Fr. JC Maximilian

“This is the King of the Jews.”  So read the sign that hung above the head of Jesus as he hung on the cross.  Obviously it was meant in a sarcastic way; the Romans wanted to make clear to the Jews that THEY were in charge of Judea.  So why do we use this passage from St. Luke’s Gospel for our celebration of the Solemnity of Christ the King?

The idea of kingship is an interesting one in the Bible.  In the eighth chapter of the 1st Book of Samuel, as Samuel who has served as prophet and judge in Israel reaches old age, and after his sons did not follow his example of obedience to God and service to the People, the elders of Israel asked Samuel to “appoint a king over us, as other nations have, to judge us” (1 Samuel 8:5).  Samuel was very displeased with this request because he knew that Israel, the Chosen People, only had one king — the Lord God!  In answer to his prayers, God tells Samuel to grant the people’s request for “It is not you they reject, they are rejecting me as their king” (1 Samuel 8:7).  Samuel does warn the people about the rights that a king would have, but they insist so Samuel is lead by God to appoint Saul as the first king.

And throughout the long history of Israel the people suffer when they have a bad king who thinks first about his own welfare and following his own will, and they prosper when they have a king who is obedient to the Lord.  Yet, instead of being the “people set apart,” they become more and more like the other nations.

Then comes Jesus, the only begotten Son of God.  He is not like any of the earthly kings.  He is meek and humble, yet He speaks with authority.  While caring towards the needs of the people in this life, He points them to their true home in Heaven.  He is innocent, yet they condemn Him to death, death on the Cross.  As He hangs on the cross they mock Him, both the Jewish leaders and the Roman soldiers, telling Him that if He is the King of the Jews He should save Himself.  They do not even realize that they are asking Him to behave like the bad kings of their past who thought about their own needs and wants first and not those of the people.  Then one of the criminals who is hanging next to Jesus joins in the reviling of Jesus by asking Jesus to “save yourself and us.”

Yet Jesus’ mission has not failed.  It has gotten through to some people.  We see that as the other criminal who is hanging next to Jesus, whom the Church has honored as St. Dismas, rebukes those who mock Jesus and asks, “Have you no fear of God?”  St. Dismas knows from the Old Testament that “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.”  He recognizes in Jesus, not only the qualities of the good kings in Israel’s history, but that Jesus is Himself the true and one and only king of Israel.  St. Dismas recognizes that Jesus is God.  St. Dismas knows that God is just, and that he deserves the punishment that he is receiving, yet he knows that God is also merciful so he asks Jesus to remember him when He comes into His kingdom.  And Jesus promises him Paradise.

What about us?  I think that for us Americans we have a hard time understanding kingship.  After all we were the rebells who rejected the kings of Europe to start the great American Experiment — a democracy, a government of the people, by the people, for the people.  Democracy certainly has proven to provide many benefits, especially in championing human rights.  Yet in rejecting human kings for democracy, have we also rejected our Divine King?  More and more it seems as if we have.  At the very least we think that our Divine King should take the back seat to democracy.  We hear so often that we should keep our religious faith out of politics.  Many spend more time each week listening to the news and reading the paper about the political issues we are facing each day — both domestic and international — then they do in reading Sacred Scripture and praying for Divine Wisdom.

Twenty-Five years ago, when I was graduating from the U.S. Capitol Page School, my class had the honor of meeting with the President in the Rose Garden.  All of us — whether we were Republicans or Democrats — were shocked when one of our classmates showed up to meet the President of the United States wearing shorts and a tee shirt.  We ended up hiding him in the back.  I would dare say that all of us here would probably still believe that he was wrong in not showing the proper respect for the office.

Should we not esteem Christ the King even more than the President of the United States?  Each of us should now take a moment to look at how we are dressed?  Why do we wear clothes to church that we would not wear to meet the President?  Would we enter the Oval Office and start chit chatting with those around us without even acknowledging the presence of the President or when he was trying to say something?  Yet how often do we enter the church without respectfully acknowledging Jesus in the tabernacle?  Or we talk at Mass?

Christ is our King!  We should proclaim that every moment of our lives.  We should seek His counsel above all others.  We should honor Him, rejoice in Him, and be humble before Him.  We should put nothing ahead of Him.  Yes, this means we must be Christians even before Americans.  We are called to live in this world but not be of this world.  We are called to be a People set Apart, a Light set on a Hill.  “Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord,” let us rejoice in Christ our King!

