Christ the King - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2019

Today’s Feast of Christ the King is a recent Feast by Roman standards and was instituted only in 1925 by Pope Pius XI. He saw it as a Feast particularly for the laity, as a response to what he saw as the growing secularism and nationalism of the age [What’s new?]. When I was growing up, the Feast had been enthusiastically adopted by the growing Lay Apostolate movements. They saw it as an opportunity to emphasise the responsibility of everyone in the Church to work consciously and deliberately to shape society according to Christ’s values of love, justice, truth and freedom. The Second Vatican Council highlighted how this responsibility sprang from the God-given and inviolable dignity of every person, which demands in turn that all human interactions be based in love and justice, respect everyone’s freedom and lead to true and lasting peace.

Over the years following Vatican II, theologians continued to reflect on the God-given dignity of every person. They have stressed that we are sacred because our very being, our existence, is gift of God who is the source of all reality. To be created is to participate in the very being of God. Since, as we Christians realise, God is love, then, for God, being and loving are the same operation. By the simple fact of giving us existence and keeping us in existence, God necessarily gives us love. If we are at all, we are loved – and totally independently of anything we do. Jesus clearly presumed this basic fact in his challenging yet also beautiful comment, “Whatever you do the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me.”

Vatican II finished fifty-five years ago. More recently, more and more theologians are recognizing that, by the very fact of God’s creating, then not only human persons but everything that is created is the fruit, the concrete expression, of God, creating in and through Christ, “the Son that [God] loves”. Indeed, as we heard in today’s Second Reading, “…all things were created through him and for him – everything visible and everything invisible… and he holds all things in unity”.

In coming to terms with creation, the sheer power and energy of the Big Bang, discovered for us by scientists and cosmologists, is complemented by the poetic simplicity of the creation story as imaged by the authors of the Book of Genesis. The dust of the earth from which we humans and everything else on our planet are made turns out to be the dust from exploded stars. And when the Son of God eventually became human in Jesus, his humanity was likewise shaped from the dust of exploded stars.

It is not only human persons who are sacred – the whole universe is sacred. As the English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, proclaimed many years ago, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God!” Everything can/should speak to us of God because everything has something of God.

Pope Francis, like so many contemporary theologians, has drawn the logical conclusion that it is our human responsibility to respect deeply and care lovingly for our world and its environment, with which our very existence is inextricably entwined. He is particularly concerned that those most effected by the escalating pollution and degradation of the atmosphere, our oceans and our land surface are the poor, the very ones least responsible for it. Listening to the overwhelming majority of scientists, he accepts the reality of our human contribution to the changing climate and urgently summons everyone to what he calls “ecological conversion”.

All this, unfortunately, remains so much “head-stuff” until we take time, in silence, to let it sink into our hearts, into our spirit. Our world is saturated with God; but for us to realize this, we need “eyes that see” and “hearts that understand”. We also need patience, flexibility to the will of God and willingness to be surprised by joy.