11.24.24 CCM Homily

The Lord be with you. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Saint John.

Pilate said to Jesus, are you the king of the Jews? Jesus answered him. Do you say this on your own, where others told you about me? Pilate answered, I'm not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done? Jesus answered,

My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendance would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here. So Pilate said to him, so you are a king. Jesus answered, you say that 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. The gospel of the Lord.

for every Christian, but especially for young Christians. It's crucial for us to come to know who Jesus Christ really is and what He expects of us. Today's solemnity of Christ the King helps us to do both. This year's celebration is particularly special. The solemnity of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI on December 11, 1925, in the encyclical Quas Primas.

20 days later on December 31st, he celebrated it for the first time to conclude the 1925 Jubilee. For the next 44 years, it was celebrated in the traditional Latin liturgy on the last Sunday of October. Since 1970, in the new order of the Mass, it's been celebrated in the last Sunday of the liturgical year in November. As today we do for the 55th time,

One doesn't have to be a math whiz to know that one plus forty four plus fifty five is a hundred. And so we rejoice to mark for the one hundredth time tonight the solemnity of Christ the King.

It's a chance to celebrate what Christ's kingship means. And as Pius XI suggested in 1925, to commit ourselves to let Christ the King ring in our minds, reign in our wills, reign in our hearts, and reign in our bodies. His papal motto was, Pox Christi in Renio Christi, that the peace of Christ comes in the kingdom of Christ.

For us to have the peace, Christ the principal came into the world to give and leave us. For us to have the peace for which our hearts yearn and our anxious age desperately cries out for. We must enter into, we must live the reality of his kingdom. Tonight we have the chance to focus on how.

It's common when we celebrate the solemnity to give our attention to the cosmic and eschatological dimensions of the manifestation of Christ as King. When as Daniel saw in his vision in today's first reading,

We will see one like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven to receive dominion, glory and kingship, whom all peoples, nations and languages shall serve, whose dominion will be an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, and whose kingship shall not be destroyed. The one whom the book of Revelation today describes is the ruler of the kings of the earth, coming amid the clouds of heaven.

The one whom the psalm indicates has made the world firm not to be moved, whose throne stands solid from of old, whose everlasting enrobed in majesty and splendor. These cosmic eternal dimensions

are an important part of tonight's celebration and a key aspect of Christian faith and hope as we live out the consequences of what we profess in the creed that Jesus will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. But it's helpful for us to remember today and always that through his incarnation that majestic King and Lord

has come into the world to make it possible for us to enter into his kingdom, not just later when he comes on the clouds, but now. The first words of Jesus' public ministry were, this is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the gospel. Later, he said, the kingdom of God is among you and sent out the apostles.

And then his 72 disciples to proclaim, the kingdom of God is at hand for you. The kingdom, he said, was not a spectacle we could point to. Here it is, or there it is. It wasn't meant to be a reality fundamentally in the future, but it was something that was both now and not yet. Jesus announced the kingdom with an urgency. He showed it was near within reach, and he wanted us to enter into it right away.

and help others to enter. In his preaching, Jesus gave many parables about the kingdom, how to become part of it, live in it, and help grow it. It's important on the Feast of Christ, the King, to ponder with fresh wonder Jesus' words.

He said the kingdom starts small like a mustard seed, but then becomes huge. That the seed of the kingdom is meant to be received on good rich soil that bears thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold fruit. That it grows like wheat in the midst of weeds or like beautiful fish in the midst of rotten. That it positively influences everything around it like yeast and dough.

It needs to be treated like the richest pearl one has ever seen or a treasure buried in a field readily selling everything else we have to obtain. He reminded his contemporaries that many tax collectors and prostitutes were entering the kingdom before most of the scribes in the Pharisees because these notorious sinners were far more willing and eager to leave behind their old lives to seize the kingdom and experience the newness of life it offers.

