TODAY’S CELEBRATION HAS the grandest sounding title on the church calendar: Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe! With a lead-in like that, any secular holiday would include fireworks and speeches, parades and pageantry. There would be formal dinners in resplendent ballrooms.
OUR SUN IS a star, one of 200 billion such entities in the Milky Way, to say nothing of the universe. As we learn this bald fact in science class, it by no means extinguishes our singular allegiance to the one star that gives us heat and light, holds us in place and possibility. To us the sun is not just a star. It’s a power so fundamental to life on this planet that we feel great sympathy for our ancient ancestors who once worshipped it as a god.
Give-and-take is more than just a metaphor in all of our readings this week. If you start with our psalm, you see God on the giving side of the equation. In just a handful of verses, God gives away justice, food, freedom, sight, hope, love and protection! It’s like standing under a waterfall of gifts. Enjoy the shower of benefits!
What good does it do to honor the saints? Bernard of Clairvaux posed this question to his brothers in the monastery on the Feast of All Saints. It certainly doesn’t give the saints anything they need or don’t already have in abundance in eternity to praise them here.
Thomas Aquinas wrote that Christ alone is the true priest. All others known by that name are merely his ministers. Aquinas got this idea from reading the Letter to the Hebrews. While all of us are summoned by our baptism into a common priesthood, and some fewer of us respond to the call to ministerial priesthood, the true priest mediator of all that’s holy among us is Jesus himself.
"The church must be missionary.” So says the Catechism (n. 851) in a terse echo of the Great Commission of Jesus: Go and make disciples of all nations. We’re reminded on this World Mission Sunday that church isn’t primarily a place where we come to pray, or even a happy assembly of the already convinced.
My friends once owned a circus, and they confirm: The biggest animal can’t pass through the smallest door. Wide creatures require wide berths! So here’s the problem: You and I become wide-load creatures if we possess a lot of stuff, or even when our egos swell to the size of our imagined self-importance.
A world without respect is a bitter, divided, violent, and uncertain place to live. You can’t have peace without justice, as popes and prophets have long warned us. And the first indication justice is absent is when one group rejects the full humanity of another.
Who loves a challenge? Let’s have a show of hands! That’s great. Now consider: Who loves being publicly called out and verbally thrashed for doing wrong? Fewer takers? If your assembly is normal, chances are they don’t really want a bold homily.
There are no good sins to commit. But pride is an especially bad one. One of the deadly ones, it’s often equated with the Original Sin that prompted Adam and Eve to turn from God and toward their own agenda.