November 26, 2023
Feast of Christ the King, November 26, 2023 – Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17; 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28; Matthew 25:31-46
So, what is the most important, but least functional, piece on a chess board? It’s the king. He’s very limited in his movements, but all the other pieces are arranged on the board and move across the board to protect the king. You have to be really careful about king imagery in the gospels or in any parts of the scripture. We have to be especially careful about the misrepresentations of the Book of Revelation. It has nothing to do with a millennium. It has nothing to do with the restoration of the Earth and Israel. It has nothing to do with any of those things that you see on the internet and hear on some podcasts and television shows.
The line that jumps out in the Second Reading this morning is the line, “And the last of the enemies to be destroyed will be death.” Which suggests that, whatever the end is and whenever the end is, it’s a long, long, long way off. Every time you open a newspaper, every time you turn on the tv, you see stories of destruction and violence. We are now in the midst of two very hot wars - one in Europe and one in North Africa. And these things will come again.
The thing is that, slowly but surely, without our noticing it, things are getting better. When I taught in high school, there was a very clever history teacher who taught his young students the difference between war up until the twentieth century, and war in the twentieth century. He took them all out of their classroom to stand in the hallway. He made one kid go around the corner of the hallway. He said to the rest of the class, “Can you see so and so?” They said, “No.” “Well, up until the nineteenth century, if you couldn't see him, you couldn't kill him. Starting with the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, that protection was gone.” The kids got it right away. The difference between traditional warfare and modern warfare. We have inherited the most dreadful of all weapons, the hydrogen bomb. And now we’re working on militarizing outer space. Because the instinct to protect and the instinct to strike first is almost universal in human beings. And yet, very slowly, two steps forward, one step back, we’re making progress.
In the time of St. Paul, in the time of Jesus, illness was almost certainly a death sentence. Ancient physicians knew the curative properties of about two dozen plants, and there were some rudimentary surgeries that could be performed successfully. Other than that, if you were sick, you were bound to die. But since around the middle of the nineteenth century, progress in the field of medicine has been exponential. It just grows and grows and grows. So that now we’re able to care for and to cure so many different illnesses.
The same thing is true in almost every other branch of learning. It's very popular now to make fun of the position of the Church in medieval times. But, according to fact, the Church was a powerful force for peace throughout the Middle Ages, when the Church had a stranglehold on the kings across the continent of Europe. Because what they did was, they lengthened Lent and added the Eastertide on to it, and then said, “You are forbidden to make war from Ash Wednesday until Pentecost Sunday,” which took a big chunk out of the year when kings were forbidden, under the pain of excommunication, to make war. And then they made the same rule for Advent. So that, from the first Sunday of Advent until after Epiphany, you couldn’t make war. Which ripped about half the year out of the calendar for war making.
Among the charisms of the great medieval monasteries was the care of the sick, the care of the stranger, and the care of the immigrant. And those charisms have remained to the present day. In fact, at the beginning of the age of reason, most of the first progress made in Botany, Mathematics and even Astrology was made by Catholic priests who were members of religious orders. And that investigative itch never went away, despite the fact that, from the time of Pope Pius IX on, we had a syllabus of errors and a fear of modernism. Nevertheless, Christian scholars were at work in all of our universities, in all the major fields, and it brought such progress today.
And that’s the real point of our scriptures this morning. That each of us is called to use our own talents, our own individual skills, to move the needle a little further forward by the things we do every day. Teaching, medicine, business, the arts. Removing just a little more of the shadow of death hanging over the universe. So that on that long, long, long in the future day, when God does judge the world, we’ll be among those who have fed, and clothed, and housed, and visited, each in our own way.
The king is the most important chess piece, but we are the ones on the chessboard who move to accomplish his will.