions and bad one, there’s good people and bad people, good institutions only do good, bad institutions only do bad.  That oversimplification that I came into the world with, most of us come into the world with — good people do good things; bad people do bad things.  A good person doesn’t do bad things, and a bad person doesn’t do good things.  That’s what I thought but — this may be a silly thing to bring up, but I remember, in 1967 when I was ordained, and the oil on my hand was still moist from my ordination, and I watched a film in 1967 that came out, and it was the story of Bonnie and Clyde.  It seems silly to say this, but I remember, in that film, I was shocked by my compassion and my feeling for the relationship that Bonnie and Clyde were struggling to have as people that loved each other.  I had to shake myself and say, “What am I doing?  These are horrible, murderous, unfeeling, terrible people, and I feel sorry for them?  I have compassion for their relationship?”  I thought, “That’s weird,” but I think what it was is I was already — I was so freshly infused in my ordination with this sense of who God really is.  I didn’t really — I’ve grown into it, I think, over the years, but all of a sudden, what I was realizing was our God is a God of compassion, not judgment only but compassion and judgment.  And the two always have to go together, mercy and justice, and they seem, when you’re oversimplifying things, they seem to be contradictory, the opposite.  In fact, many times you’ll find that you’ll come to the truth when you look at two opposites that you think do not really work at all together, because they’re completely opposite, and you find out they were perfectly made for each other.  Without justice, we’re kind of mushy, emotional people.  Without mercy, we are violent demanders of justice and destruction for those who do evil. 

So the danger to me, in this set of readings, is the gospel, because it seems at the end, instead of the more hopeful thing we see in St. Paul, in this particular passage, it seems like what God is going to do, when he comes at the end, is not to finally destroy evil but to destroy evil people.  And so we have this image of the final thing that Jesus does for the world is come into it and separate all bad people from all good people, and all the good people go to heaven; all the bad people he takes some delight in putting them in a place of destruction.  And there’s a reference to these kind of people in the first reading when we see — the first reading is all about compassion in Jesus, manifested in Jesus.  It’s God’s compassion, but look at this first reading in light of the gospel and see if I can’t come up with something balanced, because the first reading seems to be all about mercy and the gospel all about justice.  Yet the two, as I say, are perfectly matched, because justice makes clear what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s life-giving and what’s death-dealing.  It’s focus is on the action itself, but compassion, it relates to the person, the individual struggling between right and wrong, good and evil.  And we know all of us are susceptible to evil.  All of us are sinners.  That’s the understanding that we have from the ministry of Jesus.  He comes, and he said, “The only people I want to talk to in this room are people who will admit their sinners.”  So he talks to sinners.  What does he say to them?  “I love you.”  And then I love the way in which Jesus is the incarnation of this first reading from Ezekiel when it says that — when God says, “I, myself will come and take care of my sheep, and when they have made mistakes, when their life is somehow filled with darkness and confusion, I’ll come and take care of them.  And when they’re lost in their self-centeredness, I will seek them out.  When they’ve strayed from who they really are, I’ll bring them back.  When they’re injured by whoever has defended them or done something wrong to them in their past, I’ll heal that, but if you don’t admit that you have these weaknesses, if you don’t admit that you are in need of my compassion and my grace, then you consider yourself sleek and strong, and you will be destroyed, not by me, not by my choice.  I don’t want to destroy anybody.  I don’t want to lose anything that God has given me, but if you choose to turn away from everything that you are intended to become, if you deny your birthright of being a compassionate, loving creature, reflected in the Father that created you, if you say, ‘I will not accept any of that,’ then no, you will self-destruct.  You will end up never finding life.”  And does that kind of person exist?  I suppose, because if we’re free to make any decision we want, it’s conceivable that then somebody could say, “I choose death.”  But God is not going to look at a sinner and say, “I choose to destroy you, because you have failed me.”  How can he do that?  Justice works so beautifully with the mind, because the mind is much more binary.  It’s like good things/bad things, right things/wrong things.  It’s clear.  Destroy the wrong, and reward the right. It’s frightening to me that some people can live that way, judging themselves that way and judging others that way, and they live either a miserable life, or they repress everything negative in themselves or in the people they think are good, the institutions they think are good, and they say, “Well, there’s nothing imperfect in this.”  They think perfection is what God’s looking for.  God doesn’t look for perfection.  He looks for a hungry, longing heart to evolve and grow into who they’re intended to be, and that means facing their darkness and their shadows and looking at them and naming them for what they are.  And when they see the danger and the destruction that is in those things and they can feel it and sense it, they’ll change.  They don’t need to be kicked out.  They don’t need to be destroyed. 

How many times, when we listen to a story about somebody that we respected and loved for a long time, and we find out that they have this shadow, this darkness inside of them, whether it’s using their position of authority and power to feed themselves only or whether they’re abusing someone?  Does that mean that everything about them is evil, and that means that, if they’ve made mistakes, that there’s nothing they’ve done that’s good?  How many times have you heard of a story of someone who has a dark side, and yet you’ve seen them do such wonderful things?  You’ve seen them be effective.  You’ve seen them loving people, supporting people, giving people.  What is it like for a child to find out their parent maybe has this dark side to them?  Does that mean that everything the parent has done for that child is worthless, valueless, that they have to say now, “I’ve never had a father that loved me, because he has this problem”?  No, that would be too much justice.  What you have to understand is, when a person makes mistakes, if we understand human nature well enough, it’s because of weakness mostly, not because of intention, or it’s because of confusion, not because of clarity of thought.  And most people, when they do something wrong, do not say they — they do not feel in the moment they’re doing something wrong, or they camouflage it with something else.  And that doesn’t mean that they haven’t done something destructive and wrong, but it means that they’re not evil-to-the-core people.  You can’t write people off because they’ve made mistakes.  At the same time, you can’t make mistakes not seem important. 

So that’s the difficulty of this human nature that God has given us.  How do we work with these two things other than to say, “All right, I cannot be a follower of Christ unless I understand justice, and I understand what is right and what is wrong.  I cant’ be a follower of Jesus unless I don’t work just out of my mind and in a binary way, but I have to be filled with something that only comes from the heart and is not judgmental, and it’s understanding, and it’s compassion”?  When sin is committed, there are two victims, in a sense, the person who’s done the act and the person who’s received the negative impact of the act.  They both need compassion, but it’s so rare that you find the person who was the victim having the compassion for the abuser.  It’s so rare, and yet it was a — I think you might remember a court scene in Dallas where a young man whose brother was murdered by this person accused of the murder, he embraces her at the end of the trial, and it sends a chill through everybody, because it’s saying there is this possibility of reconciliation with human nature, which is imperfect.  And in a way, when you embrace a person who has done something wrong, you’re embracing the human condition, which means we are all sinners. 

So in this great solemnity of a King who has come to free us from evil, one of the ways in which it’s done is by changing our attitudes and evolving us into more both just people and compassionate people.  It’s the perfect blend of what it is to be human and what it is to be a follower of a God who is filled with both but most especially who shines as a King of the world because of his compassion. 

Father, your life is within each of us.It’s our gift, and when we manifest it as it is, we are building your kingdom.Help us to be always filled with both an understanding of right and wrong but at the same time a deep, deep compassion for our human nature, our struggle with evil and knowing that somehow, in your divine plan, we are moving, growing, becoming more and more who we should be.And as it’s revealed where we fail, keep us hopeful that every revelation of the destructiveness of evil leads people more and more to turn to the right, good, loving thing, and we ask this in Jesus’ name.