Christ the King • WRR Final Broadcast: Cycle C 21-22
This program originally aired on November 24, 2019
THE SOLEMNITY OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, KING OF THE UNIVERSE
2 Samuel 5:1-3 | Colossians 1:12-20 | Luke 23:35-43
Almighty, ever living 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 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.
Somehow that piece of music always puts me in a way of feeling some kind of clarity for what I want to say. I’m so blessed to have this gift I believe I have, that God is speaking through me. That sounds presumptuous, I guess, but it feels that way to me. And this set of readings explodes sometimes for me. When I look at the readings, they just seem so full of wisdom and understanding, and what I have to use is my imagination, not so literally reading the words but trying to imagine who God is and what he’s doing and how he’s revealed himself to us over these years. You think of it, it was probably, maybe almost 4,000 years ago when God spoke to Abraham. And Moses wrote those first five books of the Bible, and we have in those books kind of an understanding of what it was like to have a relationship with God without Jesus, without a Savior, without someone who died for our sins. And the best words that I think come forward to me about the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament ⎯ and I want to say one thing. I’m so lucky to have been ordained in 1967, right after the Council, and for the first time in the history of the Catholic Church, we were listening ⎯ we now started reading the Old Testament at every liturgy. That was never done before, and I always find that amazing, because it’s so rich and so full of images that help us understand the New Testament.
The word that comes to mind in terms of the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament is the word slavery, and the opening prayer, which always sets the tone for the readings, makes it clear that, when God sent his Son, the King of the Universe, into the world, he came for a reason, to set us free from slavery. And what we look at in this set of readings, then, is the Old Testament versus the New Testament, two kings. In the first reading, we have King David, and in the gospel, we have Jesus. And what I want you to understand with me is that, when David was king, he was called to be king, because Saul, who had been the king before, was not successful in his battles. And the Old Testament is filled with one major theme, well, a couple of major themes, but one of the themes is that God would enter into the Israelite people and protect them against their enemy, and almost always the way God showed that he was pleased with his people was he would conquer their enemies, those that would destroy them. But if they didn’t believe in him, if they didn’t trust in him, then there would be this defeat by their enemy, and they would be slaughtered. In a way, the Old Testament is kind of filled with violence, but there was ⎯ that was the way the world in the Old Testament, 4,000, 3,000 years ago. And so what we see in those images of God working is that he made it clear that, if you trusted in him, he would show his strength by overcoming someone that would destroy you.
Now, just take that as an image and know that that is exactly the promise that God continues to make to us in the New Testament. What is it that destroys us? We don’t have armies necessarily coming to our villages and pillaging us, and we don’t have all that other kind of stuff so literally. But if you just take it as an image, it means that God is there to help you now in a new, completely different way to be freed of those things that would destroy you, and we know what those are ⎯ our selfishness, our self-centeredness, our desire to do nothing for anyone else but just for ourselves. When we get into those places, we are dealing with the enemy, and we’re supposed to conquer it. But the wisdom of the Old and New Testament is you don’t do it by conquering it. That’s what’s so amazing. You do it in a different way. So in the Old Testament, let’s say, and maybe you find yourself living in the Old Testament, where you’re sitting there saying, “I hate this part of me. I’m going to destroy this part of me that causes me to sin. I want to kill it. I want to get rid of it.” We do that, and we’ve done something terribly dangerous, because we’ll throw the baby out with the bath water, in a sense. The things that are in us that cause us to sin are also the things in us that are gifts from God. We have to be able to use those talents in the way that God intends them to be used, and we need to have his help in conquering that temptation, let’s say, to do the wrong thing, to be self-centered, to be not in service to others. And so we have a new image in the New Testament, but it’s still about the same thing, about freeing us from those things that would destroy us.
So in the middle reading, it’s so beautiful. We have this beautiful passage from Paul about who God is in Jesus, and this is a really fascinating thing for me to think about. When you look at Jesus, he is God incarnate. So it’s God in a human being, not filled ⎯ it’s not a human being just filled with divinity like he fill us with his divinity. No, it’s God himself walking on this earth with us, and he’s there as an image of who he really is. So it’s a whole new image of God, not the conquering force that destroys enemies but a loving source that does something mysterious, holds all things together, makes sense of the whole thing that we’re caught up in and called our life. And he delivers us from darkness, and our inheritance is to live in light, to be enlightened people transformed. And the transformation is in a form that is so fascinating, because the transition is that we move from trying to destroy sin, get rid of it, to forgiving it ⎯ to forgiving it.
