Christ the King - A Model of Nonviolence

FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING

Homily of Pope Benedict XVI

Vatican City, November 25, 2012 (VIS)

In this final Sunday of the liturgical year, the Church invites us to celebrate the Lord Jesus as King of the Universe. She calls us to look to the future, or more properly into the depths, to the ultimate goal of history, which will be the definitive and eternal kingdom of Christ. ... In the Gospel passage which we have just heard … Pilate asks Jesus, 'Are you the King of the Jews?' In reply to this question, Jesus clarifies the nature of His kingship and His Messiahship itself, which is not worldly power but a love which serves.

Jesus clearly had no political ambitions.  After the multiplication of the loaves, the people, enthralled by the miracle, wanted to take Him away and make Him their king, in order to overthrow the power of Rome and thus establish a new political kingdom that would be considered the long-awaited kingdom of God. But Jesus knows that God’s kingdom is of a completely different kind; it is not built on arms and violence. The multiplication of the loaves itself becomes both the sign that He is the Messiah and a watershed in His activity: henceforth the path to the Cross becomes ever clearer; there, in the supreme act of love, the promised kingdom, the kingdom of God, will shine forth. Jesus does not wish to be defended by arms, but to establish His kingdom not by armed conflict, but by the apparent weakness of life-giving love. The kingdom of God is a kingdom utterly different from earthly kingdoms.

"That is why, faced with a defenseless, weak and humiliated man, as Jesus was, a man of power like Pilate is taken aback. So he asks an apparently odd question: 'So you are a king?'  But Jesus answers in the affirmative: 'You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice'. Jesus speaks of kings and kingship, yet He is not referring to power but to truth. Jesus came to reveal and bring a new kingship, that of God; He came to bare witness to the truth of a God Who is love. The power of the true Messiah, the power which will never pass away or be destroyed, is not the power of the kingdoms of the earth which rise and fall, but the power of truth and love". To be disciples of Jesus, then, means not letting ourselves be allured by the worldly logic of power, but bringing into the world the light of truth and God’s love. It is a pressing invitation addressed to each and all: to be converted ever anew to the kingdom of God, to the lordship of God, of Truth.

This means working to bring out ever more clearly the priority of God and His will over the interests of the world and its powers. Therefore, become imitators of Jesus.

The Demands of Love - 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

As we approach the Christmas season we naturally turn our minds to the unique American sport of regifting.  For those unfamiliar with this phenomenon, regifting is the act of taking a gift you have received that you don’t like and giving to someone else as a gift.  I confess to doing this once, justifying myself by saying that someone else will actually enjoy and use this gift while I will do neither.  A student of mine went one step further with a gift he received.  Someone gave him a can of Spam as a gift, and since he did not like Spam he gave it to the parish food pantry, an act that he deemed to be rather salutary and pious.  While it is certainly better for someone else to benefit from a gift that you will not appreciate or use, we might pause to consider the lessons of today’s readings before we canonize ourselves for the act of regifting.

The first reading presents us with the foundational text of Judaism, the Shema.  Every pious Jewish family has a plaque with the text of the Shema beside their front door.  As they leave the house to go about their day, Jews are to remind themselves of their identity and mission:  to love God above all things.  Every act of the day should be animated with the love of God.  The command to love God flows from the fact that God has richly blessed the Jewish people, continually leading them, protecting them, and above all providing them a law by which to live as a people set apart as special and chosen in the eyes of God.  Hence, the love pledged to God in the Shema represents the first fruits – giving our best and our all to God.  It would be a shameful act to give God any less, or to take God’s gift and give it away to another. 

The Gospel text is a remarkable exchange between a scribe and Jesus over which is the first of all commandments.  Jesus recites the Shema in his reply, but he also adds the love of neighbor to the answer, intimately connecting the one to the other.  The scribe finds himself in profound agreement with Jesus’ teaching, to which Jesus replies that the scribe is not far from the kingdom of God.  Jesus’ statement begs the question from us:  what else must the scribe have in order to enter the kingdom of God?  The answer is rather simple:  it is not enough to acknowledge that these are the two great commandments of God.  One must actually love God and neighbor in our words, deeds, and thoughts. 

How, then, are we to carry out this commandment in our everyday lives?  The letter to the Hebrews provides us with a contrast that may prove helpful.  It points out that the Jewish law had the Levitical priesthood offer continual animal and grain sacrifices to God as a way of showing their love for God.  However, Jesus’ own offering of himself is the standard by which love of God and neighbor is expressed and brought into a radical unity.  We cannot love God without loving our neighbor.  Christianity is a faith in the incarnation of Jesus the Lord.  God is for us not an abstraction, idea, or nebulous concept, but rather a person in the flesh with a particular history in time.  We cannot love God in the abstract, but in the concrete of other persons, and hence Jesus reminds us that for as often as we do something for our neighbor we do it to him. 

The Levitical priesthood erected an elaborate system of religious practices that were powerless to save.  The acts were pious and well intentioned, but ultimately they had no real meaning.  For the ultimate point of our faith is brings us to love God through love of neighbor.  Our own faith tradition has this tendency to develop elaborate religious practices, all of which are well intended.  But as Karl Rahner has pointed out, “all prayer, worship, law, and institutions of the Church are only secondary means for us to do one thing:  to love God and our neighbor.  Where we do that we have already fulfilled the Law, thrown the bond of perfection round our whole life, taken the better way which Paul has shown for us.  Only if we understand that there is a real ultimate unity between love of God and love of neighbor do we really understand what Christianity is and what a divinely simple thing it is after all.”  (Everyday Faith, p. 116)

As we seek to grow in our love for God and neighbor, we pray together this week as a people utterly dependent on God’s help and example to accomplish this great work:  “Let us pray in the presence of God, the source of every good.  Father in heaven, God of power and Lord of mercy, from whose fullness we have received, direct our steps in our everyday efforts.  May the changing moods of the human heart and the limits which our failings impose on hope never blind us to you, source of every good.  Faith gives us the promise of peace and makes known the demands of love.  Remove the selfishness that blurs our faith.  Grant this through Christ our Lord.  Amen.”