CHRIST OR THE REVOLUTION OF KINGSHIP.

November 22, 2020
The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe - A.

READINGS: EZ 34:11-12, 15-17; PS 23:1-2, 2-3, 5-6; 1 COR15:20-26, 28; MT 25:31-46.

A Zambian proverb says, “The king lives way up to where the stench of the poor cannot reach him.” And an Albanian proverb adds, “Crowning a clown won’t make him a king.”

“How worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and divinity, and wisdom and strength and honor. To him belong glory and power for ever and ever.” (Rev 5: 12; 1: 6)

When we hear the word ‘King’, what comes first in the mind of everyone is honor, power, glory, wisdom. In monarchic traditions, the Monarch or the King is the highest personality of a country, the one who has words of life or death on everyone’s life. What a king says makes office of law. According to the Britannica Dictionary, the king is a supreme ruler, a sovereign over a nation or a territory, of higher rank than any other secular ruler except an emperor, to whom a king may be subject. Kings are known for their personable, fame, parures with which they are adorned. Thus, the saying goes that, “no king without throne and crown.”

We live in a world and in societies where, though the calling and words may have changed, some people live like kings and monarchs with power, honor, glory, possessions, and surrounded by servants and slaves. We are celebrating today the last Sunday of the Year of the Church, the Year A. We are called to contemplate the kingship of Christ. Surprisingly, this solemnity presents a ‘Revolution of Kingship’. Jesus is king, but not at the likeness of our worldly kings. He is a Servant-King, a Suffering-King, a Dying-King. In Jesus Christ, we have a king who, instead of taking the life of his subjects to save his own life, accept to die, that is, to give up his life to save that of his subjects. We venerate a king whose throne is not adorned with precious gems, but with his precious blood and whose crown is not made of gold, but with thorns. Jesus is a king enthroned on a cross and crowned with thorns. The greatest and highest characteristic of the Lord’s kingship is love. It is a love that does not condemn, but rather is eager to save. Jesus, in that sense, is a king and a judge who saves. Here is the theme and the main message that springs from today’s word of God.

The prophet Ezekiel, in the first reading, uses the beautiful allegory of the shepherds and the sheep to tell to the people of Israel, in their Babylonian exile, how God leads them. As a good shepherd, he will judge one sheep and another. After the long satire against the false shepherds, the prophet, in this extract draws the portray of the faithful and good shepherd. He emphasizes one aspect of his relationship with the false and evil shepherds, and more precisely, puts the accent on his relationship with the sheep. The good shepherd, as we read, will rescue and gather his sheep, feed them, lead them to the good pasture, care for the injured, strengthen the weak, save them from the hands of those who destroy them, protect them, keep them safe, adopt them as his own…

The image of the shepherd as portrayed by Ezekiel matches perfectly to Jesus-Christ, the greatest of all shepherds, the Messiah. In the Gospel, keeping with this analogy of the shepherd and his sheep, Jesus describes the coming of the Son of Man, the final judgment, as a time to make a separation between evil and good. The Lord says, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”

The judgment as here described will have one unique module: love. It is all on the love that we have shown and shared with each other. Love, brethren, is the only thing on which God will judge us; or to say it better, as it is not God to judge, but ourselves, love will be the argument of our own judgment. For, love is what moves us either to feed or not to feed the hungry, to give or to refuse to give drink to the thirsty, to welcome or not to welcome the stranger, to clothe or not to clothe the naked, to care or not to care for the sick, to visit or not to visit the prisoners… The people who love, see the Lord in every needy, and find eagerness to serve him in them. Those who do not love, not only do not see the need of their fellow brothers and sisters but never do they see the Lord in them. And because they fail to see God in the needy, they can do all kinds of evil to others to save their own self-centered interests. The opposite of love, in that sense, is not hatred, but selfishness. For, while love makes man selfless, the absence of love, expressed in form of hatred, leads to egoism, narcissism, indifference, and sadly to sadism, finding one’s joy in the suffering of others.

Jesus, at the end of the parable of the final judgment, makes it a stern warning, “Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.” This is clear that what you do to the needy, you do it to the Lord. Therefore, what you fail to do for them, it is also to God you fail to do it. Don Orione said rightly, “The image of God shines in the most lowly of men. Whoever gives to the poor, gives to God, and will receive his reward from the hand of God.”

St. Paul, in the second reading, exhorts the Corinthians that Christ, at the end will hand over the kingship to his Father. After subjecting all things and all creations to himself, Jesus will bring all to God. The Lord Jesus, we know, subjected all things to himself not by lording over them through oppressive power, but by dying for all. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus became king of all creation. His throne, therefore, is the instrument of his torture and his crown, the sign of his humiliation and mockeries of his torturers, the thorns.

With Jesus, we learn that true authority and glory come from self-sacrifice out of love for those one loves. He who is not ready to die for his loved ones is not worthy to lead them. Here is a severe invective to our today’s kings. You are not kings or presidents to shed other’s blood. If blood needs to be shed, rather shed your own for them. If your power is won through the martyrdom of others, you are a mere bloodthirsty leader and not a servant. If you build your authority on abusing and killing, you are an evil shepherd, a power-seeker, a glutton of the throne, and fame, not a leader. And to finish, this warning from this Tibetan proverb, “When a king is about to lose his power his orders burn more intensely than fire.”