NewCreation

Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the last Sunday in Ordinary Time. That's the Sunday, the Solemnity of Christ the King. Today's Gospel is the last of St. Matthew's parables, the great parable sometimes referred to as the Last Judgement, but really more properly referred to as the separation of the sheep and the goats. Just to give us a bit of context: you remember that after Jesus gave his apocalyptic discourse to the disciples, the one in which he told them all about how the world would change after his going and how they were to notice and survive that change, he gave the three parables as ways of allowing them to inhabit this time that was opening up. The first was that of the bridesmaids with their lamps, and that was to do with training the eyes to see the coming. The second was the parable of the servants with the talents, and that was to do with having your imagination built up so as to be a healthy, creative partner in building up creation, including yourself, in this difficult time. And the third is the parable of the separation of the sheep and goats, which, as we will see, is really about the revelation of the reality of what really is, all along. Just to take us back to the end of that apocalyptic discourse: one of the things which Jesus does there is talk about the coming of the Son of Man in language which he will take up again in the parable. And here is the talk immediately after the suffering of those days. This is Matthew 24:29: "The sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from heaven and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory, and he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." Now, every one of those elements was fulfilled at Jesus's crucifixion. That's the sign of the Son of Man coming. That's the moment at which the angels go out to the four corners of the earth to start bringing in the harvest — that is, when the true nature of reality is revealed and the beginnings of the collecting of the tribes from all nations come. What does that mean? It means that the criteria for what it is to be of God starts to be revealed. The criteria of God is the forgiving Lamb standing as one slain. It is the Lord giving himself up to death in our midst. Any of those who perceive it find themselves on the inside of this process, which will be taken to all the nations of the world, and eventually that will all become visible. I feel like the criterion will make itself known throughout the world, and at that stage it will be possible to see what has really been going on all along. So this, the parable of the separation, is, if you like, a confirmation of that. It's making that more of a three-dimensional understanding. Let's see where it starts. "When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him." Okay, so the coming of the Son of Man — that was on the cross — and all his angels with him means after the word has been spread throughout the world, after the criterion, the lightning has lit up the reality of creation. And so he's going to come in his glory, which means that what looked like a place of shame and death will start finally to have its full sense and reality made available: that it was the culmination of creation, the opening up of the possibility of the new creation. "Then he will sit on the throne of his glory." In the other gospels this is worked towards with the language of ascension. The ascension was the enthronement on the throne of the Most High — in other words, the becoming a king. That was the end of the rite that started with atonement. So all the nations will be gathered before him. He will have become king over all. He will be, if you like, the criteria, the principle of discrimination, of discernment — to use a less frightening word than judgment — and he will separate people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. Now please notice: he's separating things that are from things that are. He's not engaging in a moralistic analysis of whether this person is this or that. So there are sheep and there are goats; people have become who they are during the course of their life, which is why the language of judgment — which presupposes someone saying something about you — is not helpful here, because it's far more a recognition of who you have become. If you have become a sheep, then you will be recognized as a sheep. If you have become a goat, then you will be recognized as a goat. "Then the king will say to those at his right hand" — and here it refers to him as king. It's the only place in the parable where he's referred to as king. It was the Son of Man coming in glory; that's the crucified one, and ascended he's the king. In other words, all power and authority over heaven and earth has been given to him, the enthronement has been completed, and now the reality of what has been going on all along is finally shown. Not something extrinsic to that reality, but the reality itself is being shown. "Then the king will say to those at his right hand: Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Now please notice that language gets passed over very quickly in most of our readings, but it's hugely important if we understand that what Jesus is talking about is how he is revealing the real axis of creation. His enthronement is the culmination of creation as it was always meant to be: not the failed, futile, closed-down version in which we were all somewhat entrapped until his coming, but the fulfilled, real, entirely alive version that has been made possible by him coming into the world — the lamb slain before the foundation of the world. In other words, this language is the language of the real axis of creation, if you like — what creation is really about, the real structure of creation being made available and visible. He said some of you are those who have in fact found yourself on the inside of the making fully alive of the axis of reality, of creation. This is not a moralistic extra thing. No, you've actually discovered yourselves on the inside of this project from the beginning. "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me." He returns to the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount to refer precisely to people in situations of precariousness. That is how he has been present. He has impressed himself into the lives of those who then went on to live precariously, thus bearing witness to the real truth of what is going on and how creation is to be brought into being. But not surprisingly, lots of the sheep don't realize that that's in fact what they have been doing. "The righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.'" Now some people think of this in a moralistic way — oh, this is about being nice to Christians. I think it's rather richer than that. It's being nice to Christ, who has impressed himself into the life of those fellow humans who are in fact bearing witness to him, having become, as it were, elements of the new creation pressed through into our time. That's what it looks like to be him. He gave us his body for us to make his body present in the world in all these sorts of ways. And it's as we go through the grind, becoming radiant, bringing that into being, that we become the least of his family. We become him. And rather than this being an exclusionary tactic, anybody who gets with the dynamic actually becomes part of that, whether or not they know that that's what they're doing. Anyone who finds themselves caught up in what we would call the contagion of the Holy Spirit, so that actually we enter into the dynamic of being able to give our lives away in the midst of mourning, prison, violence, hatred, all of the sickness, all of those things, find ourselves actually being turned into radiant signs of the coming in of something more — all of us are in fact already on the inside of what is true. We are being brought into complete being. Then he turns to those to his left, the goats — poor goats. That's just an image taken from Ezekiel, where it turns out that the goats and the he-rams were treated as basically the bullies, as opposed to the sheep who were the weak and meek ones. "You that are accursed" — not that I'm accursing you, but "you that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." So the notion is preparation. It's the notion of two things going on at the same time. The bringing into being of creation happens in the midst of the grinding down of futility, and those who are strong, who consider their values to be those of power and domination, are those who have not got with the axis of what it was all about at all. It's not that they're being judged extrinsically by somebody saying, "Oh, let me tot up your offenses here." It's that they've missed the whole point of creation; they haven't been on the inside of what's been going on at all. So they are simply blocked off definitively, and the promise of eternal punishment — apparently the word behind that is not so much a question of a length of time as a question of definitiveness. In other words, that whole world of futility of which you have made yourselves part will simply be definitively blotted out, come to an end. What I want to bring out here is that what's being revealed is the coming to life of what really is. This is Jesus not as an extrinsic judge but as the internal criterion for reality. This is absolutely central to the Gospel, something which we forget at our peril. We're talking about the Word through whom all things were made coming into our midst and making it possible for us to become children of God — in Saint John's language — but that's what's going on here. He's talking about how reality, the reality opened up by him, can press us into becoming signs of him, and that it's that transformation of the shame of death and the revelation of glory, our route through into radiance, losing ourselves out of love and carelessness into the coming in of the kingdom — it's that that is what blessedness looks like. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Just a very quick footnote to today's homily: it is the end of Year A And next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent for Year B. I just wanted to say thank you very much to all of you who have been following these homilies, praying eucharistically with me over these last months since the end of March. And I just want to say that I will indeed be carrying on into Year B, so we'll start up again next Sunday with Year B, and I hope to be given the time and the grace to be able to continue offering these homilies and this Eucharistic liturgy for you during the next year. This is just to give you my blessing and my warmest thanks for having shared so much with me as you have listened and written in.