Homily for Sunday, 21 November 2021– Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Readings of the day: Daniel 7:13-14; Psalm 93:1, 1-2, 5; Revelation 1:5-8; John 18:33b-37

I am not sure how many of us realize this: When we pray the Nicene Creed, as we will in a few moments, we mention only three human beings by name; three people in the whole Creed. The first two are more obvious: Jesus and Mary. But the third human figure mentioned in the Creed is Pontius Pilate.

Pontius Pilate, according to ancient Roman records and those of Flavius Josephus, a Roman-Jewish historian of the time, was not whom we might consider a good, benevolent, much less effective ruler. He was Governor of the Roman province of Judea for about ten years, coinciding with the passion and death of Jesus. Pilate was known for impulsive and brutal acts of violence toward anybody he saw as a threat to his own or imperial Roman authority. This impulsiveness and brutality was possibly his downfall; Josephus records his suppression of “an armed Samaritan movement at Mount Gerizim” that resulted in Pilate’s removal by Caesar Tiberias (although maybe a comfortable retirement; this is unclear) as Governor of Judea. Pontius Pilate has been portrayed frequently as somewhat of a coward in art and speech: The term “to wash one’s hands” of responsibility for a decision derives from Pilate’s evasion of responsibility for Jesus’ condemnation to death by washing his hands.

But Jesus was no threat to Pontius Pilate’s, or Roman, authority. Pilate knew this, or so it would seem by his provocation of the Jewish authorities who had brought Jesus to him under the charge that he claimed to be a king; equivalent to Caesar; a threat to Roman authority. Can we not hear Pilate mocking the Jewish authorities who brought Jesus to him bound? “Ecce Homo,” Pilate sneers, “Behold the man”! Behold, this Jesus of Nazareth: “Really? A king? A threat to Caesar? Maybe this Jesus of Nazareth is a threat to my afternoon power nap, but he is no threat to Caesar’s or my authority.”

Yet Pilate also knew to humour the Jewish authorities who had disturbed him with such rabble. He had Jesus scourged—a beating that, even if it were not followed by crucifixion, would often be enough to kill a condemned person—and then presented him to the crowd: “Do you wish to irritate me further? Well, then, behold your ‘king,’ bloodied and on the point of death. Take him yourselves and crucify him”! Just to be sure, though, Pilate takes Jesus to his seat of judgment, and asks him the questions that are at the centre of today’s Gospel proclamation, from John. Pilate’s questions to Jesus are at the very centre of today’s Solemnity of Jesus Christ, King of the Universe: “Are you the king of the Jews?”…“So, you are a king”?

Jesus gives Pilate, and us, the key answer about his kingly identity: “My kingdom is not of this world… You say I am a king.” But what does Jesus mean when he says his kingdom “is not of this world”? If Pilate, a pagan Roman governor, struggled to understand a kingship “not of this world,” let me venture to say that our world, and maybe especially our Church, have struggled all the more since Jesus’ answer to Pilate to understand and apply what Jesus meant.

We can point to many instances in our Church’s history that show our Church’s often tense relationship with worldly power and authority; when and how it has claimed that authority for itself. Let me be clear: I am not saying (far from it!) that any claim or exercise by our Church of authority “of this world” is bad. Often it is necessary and even good. Yet our papacy and concepts of the ministry of the pope, bishops, and priests have historical foundations in challenging, but also often mimicking monarchical (absolute royal) forms of government; power; authority.

“My kingdom is not of this world”: Our struggle not to identify Jesus, much less the pope or other Church leaders, with worldly royalty goes back to the crowds in our Gospels who wanted to take Jesus away to make him king. Even our celebration today of “Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe” is historically grounded in our Church’s often tense relationship with worldly powers, if not its identification as a worldly power in its own right.

Today’s celebration of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe dates back in our Church to December 11, 1925. On that day, Pope Pius XI proclaimed this Solemnity of Christ the King in an encyclical letter to the bishops of the Church, Quas Primas (“In the First”; the title of any Church document is derived from its first words). Why “In the First”? “The First” there refers to Pius XI’s first encyclical letter, entitled Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio (“When in the Inscrutable Designs of God,” published just before Christmas, 1922), in which the pope lamented the “manifold evils in the world… due to the fact that the majority of people had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives.” If these evils continued, said Pius XI, “there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.” What did Pius XI propose as a solution to this problem? He created this Solemnity of Christ the King as a counterweight to “individuals and states [that] refused to submit to the rule of our Saviour.”

Also debated at the time was the so-called “Roman question”: Should the Church be granted sovereign rule over a physical territory, much like any nation state in our world? The Church had lost its rule over the Papal States in the second half of the 1800s. Then there was the massacre of World War I. Finally (and through a complicated and controversial process), in 1929 the Vatican City State as we know it today was created through a Church treaty with Mussolini’s Italy. The Church had its sovereign rule over a (very small) physical territory, just like any other nation state, and political and diplomatic independence from Italy and other nations. We see the tension in this: On the one hand, our Church had become a power sovereign over a physical territory and, by Church law, the pope enjoys universal jurisdiction over the whole Church but, on the other hand, we worship a king, Jesus Christ, whose “kingdom is not of this world.”