Jesus reminded us in His other preaching, that to enter the kingdom, we must seek at first above other things, convert and become like children, be poor in spirit, be born anew from above by water in the spirit, long for it like wise bridesmaids awaiting the bridegroom, work for it like labors in a vineyard, setting our hands to the plow and not looking back.

Keep our baptismal wedding garments clean and fit for the banquet, violently cut off from ourselves, whatever is incompatible with the kingdom, and be willing to suffer for it.

On this solemnity, therefore, it's essential for us not just to look ahead to when Jesus will come in the clouds, but to recognize that the kingdom is already among us and to make the choices necessary to orient our whole life to it. As Catholics on Columbia's campus, we're called to be living in Christ's kingdom now.

Well, we go to the same classes as everyone else, eat in the same dining halls, and climb the same steers to low library. Christ the King summons us to do things. In fact, to do everything differently. We're called to do them as citizens and subjects of the kingdom. If Columbia's motto is illuminate to of the day, be most woman, in your light, we will see light

taken from Psalm 36, we are the ones called in particular to see, walk in and radiate that light, the light of the kingdom and of its king, the true light of the world. That requires a choice. Tonight's Gospel taken from Jesus' dialogue with Pontius Pilate on Good Friday helps us to focus on that choice.

Pilate begins the conversation with Jesus by asking the question that Jews had been debating and trying to answer for the previous three years. Are you the king of the Jews? They were discussing whether Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Jesus didn't reply with a yes or no, but with a question. He said to the Roman procurator, are you saying this on your own?

or if others told you about me. Pilate tried to deflect the query saying, I'm not a Jew, am I? But the question can't be ducked and it can't be answered by just regurgitating what others have told us. Jesus came into the world as king to establish a personal saving relationship with every person he has created from Pontius Pilate to our lady in St. Joseph, to you and to me,

There's a good shepherd who would leave the 99 behind and go after the one sheep who was lost. He's interested in every one of us, every one of our friends, and every person will ever meet. It's not enough for Jesus to be the King of others, or even the King of the universe. It's not enough for the Pope, for the bishops of the Catechism, or our parents. So grateful that my parents are here tonight for this man.

for our grandparents and Godparents to proclaim Jesus the sovereign Lord. It's not adequate even that the whole church in heaven and on earth that claims him is king and dedicates churches and religious institutes to him under the title of Christos racks. She just wants each of us personally and intimately to say with sincerity and desire, thy kingdom comes.

rather than just doing so because others have told us about this reality. He wants each of us to recognize that now is the time of fulfillment, to repent and believe, and to live by the parables and instructions he gives us about the life of the kingdom. Jesus died to become your King in mind, and wants us to ground our existence in the reality of the life-giving relationship the King wants to have with us. The future of Pope Benedict.

Once told the catechists of the world, words that have never been able to forget, he stated, the kingdom of God is not a thing. The kingdom of God is God. The kingdom of God means God exists. God is alive. God is present and acting in the world in our, in my life.

God is not the far away ultimate cause. God is not the great architect of deism who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it. On the contrary, God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life in each and every moment of history. Christ the King

wants to become not just part of our life, or even the most important part of our life. He wants, as Cardinal Ratziger told us, to become the most present and decisive reality in our life in each instant of our personal history. Therefore, the first choice we're called to make tonight is not to live just by what we've inherited from the church, and those who have passed on to us the treasure of the faith,

but to make those values personal and intentional. We're called to celebrate this feast not just because it's what the church puts into the missile and missile at on November 24th, 2024. Today, rather, we mark what we strive to live each day here on Columbia's campus and beyond. That Jesus Christ is the most present and decisive reality in every act of my life.

that I want Jesus to become king of my time, my affections, my study, my work and leisure, my family bonds, my loves and friendships, my mind, heart, soul and strength, all I am and have. When Jesus asks, are you saying this about me yourself or if others told you about me? He wants us each to reply.

I'm saying this about you by my deepest personal conviction, by faith, and with all my mind, heart, soul, and strength. To accept Jesus as King of our whole life, and to resolve to order everything in our life to Him, is conceptually straightforward, but morally hard.

