By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily on the Solemnity of Christ the King at Our Lady of Mercy Church in Deerfield Beach.
I am always happy to visit Our Lady of Mercy parish here in Deerfield and today I join with the parishioners here and a group of Black Catholics that have come to this parish on pilgrimage to celebrate with you the Solemnity of Christ the King.
At first glance, since today we are not governed by kings, we might be tempted to regard such a feast as an anachronistic relic of a long past era. Yet the solemnity of Christ the King – as a liturgical institution – is actually quite recent. It was established not by some medieval pope but by a quite modern day one, Pope Pius XI in 1925.
The Pope was not engaging in some flight of fantasy; in fact, adding the feast of Christ the King was a rather thumb in the eye of a world which had already begun to pretend that it could organize itself without God. The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had already been consolidated and with it, under the spell of radical secular ideologies of both the right and the left, the 20th century was well on its way of becoming the most violent, the most murderous in history.
This was the climate in which this feast was born – and perhaps what motivated the pope to establish this feast was revolution in Mexico. There, a revolutionary government was established which persecuted the Church – and not just bishops and priests, but the entire community of the baptized – with a ferocity that paralleled what was already happening in Soviet Russia. There in Mexico, thousands were killed in the name of freeing people from religious “superstition”.
Led before firing squads, many died shouting: “Long live Christ the King”, Viva Cristo Rey! The Church remembers these Mexican martyrs: the feast day of one, Fr. Miguel Pro, is observed on November 23rd. These martyrs and the millions who died in the successive holocausts of the 20th century remind us that when we pretend to organize the world without reference to God and his truth, we end up organizing the world against man himself.
While the establishment of the feast is recent, the content of what we celebrate today is indeed quite old – indeed it is as old as Christianity. To say that “Christ reigns” is the equivalent of what we say in our profession of faith: “Jesus is Lord”.
And so when many thought that God should be exiled from the affairs of the world – or at least marginalized to the point where he didn’t really matter, Pope Pius XI in establishing this feast day wished to remind us that God does matter.
According to St. Paul, there are two possible ways of living: “either for oneself or for the Lord” (cf. Romans 14: 7-9). To live “for oneself” means to live as if one has in oneself one’s own beginning and one’s own end. It indicates an existence shut-in on itself, oriented only to one’s own satisfaction and glory, without any prospect of eternity. Today, we can see individuals and indeed whole societies of people who have opted to live for “themselves.”
Faced with so much pressure to live for oneself – to think that it is all about me, me, me – we do well at the end of our liturgical year to remind ourselves that Jesus is indeed Lord, the “alpha” and the “omega”, the beginning and end of all creation – and to live “for the Lord” means to live in view of him, for his glory, for his kingdom. To live for the Lord means to put aside the “love of power” that seemingly motivates so much of human activity and is the cause of so much human suffering in our world today. To live for the Lord means to embrace rather the power of love.
In the gospel today Jesus reminds us that we will be judged. That each of us will face a “final exam” and that exam will be about how we put in action in our lives what the catechism calls the “corporal and spiritual works” of mercy. For it is through those works of mercy that we come to know the Risen Lord in the least, the last and the lost of his brothers and sisters. And the Risen Lord comes to know us in the power of our love and care for them.
If we remember the stories of Jesus’ appearances after the Resurrection, the disciples at first did not recognize him. Mary Magdalene thought he was a gardener, the disciples of Emmaus also thought he was a stranger who happened to join them along the road. The Risen Jesus encounters us today in the disguise of a stranger – sometimes, as Mother Teresa said, a stranger in the disagreeable disguise of the poor.
Today, Jesus is hidden from our sight. In Eucharist we share every Sunday, he is hidden in the appearance of bread and wine.
He is also hidden among the homeless and the prisoners, among the sick and the migrant. He is hidden among those society today deems unimportant and even disposable. To recognize him, we need the power of faith but a faith joined with charity, with love. Faith without charity is dead; it is sterile and fruitless; and love without faith risks becoming merely sentimentality.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in our modern age, modeled for us the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. And once when asked how she could do all that she did, she replied that she always reminds herself of five simple words: “You did it for me.”
Recognizing the Christ hidden in the stranger is how we can make our way through a world in love with power and still blinded by race prejudice, xenophobia and selfishness. We believe and love the God who is hidden and invisible when we refuse to pretend not to see those in our midst who are suffering or abandoned. As a Church, a pilgrim people living in a world of fragile peace and broken promises, we are called to be a reconciled and reconciling community by living “not for ourselves but for the Lord”. God will matter to us, when “the least of his brethren” matter to us.
Five words to guide us along our way to Judgment Day, and that final exam that awaits each one of us: “You did it for me.
”Long live Christ the King; Viva Cristo Rey!
