This Sunday, on the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, we celebrate the end of the Extraordinary Year of Mercy. It is the final Sunday of Ordinary Time and we bring to closure the three-year reflection on salvation history. As each liturgical cycle presents the encapsulation of the mystery of salvation, it is with the completion of the third year that the fullness of the promise is realized.
As we have reflected much during the year on the theme of God’s mercy as seen throughout Luke’s Gospel, we experience anew the ultimate expression of salvation.
Throughout the year we reflected on Jesus as the agent of God’s mercy seen first in the opening events of the Gospel. The Blessed Virgin in her Magnificat sings of God’s mercy as it has been seen throughout salvation history and as it is to be more fully realized in the mission of God’s Incarnate Son.
The Kingdom of God, which as we see in the First Reading, was a real political entity formed around the person of King David. Now, in the messianic age, the kingdom is revealed within a community of believers assembled together by the Messiah. This is not a kingdom of political power or military might, but rather a kingdom of mercy manifest in and through the Church.
This is a kingdom, which as we saw throughout the year, suffers for the very sake of its mercy. God’s mercy is not met with great enthusiasm. It comes into a world that is hostile to the very notion of mercy and is itself treated very unmercifully. We see this manifest in and through Luke’s Gospel in various ways.
Consider for a moment some of those great parables of mercy upon which we have reflected during the course of the year. Jesus used the Parable of the Good Samaritan to instruct the young man on the necessity of extending mercy even to one who would be unwilling to extend mercy to him. Jesus used the Parable of Unjust Judge as a reflection on the need to be persistent in seeking mercy and justice in an apathetic and hostile world. Jesus taught in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus that it is necessary to be merciful in this life if we are to have any hope of knowing mercy in the next life. The father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son stood as a prime example of the mercy of God and yet he still had to plead with his older son to extend mercy to his brother.
It is with much irony, then, that at the end of the Gospel and of the Year of Mercy, he who proclaimed the great mercy of God was denied any sense of mercy or justice. The merciful one was hung on a cross as an innocent, suffering.
Even there, Jesus extends mercy to those who have committed this deed, “for they know not what they do” and then more clearly in today’s Gospel Jesus extends mercy to the penitent thief: “today you will be with me in paradise.”
Nov. 27 – We are preparing for the peaceable kingdom of heaven
As we enter the Season of Advent we begin our preparations for the Nativity of the Lord not by reflecting on the beautiful passages of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, instead we are confronted with the image of the coming “Day of the Lord.” As we completed last week the three- year cycle of readings, this week opens the next three-year cycle. So we have the opportunity to reflect here on both the very beginning and the very end.
Apocalyptic and eschatological language and images frighten some people and leave others hopeful. The same readings cause different visceral reactions.
Our recent presidential election reintroduced apocalyptic fervor in the language. “This is the end” some have warned us. The time of America is over! Yet, others offer a sense of hope that we will be “great again.” Change, especially when it is not a change we can accept or believe in, brings about a painful consternation and a sense of despair.
We can read the Gospel in the same way. We can worry about the coming end of days when one person is swept away and another is left behind. That dreadful series of books and cinema that focuses on those who have been “left behind” elicits fear and dread about the coming kingdom. We see some of this same sense of virtual hopelessness even from some of the visionaries and mystics in the tradition of the Church. The coming of the Kingdom of Heaven will be a nasty and violent eruption of the world in the final apocalyptic cataclysm between God and Satan. Indeed such imagery builds upon our sense of hopelessness and leads some to that deep despair called angst.
The realization of the Kingdom of Heaven is our goal. This is what we work for and long for our entire lives. We as disciples of Jesus yearn for the day when we enter that kingdom and share fully in the mystery of life prepared for us.
We as Christians must always live our lives in light of this most fundamental of all beliefs. We long for the coming of God’s Kingdom in our midst.
St. Paul challenges us to live lives of faithfulness, setting aside the distractions of the world around us, focusing instead on the presence of the kingdom in our midst. It is not easy with so much noise in the world that can easily lead us to a sense of hopelessness. Political rhetoric with its unabashed anger and hatred can leave us all feeling like the world is spiraling out of control and we are all doomed. Playing off of fear is an ancient and vile strategy used to control the masses, and today we are no less vulnerable to that tactic than were our ancestors before us.
We cannot allow ourselves to fall into that trap. We are men and women borne of hope and made ready for the peaceable kingdom of God by virtue of our baptism. This is our starting point – this is who we are. Our focus is not on the plight of those left behind but on the sure and certain hope of those who were taken away.
As we approach this Advent Season, let us keep focused on the real task at hand: getting ready for the next adventure – whether in this life or the next – that the Lord is calling us to.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.