For us to denominate Christ as king is in this world, not to be a fear-weather fan of Jesus, like those who root for a championship team simply because they're winning. That's why today's gospel of the king of the universe before a Roman procurator is so important. By worldly logic, the last thing Jesus looked as he hung upon the cross was a conquering king.

He was bathed in blood, not clothed in royal purple. He was hammered to a cross, not seated on a mutual throne. He was crowned with thorns, not capped with gold and diademes. To ridicule him and the Jews in general, Pilate ordered that an inscription of three languages be placed above his head, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, rather than pay him homage, most in the crowd mocked him.

as did the chief priests, Roman soldiers, pastors by, and even the thief on his left. They all derided him in the same way. If you are the king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, come down from that cross. Save yourself. Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power they could comprehend. To name him as our king is to recalibrate everything.

to his way of reigning. He told Pilate, my kingdom doesn't belong to this world and is not here, but we often try to frame his kingdom in earthly and even political categories. Until the resurrection, the apostles all had a false idea about the kingdom and what it meant to be in the king's service, incessantly competing against each other for the greatest position in the royal administration. They imagined Jesus was about to inaugurate.

But Jesus said to them and to us, you know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over others. And the great ones make their authority over them felt, but it shall not be this way among you. Rather, whoever would be great among you must be your servant. Whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for the many.

The king of the universe came in the world to serve you. And when he calls you to follow him, he calls each of us to follow him in this type of total loving service. To proclaim Jesus' kingdom to enter and share his kingship means to be willing to give our life as a ransom for God and others, to serve rather than be served, to give rather than get.

That's why it's not sufficient to listen to what others are saying about Jesus. Because to live in His Kingdom, each of us must undergo a moral revolution, which we live by the King's values rather than by the world. We have to proclaim Him King ourselves, not just by our thoughts and our words, but in our actions.

Jesus' interrogation by Pilate in tonight's gospel also points to another reality that's essential for us to live in Christ's kingdom here on campus. And wherever our future paths take us. After Jesus stated that his kingdom was not of this world and Pilate followed up by asking, then you are a king. Jesus replied, you say I am a king. In other words, that's what you call me.

But Jesus very much wanted to distinguish his kingdom from all earthly realms. He stated, 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. She was stressing that his kingdom, the reason for his incarnation was to witness to the truth

to help everyone enter the real, real world. Once again, Pilate tried to duck the personal thrust of Jesus' words by asking rhetorically, quit as baritas. What's truth? But we can't escape the meaning of Jesus' words.

His whole mission was to remind us of the real, real world, the world God created and holds in existence, the world that goes beyond what might appear in the morning newspapers, with the relatively minor detail of who happens to be president, or who's the richest person in the world, or what are the latest movements on the stock market or the battlefield. The real, real world is the realm where the saints live in the world, but not of it.

acknowledging Christ as king, storing up for themselves a treasure that can pass through a needle's eye, that rust can't corrode, thieves rob, or even the IRS tax. Jesus came to witness to this truth that the real, real world is his kingdom. Earlier in the gospel of St. John, Jesus had said,

If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. Knowing the truth, in other words, is the difference between slavery and freedom, between living a lie and living in the light.

A little later, Jesus would further specify that the truth isn't a correspondence, whereas the philosophers teach us an ad equation between what's in the mind and what's outside of the mind. But the truth is ultimately a moral correspondence, a personal relationship with him. He said during the last supper, I am the truth.

It came not just to teach us various truths, but to invite and urge us to ground our entire existence on a relationship with Him as our King. The big battle in the world, the war between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death, is between truth and falsity, between Christ the truth and Satan, whom Jesus calls a liar and the Father of lies.

To proclaim Christ as King is not just to announce the truth, but to commit ourselves to seek the truth, find the truth, know the truth, love the truth, live the truth, and share the truth. In a context in which the Prince of Demons tries to seduce us to live a lie. Satan's lair is a dominion of mendacity, spin, slander, deception, and self-deception.

