November 26, 2017
Last Sunday was not only the feast of Christ the King, it was also the last Sunday of the Church year! Advent begins, Sunday Dec 3rd! Some of us have been getting nervous about Christmas presents. About our Christmas family dinner. Or with whom to celebrate with. Yes, but let us look at today and not go too far in the future. For now, we need only ask why the churches have chosen to mark Christ as “king.” Did the churches think that we would understand the year that lies behind us better this way? Yes, I think that the image of Christ as the King is helpful. This image helps to look at the Christ we have seen in the Gospel readings over the past months! And a revealing way to look at Jesus Christ is offered to us in the readings heard on the feast of Christ the King. Look at the shepherd imagery of the first reading. God says, “I myself will look after and tend my sheep. The injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal.” This is a beautiful passage. Throughout history, God continually sought out his people, we are told, inviting them to a mutual relationship. This knowledge about God’s presence in our world is the foundation of our faith – in spite of all the terrible things we see and hear in the media: God is not far away in heaven, God suffers with us, God is helpless in his love for us. Is God still all mighty then? Yes – but God ties himself, binds himself to humanity, and in this way, becomes vulnerable and helpless. And yes: God wants to shepherd us today in the same way as God did then! Two and one-half thousand years ago, the Responsorial Psalm was written, “The Lord is my Shepherd.” This psalm 23 is the one I pray very often with the patients in the hospital where I am chaplain. Again: if we are paying attention we see that God is still being the shepherd, as he promised. God has us walk beside restful waters, through green pastures. Goodness and kindness are all around us – we just have to open our eyes and our ears. Then gratitude fills our hearts. In the letter to the Christian community in our second reading, St. Paul tells us about Christ, who is God’s shepherding made concrete. Yes, there is the rampage of death and sorrow and sin and terrorist attacks and shootings. But in spite of this, Christ wants to bring light and peace to the world – the light and the peace we were told of in the first reading, in the prophet Ezekiel! Finally, the Gospel according to Matthew tells us in a parable who will get to have this light and peace. Not everyone! Some people have been “bad goats” as the gospel calls them, not “good sheep”. All right, how do we become “good sheep”, in spite of our bad “goatish” tendencies? Or how do we become, at least sometimes, the good sheep? I think this is quite simple. We care for the Lord by caring for other people. Yes, certainly, we need goals for our lives, but if we take our own preferences as the only goals for our lives, then we become like those Jesus calls “goats”. So, instead of “goatishly” taking our own preferences as the only goals, we can join God as the One who cares for others. We dip into the restful waters with Jesus, we offer everything we can, like Jesus, for the poor and needy, they are the images of God in our world, not because it is simpler but because this is the way Jesus has taken among us as the very way of God…the way of the King. You see, the example is Jesus Christ who gives according to the many needs of the least of his brothers and sisters. Instead of sleeping restfully in the slumber of non-acting, we are to join with Jesus Christ as one among very many shepherds. We are asked to say “yes” to the God who loves without prejudice, yes to the Christ who spent life as a nobody in a negligible corner of the Roman empire, yes to the shepherd who would love his sheep to the very end. We will be cared for insofar as we care for the others!
Fr Wolfgang Felber