Christ the King

We arrive today at the end of the liturgical year. In the Church we have, in a sense, two years, the normal year, which follows the feast days of Jesus, Mary, angels and saints, and the year that follows the liturgical seasons, Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter. We finish the ordinary time with this beautiful feast day of Christ the King. The Gospel of today’s Mass brings to our consideration three main ideas: there will be a judgement at the end of time, Christ identifies himself with everyone in need, and evil people will experience eternal punishment and the good eternal reward.

In the Bible Jesus is depicted as a judge on a throne, who will come to judge the living and the dead. We believe that time will come to an end with the last judgement, when everyone will be punished or rewarded. It will be very interesting to watch the movie of our lives in front of everyone. Everything will be uncovered, all the secrets revealed. We will know all the things we wanted to know, the why, the when and the wherefore. But thanks be to God, the things we have confessed will be deleted, the hard disk will be formatted. Those things will be left alone in God’s mind. There was an old woman who used to go to the priest telling him that Jesus appeared to her, and she could talk with him. He didn’t know what to believe. One day he told her to ask Jesus about his own personal sins, to see if they were forgiven. Next time she told him that she had asked Jesus about his sins. “What did he say?” “He has forgotten them.”

We talk about the last Judgement to distinguish it from the particular judgement, which everyone will undergo immediately after death. The sentence pronounced at the end of time will be a confirmation of this one. People who had near death experiences talk about how they relive their entire lives in a flash of a second, in the presence of a superior being, with a good sense of humour. Those experiences normally change their lives for the best. We all feel empty handed in front of Jesus when we have to give an account of our lives. We are not ready because we are still here. Saint Josemaria says that for us Jesus won’t be a judge in the harsh sense of the word, but he will simply be Jesus.

That’s why we need to see Jesus in every person we come across, especially in people in need. People who annoy us, who bother us, who make our lives more difficult, are in need of our affection, our thoughts and our care. The homeless, the old, the poor, the people who are ungrateful, are Jesus passing by, hidden behind a distasteful crust. We do not know how much we love God; but we can know how much we love our neighbor. We are normally self centred and we need to make an effort to look around us.

The modern mind finds it very difficult to believe in eternal punishment. You don’t hear these days much about hell, fire and brimstone. Why is this? Because we all want everybody to be saved, we believe in humanity, and God has created us to be with Him in heaven. But if there is no punishment, there is no justice, and there is no reward. After this life we wouldn’t like to go to a natural paradise if God is not there. We are naughty little children, and we need to be admonished by our Father God that there is a hell.

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