Christ the King (Fr. Vinner)

My Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

This Sunday, at the end of Church’s liturgical year, the readings describe the enthronement of the victorious Christ as King in Heaven in all His glory. Instituting this Feast of Christ, the King in 1925, Pope Pius XI proclaimed: “Pax Christi in regno Christi” (the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ). This means that we live in the peace of Christ when we surrender our lives to him every day, accept him as our God, Savior and King and allow him to rule our lives. The words kingdom, dominion, king, ruler and such types of words help us understand that others can dominate or guide our lives. We humans are social beings and belong to social groupings. We may live in a town or a city; we might participate in various groups; we may have smaller or larger families. All of these groupings indicate some kind of tie to people outside of ourselves. None of us is alone in the world except by our own choosing. And even then, if we choose to be alone, we are still related in various ways.

The challenge of the Solemnity of Christ the King is to belong to Jesus. Belonging to Jesus does not cut us off from belonging to others but gives direction to that belonging. Perhaps too often today we make our social belonging more important than belonging to Jesus and thus our faith is weak. The invitation today is to make our belong to Jesus, our being part of the dominion of Jesus, the Kingdom of Jesus, the most important aspect of our life and all the other belongings that we may have only in terms of belonging to Jesus.

The first reading, taken from the book of Daniel, speaks of the mysterious Son of Man (with whom Jesus would later identify himself), coming on the clouds, glorified by God and given dominion that will last forever. Today’s Responsorial Psalm (Ps 93), proclaims, “The Lord is King,” celebrating the God of Israel as King over all creation. In the second reading, taken from the Book of Revelation, the risen Christ comes amid the clouds as the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last of all things.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus asserts before Pilate that he is a king and clarifies that that his kingdom “does not belong to this world.” He rules as King by serving others rather than by dominating them; his authority is rooted in truth, not in physical force, and his Kingdom, the reign of God, is based on the Beatitudes. Jesus has come to bear witness to the truth: about God and His love for us, about Himself as the Son of God and about us as the children of God. There are plenty of texts proving the kingship of Jesus both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament of the Bible.

We need to accept Christ the King as our Lord, King and Savior and surrender our lives to him. We surrender our lives to Jesus every day when we give priority to his teaching in our daily choices, especially in moral decisions. We should not exclude Christ our King from any area of our personal or family lives. In other words, Christ must be in full charge of our lives, and we must give him sovereign power over our bodies, our thoughts, our heart and our will.

We need to be serving disciples of a serving King. Jesus declared that he came not to be served but to serve and showed us the spirit of service by washing of the feet of his disciples. We become Jesus’ followers when we recognize his presence in everyone, especially the poor, the sick, the outcast and the marginalized in the society and render humble and loving service to Jesus in each of them.
We need to accept Jesus Christ as the King of love. Jesus came to proclaim to all of us the Good News of God’s love and salvation, gave us his new commandment of love: “Love one another as I have loved you,” and demonstrated that love by dying for us sinners. We accept Jesus as our King of love when we love others as Jesus loved, unconditionally, sacrificially and with agape love.
May God Bless us.

FR. S.Vinner HGN