Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Readings: Ezkl 34:11-12.15-17; Ps 23:1-3.5-6; 1 Cor 15:20-26.28; Matt 25:31-46

In the Creed we profess that Jesus Christ “will come to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.”¹ That Christ will return as King to Judge the world and definitively usher in God’s Kingdom remains, nearly two thousand years later, an article of Christian faith. It isn’t difficult to see that over the centuries the Church has lost a bit of its eschatological edge.

Eschatology is the word used to describe the study and explanation of ultimate things. As Christians and as Catholics, in addition to Jesus’ return, eschatology refers to the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Purgatory is not included because, like mortal life, it is transitory. Set forth more formally,

Immediately after death, each person comes before God and is judged individually (the particular judgment) and enters heaven, Purgatory, or hell. Yet at the end of time, a final judgment will occur when all are assembled before God and their relationship to God is made public (the general judgment)²

In our day religion is not, as Karl Marx insisted, the opiate of the people. Rather, the opiate of our day is living one’s life as if there is no God as if there is no day of reckoning. It stands to reason that if there is no day of reckoning, there is no need to repent, no need to change, no need to be converted.

While a necessary part of or, more accurately, a preamble to, sorrow for one’s sins is insufficient for repentance. When we make the Act of Contrition in the Sacrament of Penance, we pledge “to sin no more and to avoid whatever leads me to sin.” This is a pledge of repentance.

Before stating our firm intention “to sin no more” when making an Act of Contrition, we acknowledge our need for God’s help to make this more than merely an intention: “I firmly intend, with Your help, to do penance, to sin no more and avoid whatever leads me to sin.” Another name for God’s help is grace. It is this same grace, given us through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, that will enable you to survive the day of reckoning, not your own righteousness.

This is heavy-duty stuff. The kind of thing we are told turns people off. I believe what many people find off-putting is the prospect of self-examination. Because, as the apostle Paul points out in his Letter to the Romans, “all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God.”³ In any honest self-examination, you are bound to come up short. This might seem like bad news. It certainly is bad news if one ignores the good news.

The first bit of good news is that death is not the end for anyone. Because of Jesus Christ, all will be resurrected from the dead. Especially in our very medicalized time, we often speak of and worry about our “quality of life.” Rather than merely being an earthly concern, quality of life should be an eternal concern as well. Wisdom bids us to live sub-specie aeternitatis, that is, to live life under the aspect of eternity, to live as if there is a merciful and just God.

Christ the judge at the National Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

Rather than causing us to turn a blind eye and/or a deaf ear to life in this world, living this way bids us to pay closer attention to the quality of life of those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned. To live sub-specie aeternitatis is to live mercifully, to live tenderly, to live like Christ. This means practicing the works of mercy. There is a simple calculation to this, one for which our Gospel today gives us the formula: if you want mercy, be merciful.

But calculation is too cold, too formal, too impersonal, too transactional. We must never forget, “God is love.”⁴ God is agape. God is self-giving, self-emptying, self-sacrificing love. Here is the good news: “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”⁵ The inspired author continues: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another.”⁶ Bearing witness to God’s love is evangelization. But this does not mean

adopting the sentimental reductionism that marks so much contemporary Christianity, characterized by a spiritualism that replaces Christ with love, an approach that, echoing Feuerbach, says not that God is love but that love is God⁷

Hence, we do not propose Christianity “first of all, as a doctrine or a moral law but… as a reflection of the attitude with which Christ relates to the world.”⁸ Christ relates to the world through tenderness and mercy, not through harshness and condemnation. Any self-examination that would yield the fruits of repentance needs to be done by gazing on yourself with the same tenderness with which Christ gazes on you. In such a self-examination, you must seek not only to discover what you need to be forgiven, but who and what you need to forgive.

Only God is God. Being God trumps being a king. Christ can only be King because he became human. Through the Incarnation, God, to quote Pope Francis, “gets involved and meddles in our miseries.”⁹ Jesus, now by means of the Holy Spirit,

gets close to our wounds and heals them with His hands… It is a personal work of Jesus. A man made sin, a man comes to cure it. Closeness. God doesn’t save just because of a decree, a law; he saves us with tenderness, he saves us with caresses, he saves us with his life¹⁰

Jesus Christ is a King unlike any other king, no matter how benevolent. He establishes his kingdom not by through politics, nor by force, not through threats and coercion, nor through laws and decrees, but through tenderness and mercy, which require patience and forbearance. Jesus Christ is the triumph of grace over karma. This is why, in the major discourse of Saint Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus teaches: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”¹¹ The merciless have no need of God’s judgment. They judge themselves.

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1 Roman Missal. The Order of Mass, sec. 18.^↩
2 USCCB. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults (p. 161).^↩
3 Romans 3:23.^↩
4 1 John 4:8.16.^↩
5 1 John 4:10.^↩
6 1 John 4:11.^↩
7 Borghesi, Massimo. Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis (p. 241). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.^↩
8 Catholic Discordance (p. 240).^↩
9 Catholic Discordance (p. 241).^↩
10 Ibid.^↩
11 Matthew 5:7.^↩