Christ the King, Year A
First reading: Ez 34:11-12, 15-17
Second reading: 1 Cor 15:20-26, 28
Gospel reading: Mt 25:31-46

This Sunday, the last of the Church’s liturgical year, we celebrate the solemnity of Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.

Our own country, Canada, is a democracy. “Democracy” comes from two Greek words: demos, meaning “the people,” and kratos, meaning “rule.”

The Oxford Dictionary defines democracy as “that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole and is exercised either directly by them, as in the small republics of antiquity, or by officers elected by them; in modern use, often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.”

In a democracy we decide what to do by consulting the people. When people disagree about what we should do, we do what the majority of the people want.

Today, almost everybody condemns authoritarianism and considers democracy the best form of government. “The Church values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices and guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate,” Pope St. John Paul II said in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus.

A month later, La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit magazine whose editorials are reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State before publication, said that the Catholic Church accepts democracy as the preferred way of conducting political life and safeguarding human rights.

Why, then, do we honour Christ as a king? Why do we speak of the kingdom of God?

To understand the difference between our country here on earth and God’s kingdom, in which Christ is King, we must remember two facts: 1) that we are members of a fallen race, and 2) that we are merely passing through this world on our way to our true homeland.

1) When Adam and Eve rebelled against God, they lost their internal harmony, for the control of their souls’ spiritual faculties over their bodies was shattered; their marital harmony, which was replaced by lust and domination; and their harmony with the rest of creation, which became alien and hostile. That is the humanity we inherit.

For us, democracy is the best form of government not because all people are so knowledgeable, wise, and honest that they should all be consulted when anything has to be decided. No; it is because all people are so faulty and fallible that we cannot trust any one of them with absolute power over the rest of us.

We have to protect ourselves from one another’s greed and cruelty, and we can do that most effectively in a democracy. Accordingly, even in countries that are still monarchies, the king is little more than a figurehead.

2) This world is not our true homeland. We will live here about 80 years, and then we will move on, to heaven or to hell, to God’s country or into the darkness outside.

Eventually, the world itself will come to an end, and Christ will destroy “every ruler and every authority and every power” except himself.

Then he will deliver an absolutely infallible judgment on every human being and on the whole world. “I shall judge between one sheep and another, between rams and goats,” God says in the first reading. Christ himself will “separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats,” we hear in the Gospel reading.

Some Christ will invite into his kingdom, prepared for us “from the foundation of the world,” “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love, and peace,” the Church says in this Sunday’s preface. Others he will dismiss into “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

That is the choice we face, at every instant of our life here on earth.

Fr. Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge.  All the materials (video and print) are available online at www.beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 12, “Divine Revelation,”  will be available Nov. 22.