Artwork: Big Stock 

In the Church’s calendar, Christ the King is the parallel of the Super Bowl trophy or the Final Four in college basketball or the last game of the World Series. The Church’s liturgical year concludes with this feast of Christ the King, instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 to celebrate the Jubilee Year and the 16th centenary of the Council of Nicaea.  Instituting this feast, Pope Pius XI proclaimed: “Pax Christi in regno Christi” (“The peace of Christ in the reign of Christ”).  Christ is our spiritual King and Ruler who rules by truth and love. We declare our loyalty to him by the quality of our Christian commitment, expressed in our serving of others with sacrificial and forgiving love, and by our solidarity with the poor. The Cross is his throne and the Sermon on the Mount, his rule of law.   His citizens need obey only one major law: “Love God with all your being, and love others as I have loved you.”  His love is selfless, compassionate, forgiving, and unconditional.   

He is a King with a saving and liberating mission: freeing us from all types of bondage, enabling us to live peacefully and happily on earth, and promising us an inheritance in the eternal life of heaven.

Today’s Gospel presents Christ the King as reigning, not from a throne, but from the gibbet of the cross. Like the “suffering servant” of Isaiah (53:3), He is despised and rejected, as the bystanders ridicule the crucified King, challenging Him to prove His Kingship by coming down from the cross.  The Gospel also tells of the criminal crucified beside Jesus who recognized Him as a Savior King and asked Jesus to remember him when Jesus entered His kingdom. Jesus promised the good thief that he would be with Him that day in Paradise. Tradition remembers the criminal on Jesus’ right side as “the good thief” who repented of his sins at the last moment, though Mark and Matthew call him a “revolutionary.” Although the Romans intended the inscription on the cross, “This is the King of the Jews,” to be ironic, it reflected the popular Jewish speculations about Jesus’ possible identity as the Messiah of Israel. For Luke and other early Christians that title was correct, since the Kingship of Jesus was made manifest most perfectly in his suffering and death on the cross, followed by His Resurrection on the third day, as He had foretold.