Christ may be king, but there seem to be an awful lot of princes and extra royalty standing around in our lives to which we bow and curtsey.

Many of us, admittedly, live in the past or the future a good bit of the time. Past-dwellers can be divided into groups: the nostalgists who think the past is much too good to leave behind and those who rubberneck their personal histories with all the gruesome fascination of a car wreck.

The people stood there staring at Jesus, and the ringleaders made faces, taunting, “He saved others. Let’s see him save himself! The Messiah of God—ha! The Chosen—ha!”

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown is a children’s story that I often read to our daughters in their early years. The story begins with these words: “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, "I am running away.” “If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”

When my daughters were little and I would read them fairy tales we’d often come across lands where the king was either bad or missing in action. And because the one who should have sat on the throne ruling justly was either not on the throne, or ruling unjustly, the storybook land had inevitably turned bleak and gloomy and the people were sad.

Following a devastating world war and nearly a century of vicious conflicts among nation states trying to establish their identity and independence, Pope Pius XI decided it would be a good idea to remind Christians that when all is said and done Christ is the King, the ruler, the head of state. If we kept that in mind, he wrote in 1925, our conflicts might not be so frequent or severe.

Encouraged by God's promise of salvation, let us pray for reconciliation with God and one another.

God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.