So we look at the gospel, and I’ve never really seen it this way before, which makes me very excited. I’ve been looking at this reading for 55 years. Sometimes I’ve been preaching on it if it comes up every year, and I’m surprised at how I see something new. And it’s this: the rulers are all jeering at Jesus, and they’re doing something that is obvious. “You’re so powerful. You’re so great. Your God is going to do anything through you. You can do miracles. Well, save yourself. Show us your power. We want to see your power.” And Jesus once said, if he wanted to, he could call down angels and destroy everyone that was against him. So he had power. He could do anything, and they want to see the power of God in a human being. And then he does exactly what they’d asked. He says, “All right.” He looks at the criminals on either side of him, and one of them says, obviously, “Come on.” He’s like the crowd. “Come on. Save yourself and us. Let’s get this over with. Get rid of evil. Get rid of evil. We want to control the world and make it better.” And the other criminal looks at him and nails it. It’s like he’s already channeling Jesus by saying, “Look, you’re condemned. We deserve this punishment. It’s something that we have to pay for in justice, but this man has done nothing wrong. He’s done nothing wrong, and he’s here for us.” I’m just taking it further than the scripture says, but this man must have felt something flowing out of Jesus. This divine creature hanging next to him, giving his life to us just touched this one man, and that’s the thing that we need to awaken in us, be awakened to the gift that God has given us through forgiveness of sin. It’s everything, and Jesus so calmly and so beautifully just says it. “Hey, you understand who I am. You understand I’ve come to forgive those who can name their own sin.” It’s so important that we look at the things that we do, and we accept the fact that we have done wrong, and we long for something to free us from those ⎯ that enemy, that thing in us that causes us to sin, and we want God to get rid of it. And he said, “No, I’m not going to get rid of it. I’m going to tell you simply I want you to forgive it.”
Do you remember St. Paul one time saying to Jesus, “There’s this thing in me, this sin, this problem, and I keep trying to get past it, and I keep wanting to get rid of it. And I can’t.” And the response from Jesus is, “Look, my mercy is enough for you. My gift to you is my forgiveness. You will not get rid of this weakness.” Think about that, God saying, “You will have to deal with this weakness, but you must forgive yourself over and over and over again.” Why would he make that so crucial to his whole message? Because unless you can do that to yourself, you’ll never be able to do it to each other, and once you hold a grudge against someone, once you’re angry at them for their sin and you want to reject them along with their sin ⎯ there’s times to cut yourself free from people who are just self-destructive, yes, but the longing in a heart of anyone who understands the gift of redemption, which is forgiveness of sins, knows that one cannot hate the sinner ⎯ the sinner. You hate the sin but not the sinner, and so you are constantly called to this place of forgiveness. The thing that I love about focusing on this is because it simple ⎯ it changes completely the focus of what it means to grow and to become who God wants us to be. It’s much more about surrendering to the reality of who we are, what has happened to us in the past, what problems we had because of our past, and we move into a place of peace. And it’s not because we get rid of everything that’s wrong, and it’s not even right to do something that I get caught up in when I listen to the news today, when I listen to the way the world is going. I have this feeling that I wish it would be better. “God, can’t you get rid of all evil? Wouldn’t that be a better deal? Wouldn’t life be better if we didn’t have to deal with evil?” And God smiles and, through Jesus, says, “No, no. No, my grace is enough for you. This is what you deal with. This is what you work with. This is the thing that brings life into the world, your capacity to surrender to “as it is written.”
Nothing seems more important for me to teach you, and that is something unique about that moment when Christ was hanging on the cross, and he had every ability he could have to do the most effective thing at that moment, and instead of saying, “I’m going to condemn everybody out there that’s doing wrong to me; I’m going to destroy them,” instead he surrenders to them and forgives them. And that is just the essence of what it means to find peace in a world that’s filled with sin. And yes, it will change, and it will grow as each individual understands fully that, when you don’t try to destroy evil and you forgive it and you find its purpose of being a channel through which we can change and grow, then you enter into a whole new kingdom. It’s the kingdom that Christ the King is the King of. King David was king of crushing the enemy. Jesus is king of saving us by forgiving the enemy. God bless you.
Please, open our hearts to see the nature of this kingdom, to embrace it and to live it as full as we can so that we can find a way of finding the light that you promise and eliminate the darkness. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.