So what kind of kingdom or kingship is the kingdom or kingship of Jesus? Many if not most portrayals of Jesus as king, from the Infant of Prague with the sceptre in one hand and a globe in the other, or the icon of Jesus, Ruler of All (“Pantokrator”) show Jesus much like the monarchs of this world; they portray Jesus as the kind of worldly king he actively resisted becoming during his earthly lifetime.

“My kingdom is not of this world.” But even the readings we have just heard for this Mass witness to the limits of human language around kingship, especially when we apply kingship to Jesus; to God. We hear today of Daniel’s vision of “one like a son of man” (a common royal, messianic title in our Bible, which Jesus even uses of himself) who will have dominion over the universe: “His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.”

Our Psalm, one of our Bible’s beautiful “royal Psalms,” speaks of the LORD as king, “robed in majesty… girded with strength.” The Book of Revelation speaks, at the beginning and end of our reading today, of Jesus as “ruler of the kings of the earth… ‘The Alpha and the Omega’… who is and who was and who is to come.” I find it fascinating, though, that, between these two statements about Jesus’ everlasting kingship, Revelation also affirms that we have a share in Christ’s kingship: Christ “made us a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father.”

How can we, as worldly creatures, have a share in Jesus’ kingdom that “is not of this world”? The simplest answer to this question, which Revelation gives us, is three words long: “By his blood.” Jesus is King of the Universe, not because he holds any traits of a worldly king. He has no physical territory to govern, no throne, no sceptre. He has no globe in his hands, but only the cruel marks of nails in his hands and feet by which he has saved our universe and everything and every creature in it.

“By his blood”… “My kingdom is not of this world.” And, by his blood, we have a share, sisters and brothers, in the kingship of Jesus Christ that indwells this world, and will fully so on the day of the Lord’s return in glory, but “is not of this world.” We share, by our baptism, a priesthood. And I do not mean the priesthood of the ordained (people like me); I mean priesthood in the sense of our having a share and a responsibility in the communication of the presence of God—the “other-worldly”—to this world by the way we live. Our priesthood and, in a perfect way, the one priesthood of Jesus Christ, is a priesthood of servant leadership. Our priesthood, in all we say, act, and do, serves God by serving and loving one another, to the point where we would be prepared to give our lives for one another, as Christ did for us.

This is the kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. This is the kingship in which we share “by his blood”; a kingship evermore indwelling our world but not of this world; a kingship that is the only kingship that will save us, this universe, and everything and every creature in it.

Homily for Sunday, 7 November 2021– Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 17:10-16; Psalm 146:7, 8-9, 9-10; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

In the language of the Bible, there are few people depicted as poor and downtrodden as widows. From many different texts of the Old Testament, we have the oft-repeated triplet, “the widow, the orphan and the stranger (or resident alien),” which stands for the lowest of the low classes in the society of Israel of the time. We hear the widow-orphan-stranger motif in our Psalm today: “The LORD loves the righteous, and watches over the strangers. The LORD upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.”

Girls and women through Biblical times had few rights independently of their fathers and then their husbands, and children had few rights independently of their parents. So a child whose parents had died, or a woman who had lost her husband, would be extremely poor and excluded from the power structures of those ancient societies.

Can we not think of many examples when Jesus preferentially calls upon children, women, and sometimes widows; when he makes these underprivileged people the centre of the event? We hear a clear example of Jesus doing this in today’s Gospel, the story of the so-called “widow’s mite.” In fact, both Mark’s Gospel and our reading from 1 Kings today centre on the heroic widow figure. (And if we are thinking that the term “heroic widow” is self-contradictory, an oxymoron even to our ears today, that is because it is. Our Bible offers us this jarring image of the widow, the lowest of the low classes, who becomes the heroine; the main driver or protagonist of the event).

When I think of the widow’s mite, I think of one of my favourite paintings, one by the French painter James Tissot, called “The Widow’s Mite” or “Le denier de la veuve.” Tissot is known for his set of 365 distinctive watercolour (or gouache) paintings, which he painted late in his life and many of which are scenes from the Bible. But much of his earlier work is of well-dressed, wealthy, attractive women in the rich neighbourhood of Paris where Tissot lived. And then, one day, James Tissot visited Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris to paint a portrait of a choir singer. There, he experienced a vision of Jesus tending to the very poorest people, and soon he returned to a devout practice of his Catholic faith.

It strikes me (whether this is intentional on Tissot’s part or coincidence, I am not sure) how similar the temple treasury area in Tissot’s “The Widow’s Mite” looks to the limestone façades of Saint-Sulpice and many other churches in Paris. I lived within a fifteen-minute walk of Saint-Sulpice for five years in Paris. And the scene of people milling about the temple treasury in “The Widow’s Mite” reminds me of a frequent scene around the entrances to Saint-Sulpice and other churches in Paris: Well-dressed elites, but the (still) many poor people the elites have been almost conditioned to ignore.

