Christ the King (Year B) 2012

Christ the King (B)

                 (Daniel 7:13-14; Apocalypse 1:5-8; John 18:33-37)

In our readings today we are given a magnificent portrait of Him Who is our Lord and Saviour, Jesus the Christ, Son of God become Son of Man:

As the visions during the night continued, I saw One like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven; when he reached the Ancient One and was presented before him, the One like a Son of Man received dominion, glory, and kingship; nations and peoples of every language serve him.  His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, His kingship shall not be destroyed.

Behold, He is coming amid the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him.  And all the peoples of the earth will lament Him.  Yes.   Amen.

And, in answer to Pilate’s question, Jesus pictured Himself as follows:

I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to My voice.

Jesus is, therefore, most worthily our King, and today we gratefully celebrate His kingship and rule.  As He tells us, He came, as King, to bear witness to -- that is to proclaim in word and deed, by His death as through His life – the ultimate truth about God and His plan of salvation for us:

Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.  (John 17:2)

He came as King because His proclamation of the truth had to be both authoritative and unambiguous, it could know neither frustration nor failure; and His sublime witness of love and forgiveness had to be seen and experienced in all the fullness of its beauty and power:

And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.  (John 17:3)

As King, therefore, He not only proclaimed the ultimate Truth, He also manifested that Truth in all its sublime reality, because He Personally was and is, the eternal  Truth:

            I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

But did not St. John also tell us that, God is love?  Indeed he did, and this is just how he put it:

We have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.            (1 John 4:16)

That means that those who have known and believed the love that God has for us, that is, those who have believed in Christ’s proclamation of and witness to, the only true God, have God -- Who is love -- abiding in them.  Therefore, God is Truth in the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel and He is Love in the hearts of those who receive that Gospel of Good News and Hope.

And so we can appreciate that truth is not just to be heard and acknowledged, it has to be lovingly believed and responded to, in order to fulfil God’s purpose as Isaiah prophesied (Isa. 55:11; 61:11):

My word that goes forth from My mouth shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it;

The Lord GOD cause(s) righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.

Those prophecies are rightly fulfilled when God’s word is both proclaimed in truth and received in love; for then, and then only, does God loved in the Word become God ‘lived’ in our heart, a fulfilment which the Psalmist (Ps 85:10) celebrates with the words:

Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed.

It was strange, however, to hear the author of the book of Revelation so emphatically assuring us that, when our Lord and Saviour will come in His glory:

Every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him.  And all the peoples of the earth will lament Him.  Yes.   Amen.

His coming will cause all the tribes of the earth to mourn, every eye to lament?  Obviously, it would seem to us, all those who killed Him might mourn at His return in glory; but why will it be that all will lament, even those who loved Him?  

This will be because of the Truth; since it is, indeed, Gospel truth that all, each and every one of us on earth, have sinned:

There is none righteous, no, not one; none seeks after God.  All have turned aside; there is none who does good, no, not one. (Romans 3:10-12)

Those who receive the truth proclaimed by the Lord’s coming, will see Him and lament the evil that was done Him; above all, they will lament their own part in that evil: that is, they will lament and mourn out of love, out of sympathy, for Him, and out of regret for and displeasure with their own behaviour.  Consequently, in their case, those words of Scripture will be fulfilled:

You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; You have put off my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, that my glory (soul) may sing praise to You and not be silent.  O LORD my God, I will give thanks to You forever. (Ps 30:11-12)

On the other hand, those who did not receive, will not embrace, that Truth made manifest, will mourn simply and solely because of His return.  There will be no love for, nor sympathy with, Him; nothing other than continuing rejection of Him and concern for self.

The kingdom of God, Jesus once said, is among you.  And so, today as everyday, the question -- the drama -- of truth and its reception is going on around us in society, within us as a community, and in the secret depths of our own, individual, hearts.  How do we, can we, should we, respond to God’s truth revealed to and treasured in Mother Church?

There are those, who seem to think that truth is above all to be known with our minds, hopefully, as extensively and as accurately as possible; and, at the other extreme, there are others who think that love is all that matters.   Let us consider these two attitudes a little more closely.

Many Catholics are perfectly content with themselves when they go to Mass and receive the Sacraments on the appointed days, just as they have always done: they say they know the faith; they were taught it at school or received it in the instruction given them by a priest, say at conversion and baptism, or when they were preparing for marriage.  Thereafter, they merely fulfil the obligations they originally accepted as part and parcel of the faith.  Here we have an example of the truth proclaimed being received with but a minimum of heart commitment: believers doing what they have been taught, but no longer fulfilling with love that which they themselves had, perhaps, originally sought and embraced with love.  At the head of such disciples can be found clerics of all levels who will ‘say’ Mass and give the Sacraments in double-quick time; they will present Catholic doctrine and spirituality with words that are nothing more than bloodless transcripts of Jesus’ words of life or of the experience of saints revered throughout the Church: too often, that is, mere abstract truths or cold mental concepts, apparently standing upright and firm only because they are backed by ‘authority’.