[A stone from the Basillica of St. John the Evangelist in Ephesus, Turkey.  From my photos, taken 2007]

What will happen to us after we die?  Is death simply the end, like the snuffing out of a candle?  If there is life after death, what is it like?  All of us have questions such as these.  In fact, these are the type of questions that really make us human.  Neither dogs nor cats nor any other animal ask themselves these type of questions.  These deep, existential questions are only asked by us human beings.  November, the month in which we celebrate All Soul’s day, is a time when the Church calls us to ask these questions so that we can have certainty as to the answers.

The brothers in today’s first reading from the second book of Maccabees were certain of their answers to these questions.  On the surface it might seem like a rather silly reason to suffer torture and death – all because they would not eat a piece of pork.  How often do we eat a ham sandwich or some bacon without giving it a second thought?  Yet this is what the seven brothers were asked to do, with their mother, just to eat some pork yet they chose to die instead.  Why?

Well, of course what they were being asked to do was so much more than just simply to eat some pork.  They were being asked to give up their faith in God, and instead believe in the false gods of the Greeks.  At that time, the Greeks where the very height of civilization, so the brothers and their mother were being told to give up their “old-fashioned” and “superstitious” beliefs and embrace the “modern” world.  Sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it?  How often are our religious beliefs held up by the modern world as being “old-fashioned” and “superstitious”?  Just look at the rash of books that have been on the New York Times Bestseller list recently which attack belief in God as irrational, old-fashioned, superstitious, and even dangerous.  The pagan gods of the Greeks have been replaced by our modern gods of genetics, physics, cosmology, economics, and the entire pantheon of the sciences, both natural and social.

The brothers in the today’s first reading knew that there was something more important than this life.  As the first brother said right before he died, “You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever.  It is for his laws that we are dying.”  Do we have that same kind of faith in God’s promise of eternal life if we obey His commandments and follow His will?

Today’s Gospel account makes it clear that there were still those during Jesus’ time who did not believe in anything beyond this life on earth.  Among the various sects of Jews, it was the Sadducees who did not believe in an afterlife, so they try to trip Jesus up with their ridiculous hypothetical question.  They were really just trying to make the whole idea of life after death look ridiculous, and Jesus could have dismissed them as just being frivolous.  Rather, Jesus took the opportunity to teach them, and us, about what the next life will be like.

Jesus points out that life beyond death is not simply a prolongation of life on earth.  Rather it is something entirely new.  Maybe a better way of saying it than “life after death” is to call it “life beyond death.”  So what will life beyond death be like?  Of course our finite minds cannot fully answer that question, but St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, gives an excellent description:

    “Eternal life is the perfect fulfillment of desire, because each of the blessed will have more than he desired or hoped for.  In this life, no one can fulfill his desires, nor can any creature satisfy a man’s craving.  God alone satisfies and infinitely surpasses man’s desires, which therefore can never rest except in God.”

Pope Benedict XII, in Benedictus Deus, wrote that the souls in heaven “see the divine essence with an intuitive and even face-to-face vision, without interposition of any creature . . . . Those who see the divine essence in this way receive great joy from it.”
The basic truth of Jesus’ teaching, from today’s Gospel passage, is that our hope of life beyond death is not based on wishful thinking but on the nature of God Himself.  Yes, in philosophy we can talk of God as being the “first cause” and the “unmoved mover”, yet He is infinitely more than that.  Jesus reveals God as our loving heavenly Father who enters into a personal relationship with us.  God loves us, and this relationship of love cannot be terminated by death, just as God the Father’s love for Jesus did not end when Jesus died on the cross.

Jesus does not offer us a faith that answers every question our curiosity can propose.  Rather He gives us a faith by which to live and die.  When we die, we will find that Jesus has already gone before us, and is waiting for us.  He has prepared a place for us.

Meanwhile our task is to prepare for that great encounter with Christ Jesus, which will be our homecoming.  We prepare for it not by worrying about the details but by living to the full here and now.  Jesus has entrusted to His Church gifts – namely the Sacraments – to help us do just that.

“When we encounter Jesus at the end of life’s journey, will we be meeting a familiar and well-loved friend?  Or will he be a stranger at whose approach we shrink in fear?  The answer to that question lies in our hands, right now.  Out of his great love for us God permits us to choose what that great final encounter will be like.

It is the most important choice we what ever have.” (John Jay Hughes, Proclaiming the Good News:  Homilies for the ‘C’ Cycle, Huntington, IN:  Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 1985, p. 255)