Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, C, Vigil

November 19, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.19.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Christ the King wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we celebrate the last Sunday of the liturgical year and, in many ways, the culmination of everything we have marked up until now — the goal of Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, Pentecost and Corpus Christi and of all the Sundays and feasts throughout the year. They have all pointed toward this reality, that Christ is the King of the Universe, the Lord of all, the judge of the living and the dead. All of time, all of history, is heading toward this climax when Christ will be revealed to people of every race, nation and religion as the universal King of Kings.

* This feast is relatively very young. It was instituted only 97 years ago by Pope Pius XI during the 1925 Jubilee at the request of many bishops and faithful from around the globe in response to a militant atheism that was trying to repress belief in Christ and suppress Christian presence in the world. Just eight years earlier, Bolshevik communism had begun to show its evil head and was seeking to “free” the people from the “opium” of faith in God. In Mexico, there had been a revolution against the “old order” and one of the first results was anti-clerical persecution based on a similar militant atheism. The Church needed to go underground. Catholic priests like Blessed Miguel Pro, whose feast we will celebrate on Wednesday, risked their lives and donned various disguises to try to bring the sacraments to those in need. After Blessed Miguel was arrested and hastily brought before the firing squad, he pronounced, as the soldiers raised their rifles and took aim, his emphatic valedictory, “Viva Cristo Rey!” — “Long live Christ the King!”

* Christ the King. The last thing that Jesus seemed at the moment that Blessed Miguel was murdered was to be reigning, but in fact he was, even though it did not correspond to anyone’s idea of what a king’s reign would look like. Similarly, when Jesus inaugurated his kingdom, it had nothing to do with anyone’s expectations either. The last thing Jesus looked like as he hung upon the Cross on Good Friday was a king. He was bathed in blood, not clothed with royal purple. He was hammered to a Cross, not seated on a throne. He was crowned with thorns, not with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and humiliate the Jews, Pilate had ordered that an inscription in three languages be placed above his head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Rather than pay him homage, most in the crowd mocked him. The chief priests mocked him. The Roman soldiers and passers-by mocked him. Even the thieves crucified with him mocked him. And they all derided him in the same way: “If you’re truly the king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, come down from that Cross and save yourself.” Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power they could comprehend. And a crucifixion would be proof that he was precisely notthe long-awaited Messiah-king for whom they had been waiting for centuries. The Jews anticipated that when the Son of David came, he would rule in the way that his ancestor David had ruled. He would use his power to subjugate all those who made themselves his adversaries, not take their abuse and die a horrible death to save his abusers.