Sunday Reflection: Solemnity of Christ the King, Cycle B

1^st Reading      Daniel 7:13-14

2^nd Reading     Revelation 1:5-8

Gospel             John 18:33b-37

Reflection: As we end the Liturgical Year, the last Sunday in Ordinary Time is the celebration of the Solemnity of Christ the King. As we end the year, we are reminded again by the Church that the sum of all our human experience should always end with the Kingship of Christ Jesus. Jesus is the King of the Universe, the King of our lives. 

The Kingship of Christ is the reign of truth. This is the revelation of Jesus to Pilate in our Gospel today. If truth reigns, God is present. Where God is there is freedom, peace, love, mercy, and reconciliation. This is what Jesus wants to express to Pilate, His Kingdom is not of this world, which is dominated by fear, tyranny, injustice, etc. The Kingdom of Christ goes beyond human expectation because the reign of God is primarily the reign of love which embraces everyone, no matter what ethnicity they are from, whatever language they speak, no matter where they are in the world. The prophecy of Daniel is fulfilled in Christ’s coming into this and ultimately by His death on the Cross and His resurrection. 

The Paschal Mystery of Christ opens us to a new way of living. His kingship gives us a new way of relating with God, in the reign of Jesus the Father becomes our Father. The Blessed Mother, the Queen Mother, becomes our Mother. And so, we become a royal priesthood, a people set apart as His own. Our 2^nd Reading, from the Book of Revelation, clearly presents this to us, “Jesus Christ is the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father, to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.”

Jesus challenges us today, we who call Him King. “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Do we live the truth of Christ? Do we listen to Him? Our world is full of noise that the voice of God is drowned in it. We have grown deaf to the voice of God who calls us to the truth of our being. We have rejected the Truth of Christ because we want to be come our own truth. We have exercised our freedom so much up to the point of even rejecting the source of all truth because we want only to hear what we want to hear. We have been blinded by our own light, we have been deaf to our own voice, the voice of our conscience telling us to go beyond ourselves. 

The Kingship of Jesus invites us to see the reality of our being, to see who we are and what we are capable of. Jesus directs us to see the potentials the Father has given us, that we are all heir to the Kingdom of Heaven, and we should not miss the opportunity of living it out today. Let us be witnesses of God’s Kingdom in Christ by the way we live our daily life.