But there is one person noticeably not shown in Tissot’s painting, “The Widow’s Mite.” That person is Jesus. Tissot is also famous for at least two (that I can think of) of his later watercolours that are from Jesus’ perspective. One is Tissot’s “Crucifixion, Seen from the Cross,” which is from the crucified Jesus’ view, looking down upon the crowds—closest to him, his mother, the women who served Jesus during his ministry, and the beloved disciple—at the foot of the cross. And the second of these paintings is “The Widow’s Mite.”

Midway through today’s Gospel reading, Mark says, fairly innocuously, that “Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” Tissot’s unseen Jesus paints the watercolour for us: A crowd of men in fine robes, the scribes Jesus has just criticized for their boastfulness, even in prayer, as “they devour widows’ houses.” This crowd is wealthy, proud, and self-serving. And in their midst is a poor widow, facing Jesus; facing the artist; facing us. Her eyes are downcast in a shamed gaze. She is carrying a small child, at least in Tissot’s painting. And the wealthy men continue to socialize; continue to boast of their wealth and status. One reaches for a horn, one of seven next to the temple treasury box that the wealthy would blow to announce that they had made a substantial donation. All these men ignore the poor widow, whom Tissot depicts as she walks away, after having dropped her “two small copper coins” in the treasury box. All ignore her, except the unseen but ever-present Jesus.

Jesus notices the poor widow. And he takes this opportunity to teach his disciples: Pay attention to the widow. Do not, in your pride, in your wealth, in any spirit of self-absorption that can even affect our prayer, ignore this widow and what she has just done! “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to his disciples, “This poor widow has put in more than all of those who are contributing to the treasury.”

There is profound meaning in just these few words of our Lord. And, of course, we would be right in observing a recurring pattern of this kind of event—of encounter with the poor; the widow; the orphan; the stranger, resulting in a teaching moment—in our Bible. For good reason, our Church has us hear the Gospel account of the widow’s mite alongside our reading today from 1 Kings about the encounter between Elijah and a widow with a young son at Zerephath.

Understandably, the widow of Zerephath is focused on conserving what little food she has so she and her son will not starve. Yet, just then, Elijah asks this woman to be boldly generous—Elijah asks the widow, not the other way around, for “a little cake”! And somehow (1 Kings does not say why) the widow at Zerephath trusts Elijah. Maybe Elijah simply had that great a reputation as a prophet. Anyway, Elijah’s prophecy comes true: The jar of meal and the jug of oil last until the LORD sends rain to relieve the terrible famine in the land, which was disproportionately affecting the poorest people.

I think it is reasonable for us, when we hear about the widow at Zerephath in 1 Kings; the widow at the temple treasury in Mark’s Gospel, to focus on how each widow is exceedingly generous with very little, or on the trust each widow shows in God, directly or through a prophet like Elijah. But in each event, with each widow, there is more depth of meaning than generosity or trust. And, please allow me to say, the added depth of meaning has nothing to do with each widow’s starting lack of food or money. The focus, in either event, is not primarily on either widow but on the abundance of God.

The widow at Zerephath obeys Elijah and makes him “a little cake” from her meal and oil, and then she and her son receive more food by the word and hand of the LORD than they needed to survive until the rain ended Israel’s crop failure and famine. The widow at the temple treasury quite possibly gives the second greatest gift anybody gives in our Gospels. What do I mean by this?

It is helpful, I think, to place the event of the widow at the temple treasury and her “mite”—her two small copper coins—in its broader context within Mark’s Gospel. We are drawing toward the end of the Church’s liturgical year. By the way, Advent is only three weeks away; the beginning of a new Church year (just saying!). We have followed Mark’s Gospel roughly in order this year on Sundays. After this account of the widow’s mite, Mark includes only one more short chapter before Jesus enters Jerusalem, and his Passion and death take place. At the point where we hear from Mark today, the Pharisees and the scribes, the religious elites of Israel, are murderously angry with Jesus. Jesus continues to criticize them for their blindness to their worst sin, and they are on the cusp of having Jesus killed.

Jesus’ death on a cross is the first and most generous gift that anybody gives in our Gospels; in the whole of the Bible and of human history. In the immediate foreshadow of Jesus’ gift of his very life for our salvation is the gift of the widow and her two small copper coins, “everything she had” out of her poverty. A more historically distant sign, but still a sign, of God’s supreme generosity that culminates in Jesus’ gift of eternal life by his death on a cross is the gift of food of the widow at Zerephath to Elijah.

On the cross, God gave us in Christ “everything [he] had to live on” so that we might live forever. God invites us not to ignore this, but to imitate it by giving generously according to our means, as a sign that we, like the hidden but ever-present Jesus in the Gospel scene, the artist of our creation and our salvation, have taken notice.