On the other hand, those of the contrary inclination are most content when they can give themselves exclusively to devotions or charity, to social involvement or emotional prayers: these have a full heart, indeed, but not infrequently, are somewhat dismissive of the idea that they might have any true need for better appreciation or greater understanding of their faith.  These Catholics rarely have any doubts about themselves, they do not experience any need to ask about, search for, a deeper understanding and appreciation of what they think they already know and most firmly believe.  They are totally satisfied with their own warm heart, and fully approve of and uphold the sincerity of their own intentions.  And yet, Jesus, early on in His public ministry, had lovingly yet unhesitatingly declared of Samaritans encountered in His travels:

You worship what you do not know, we worship what we know. (Jn. 4:21)

How many sects, originally enthusiastic disciples of Jesus, have separated themselves from Mother Church over subsequent centuries because of like  ignorance of the will of God and of the fullness of the maturity of Christ!

People of God, Jesus is come to bear witness to the truth for us, and He tells us:

            Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.

For Jesus’ disciples, His truth is ever a living and loving issue whose beauty is to be unceasingly and increasingly admired, not just a memory from the past, however  firmly fixed; nor can worship in His name ever be just ritual, no matter how beautiful, but is essentially, a total and vital commitment with Him to the Father and for the brethren, by the Holy Spirit. 

So, People of God, on this feast of Christ the King of Truth let us open both our minds and our hearts to Him in His Gospel proclamation, that proclamation which continues to this very day to be made for us and offered to us in and through Mother Church.  It is not just to be remembered as ammunition for argument; we have to increasingly appreciate and love it, by committing ourselves to live for it and grow in it.  Only thus will we allow it to fulfil God’s purpose in our lives.

Jesus assures us that with God, Truth and Love are one; let us also recall those other words of His to the effect that, what God has joined together none of us should ever separate.

           

33rd Sunday in Ordinary time 2012

Thirty-third Sunday (Year B)

(Daniel 12:1-3; Hebrews 10:11-14, 18; Mark 13:24-32)

For us Catholics and Christians there is a mysterious cohesion between ourselves and creation around us: all given life or brought into being by the One true God, with what is material and temporal serving and supporting all spiritual degrees, and our own supreme spirit polarized towards God and eternity.   As a result of this, things of earth and temporal events can help our spiritual awareness, our understanding and appreciation, of God’s mysterious presence for us in our experience of the world, and contact with us in our spiritual life.

This year of 2012 is coming to its end and that fact leads Mother Church to call upon her children to think appropriately about the end of this world, the ‘great and final end’ which we prepare for individually by the way we face up to all the little ‘ends’ we experience throughout life, and for which God’s People have been gradually prepared over many centuries by God’s grace at decisive junctures of their history.  The readings Mother Church has given us for today sound very strange to our ears for we cannot understand much of them; and yet they surely make a deep impression with words both awesome and majestic, concerning events great and even cataclysmic, and yet for all that, most wonderfully full of hope for all who know and love the Lord Jesus.

Those descriptions of ultimate, cosmic, disturbance:

In those days after that tribulation the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken;

had been used earlier in the Old Testament predicting the ruin of nations hostile to Israel; as we find in the prophesy of Isaiah (13:10) foretelling the ruin of Babylon:

For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not flash forth their light; the sun will be dark when it rises, and the moon will not shed its light;

and again when the same prophet speaks of the downfall of Edom (Isaiah 34:4):

And all the host of heaven will wear away, and the sky will be rolled up like a scroll; all their hosts will also wither away as a leaf withers from the vine, or from the fig tree.

After Isaiah, the great prophet Ezekiel (32:7-8) spoke in similar tones of the then forthcoming destruction of Egypt:

‘And when I extinguish you I will cover the heavens and darken their stars; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give its light.  All the shining lights in the heavens I will darken over you and will set darkness on your land’ declares the Lord God.

Like words were also used by one of the later prophets, Joel (2:28-32), to evoke the latter times when God’s Spirit would be poured out upon mankind:

And it will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all  mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.  And even on the male and female servants I will pour out My Spirit in those days.  And I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth; blood, fire, and columns of smoke.  The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes.  And it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the LORD will be delivered; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who escape, as the LORD has said, even among the survivors whom the LORD calls.

And now, we hear Our Lord using similar words to foreshadow God’s final purifying of His People when the evil that was in her would be purged away and God’s true servants shown forth:

And then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory, and then He will send out the angels and gather His elect from the four winds, from the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven.

From the beginning of His ministry Jesus had used the title Son of Man, and now, in those words He identified Himself, for the first time, with the One seen in a vision by the prophet Daniel (7:13-14):

I kept looking in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven One like a Son of Man was coming and He came up to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him.  And to Him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and men of every language, might serve Him.  His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away, and His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed.

