| Readings: | 2 Samuel 5:1-3 Colossians 1:12-20 Luke 23:35-43 |
| Date: | November 23, 2025 - Feast of Christ the King, Cycle C |
Today we celebrate the feast of Christ the King. If I ever needed a reminder that our Catholic faith is radically counter-culture I had it this week. As I was working on preparing this homily, everywhere I drove around I saw signs saying, No King, No King! One of the first things that came to mind was that in previous years that I preached on this feast, one challenge was to help us understand what it really means to have a king. Those signs reminded me that I don't have to do that. Having a real king, giving ourselves over to a real king means putting our whole livelihood in that king's hands, so even our staying alive is up to that king.
As we see in the first reading from 2 Samuel, there is something in our human nature that needs a king. The people of the northern kingdom of Israel come to beg David to be their king, even though for the last seven years, they had been trying to kill him. For several centuries after leaving the slavery of Egypt, the Israelites had no human king. The Lord God was their king. But as humans often do, they wanted a king who was bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh and so God gave them Saul, and then David.
The only problem with human kings is that they are only human; they are not perfect. So they have no power of their own so they must take their power from their subjects. The ancients recognized this truth and tried to feed life and power to their kings, who were often regarded as gods, by offering sacrifice of animals or even human life. Kings throughout the ages have had to constantly conquer new areas to feed on the lives of the captured people or their resources to stay alive, to stay in power. God refused to let David build a temple for God because he had so much of that blood on his hands. At the end of his reign, he had sucked his nation dry to amass the gold and silver and fine wood and artists that his son Solomon would use to build the temple.
Today the kings and false gods we create and give allegiance to suck us dry. The king of consumerism lies to us that it is giving us the one thing that will make us happy, or fulfilled. But the truth is, as soon as we have bought that one thing, it lies that it really is something else that we need to buy. It doesn't matter how much we have bought in the past, the only thing important to the king of consumerism is what we will buy next. And so it sucks us dry. This is true of whether our false king or god is a government, or an ideology, or even a relationship.
The only true king is God. God does not need anything to stay alive or to have power, so God does not suck us dry. Only the kingdom of God fills its followers with life to the fullest.
So today's Gospel story of Jesus dying on the cross while promising the thief life with him in Paradise is a perfect summary or culmination of the story how the crucification brings us salvation.
By sending his only Son to be human and letting him die on the cross, God tells us in humanly understandable terms that only God is worth giving our allegiance to, only God is a king who comes to serve, not be served. In Jesus , God satisfies our human desire to have a king who is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh but who gives us life instead of draining it from us. In this story of our king dying on the cross, we understand that even in the complete emptying of himself on the cross, our king still looks around for someone who needs to be filled up, to be given life. He finds him in the second thief, and in the completeness of Jesus' emptying, he takes this thief to the complete fullness of paradise.
By sending his only son to die on the Cross, God has delivered us from the mistaken notion that a humanly created king will ever satisfy us. He invites us into the kingdom of a King who comes to serve us, and even in emptying himself of human life, pours life into us.
So on this feast let us look long and hard at the crucifix; see there the king who gives life even as he faces death, who continues to give us life here at his table today. Then look at the kings we have given power to in our lives and decide which king to choose. May we always choose the only King who fills us with life: Christ the King.