The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

(Year B)(November 24, 2024)

        While we celebrate Christ the King today, we live in an age which finds kings and any sort of monarchy to be outdated and dysfunctional – yet Jesus is our Messiah and King, and we rejoice and glory in that fact!  How can this be?  Kings have armies and as such use the solution of violence, which makes them killers – but Jesus is a healer.  Kings (and all other human leaders) rule by the “art of the possible,” and yet Jesus always says and does only the truth, only what is right, just, and loving.  He is not some sort of invulnerable superhero who comes in suddenly to save the day and restore our usual life and situation.  Given all that, we can well ask just who this Jesus the King is and what he expects from us who “believe” in him. 
          We are quite aware of all of the problems with immigrants and displaced people, the economic injustice, the lack of peace, the poor quality of our governments, the steady disappearance of minerals and fossil fuels, and all the other very human problems that we mere humans have failed to solve.  Beyond all that, though, we also hear that climate change has gone beyond the point where we humans can solve it by ourselves.  Looking as well at our worldwide problems with clean air, lack of water, and the disappearance of species, all of them fairly clearly beyond our human ability to solve, we have to admit that only God can save us and our planet at this point. 
          In the end, and however he achieves it, it will not be the Crucified Christ who comes to the fore, not the Risen Christ, but the Incarnate Christ whose Mystical Body is the Kingdom which he presents to the Father, the New Creation which is no longer at an absolute and infinite distance from God's presence and His love but a creation which is now so completely healed and transformed by Jesus the Christ that it is now incorporated into God's very being...
          The Incarnate Christ exists from all time, beyond any possible imagined or imaged beginning to the Creation.  Indeed, Creation is what it is specifically in order to be joined to God in the Incarnation; the Nativity, the Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Passion and Death, the Resurrection, and the Ascension are only particularly important high points in the history of the Incarnate God who is our salvation – not in any particular one of them but in the totality of them all and of every moment of Creation’s story.
          The final point of all history of any sort, its true climax and realization, will be the full actualization and revelation of God’s love in the Kingdom of his Son.  At that point we will celebrate the culmination that Christ incarnate brings to human history and we will understand what the Trinity has always planned for us and all of creation, what our true King seeks at any cost to himself, what our true King is and does.  And that gives us reason to already be grateful for Christ's mastery of reality and gives us all the more reason to celebrate our coming Advent with fantastic yearning. 
          The Prince of Peace and the Lord of Lords is coming in love and healing, not only in power and majesty, and he is on his way to restoring creation to its innocence and goodness, healing it and in his Spirit making it a New Creation to the glory of his Father.  And in Christ we will be at the center of that Kingdom. 

Chas Kestermeier, SJ
St. Camillus Jesuit Community
10201 West Wisconsin Avenue
Wauwatosa, WI   53226-3541
414-259-4689
ctk34340@creighton.edu