In Daniel the Son of Man heads the Kingdom of the Saints which is to supersede the heathen empires of the Four Beasts (Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome?); and now Jesus, showing Himself to be the Son of Man, allows us to appreciate that, in Him, humankind finds its supreme glory and God’s People its supreme Head, while God’s Kingdom knows the irresistible beginning of its definitive establishment:

And then He will send out the angels and gather His elect from the four winds, from the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven.

This process is now going on before our very eyes, so to speak; for the Church is being purged of evil-doers whose secret sins are now being both made manifest and publicly rejected; while former hangers-on, members not by virtue of their love for and faith in Jesus but for reasons of social acceptability and personal advantage, are freely abandoning her for those very same reasons.  Indeed, even at this very moment, we ourselves gathered here are all part of it, for God the Father has called us here today as the Body of Christ to celebrate and acclaim the glorified Lord as our Head:  He brings us together from all corners of the globe as the Church of Christ, called to become ever more truly the fruitful Spouse of Christ for the glory of the Father and the salvation of souls. 

People of God, recognize where we find ourselves at this moment: the process for the purification of God’s People and the establishment of His Kingdom has begun, since Jesus has risen from the dead; He is to be seen and heard, known and received, by those who love Him in His Church; and all this is leading to a final dénouement in which Jesus will be seen by all mankind whether they love Him or not.  He will appear, not humbly as Bread and Wine totally given over to our service, but in all His glory as the Son of God, our Redeemer, and the Judge of mankind.  At present the words of the second reading from the letter to the Hebrews are being fulfilled:

He offered one sacrifice for sins, and took His seat forever at the right hand of God; now He waits until His enemies are made His footstool;

and we all , in the bosom of Mother Church, are being led to justice, as the first  reading put it, being instructed in virtue and wisdom as we learn to lead our lives in conformity to Jesus’ teaching, that we might truly know something of the beauty and goodness of God our Father.

It is a fact today that we see all around us ‘the wicked proving themselves wicked’: we find that wisdom and understanding, far from being valued and sought after, are mocked and disregarded, while the most abominable practices are openly flaunted and accepted; indeed, they can even be found covering themselves over with a cloak of pseudo-respectability, to such an extent that some simple Christians and even some Catholics, are troubled, as Jesus foretold:

False messiahs and false prophets will arise and will perform signs and wonders in order to mislead, if that were possible, the elect.  

In our Gospel reading Jesus again mentions “the elect” as you heard:

Then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory,  and then He will send out the angels, and gather His elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.

Who are these “elect”?   Daniel told us in those words: many shall be refined, purified, and tested, because the elect are those faithful disciples who are being formed into a likeness of their Lord through their experience of life under God’s Providence, by the sacraments of Mother Church, and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, whereby they are encouraged and enabled to walk perseveringly and faithfully along the way of Jesus.  A notable part of the purging and purifying of the faithful elect is accomplished by the sufferings they have to endure in order to remain true to Jesus despite the allurements and trials of life; and today mockery is one of the great trials Christians have to endure for Jesus, especially mockery of Jesus’ teaching about a future judgement. 

 Now Jesus speaks of the coming of that judgement day when He says:

After that tribulation (the appearance of false messiahs performing their signs and wonders), the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

We can imagine something of the calamitous nature of such pre-judgement events, for today we are not unaware of the primeval powers at work in our own sun and Milky Way, and in the astounding galaxies above and beyond us: galaxies that defy counting; involving powers and occupying space beyond human imagining.  In fact, we have learnt and are still in the process of learning so much from the heavens that some scientists regard the heavens as the source of the knowledge of all times, past and future.

For the psalmists of old, however, the heavens spoke resoundingly of the glory of God. In those days, though there were few facts available other than what our human senses could immediately discern, the psalmists however, being filled with the gifts of humility and wisdom, were able to understand and interpret aright what facts were known to them.  Today, on the other hand, for many moderns, the facts are so multitudinous and often so tenuous that their mind is overwhelmed as it seeks to co-relate and then co-ordinate them into a comprehensible whole; and, where faith has been lost or rejected, and pride acknowledged as an acceptable guide, many falsely interpret what they have correctly but only partially observed, with the result that their reading of the heavens proclaims not the Glory and the Goodness of God, but rather power for no purpose, majesty without meaning, and beauty alien in its cold irrelevance.

Therefore, dear People of God, do not let yourselves be troubled by scoffers who ignore the teaching of truth, who walk, indeed run, merrily, along ways that lead to destruction.  Let Mother Church guide you, let the Spirit of Jesus lead you, to righteousness and insight; for then you will come to know, even here on earth, something of the plenitude of peace and fullness of joy promised by Our Lord, before ultimately sharing in His transcendent glory and most sublime joy:

When all things are subjected to Him (and) the Son Himself (is) subject to Him Who put all things in subjection under Him, that God may be All in all.  (! Cor. 15:8)