Christ's kingdom is a kingdom of truth. To live in His kingdom is to stop pretending, to stop treating life as if it's a game or a dream, and to commit ourselves to the reality of His kingdom, to live maturely full-time in every aspect of our life with Him, the King. This is so important on college campuses today because various professors explicitly or subtly

are relativists proclaiming in a self-contradictory way the truth that there is no truth. It's key at a time of an even more pernicious moral relativism which says that it's wrong to believe that there is right and wrong. But now we're facing a particular cultural assault on the truth unprecedented in human history based on sentimentalism or emotivism.

in which people are trying to argue that there's no truth even to the incontestible facts of our biology, to our having been made by God as male or female. They're claiming that male and female are just social attributions assigned randomly or arbitrarily at birth, or that they're mental states. And they're trying to get everyone else in culture

at the cost of being canceled, to pretend that the naked emperor is well-dressed and living sanely in the real world. As Christians, human beings, friends, and fellow citizens, we do no favors to anyone, especially those who are suffering a profound anthropological confusion, to enable them to live in a made-up world far from the kingdom of truth.

Christ and we love them too much for that type of cowardly omission of truth and charity. Jesus came as king to testify to the truth and says that those who belong to the truth listen to his voice. The voice that in the beginning said, let us make man in our own image and then male and female he created them.

in the context of powerfully ensconced untruths that will injure people not just in this world, but potentially forever. The solemnity of Christ the king is the occasion for us to reaffirm not just the fact of his kingdom, but to commit ourselves to living the truth in every way and to help others to live the truth to, even if it costs us.

Today on this great solemnity that we're celebrating for the hundredth time, we're likewise thanking the Lord for the last two and a half years that I've had the privilege to serve as your Catholic chaplain. For the Lord's 25 years of faithful help is I've sought to serve him as a priest. The work of a Catholic priest is always to try to proclaim and prosper the kingdom of God and to help by what he says and how he lives

People to come to embrace that kingdom. That's what I've sought to do here. I remember one of the first conversations I had with members of the board of Columbia Catholic Ministry in the summer before I arrived. Normally, when people reach out to you before your arrival in a priestly assignment, it's more than just to get to know you. It's because they hope to influence some of your priorities. Fair enough.

We're talking to one student at the time the CCM retreat chair who got right to the point. Father, I've been praying that the new chaplain would increase opportunities for Eucharistic Adoration. I asked her, how hard have you been praying? She replied, sincerely, I've been praying every day for it for now several months.

And so I told her with a smile. God's been listening. She said, what? I said, how about adoration every weekday? She couldn't believe it. But that's what we've done together. It's obviously a priority for a priest to facilitate the encounter of Christ's beloved faithful with him, the king.

to give them a chance to come to be with him, to listen to him, to befriend him, to love him, and to adore him. In another pre-arrival conversation, I asked the officers what they thought about moving the daily and Sunday Masses from St. Paul's Chapel on campus, where it had been since the mid-1960s, here to Notre Dame, so that we could offer more easily what I call full-menu Catholicism.

with daily confessions, adoration, kneelers and more that wouldn't be possible at St. Paul's. They were very supportive, but Jess asked me to be open to keeping two things, to distribute ashes at St. Paul on Ash Wednesday, to make it easier for students who couldn't come to mass that day, and to continue eucharistic processions on campus, both of which I was very eager to do.

Everything I've tried to do as chaplain has been ultimately to foster life in the kingdom. I've heard every semester about 140 hours of confessions because the call to live in the kingdom always involves repenting and believing. I've celebrated and prepared people to receive the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, penance, first communion, and marriage and help people to discern to follow God, the seminary, and religious life.

to live with Christ the king means to meet him in these sacraments, together with others at the Merton Institute and with the focus missionaries, have sought to provide some high-quality formation in the faith so that students can learn about Christ the king and about living in his kingdom at a level commensurate with their aptitude and what they're getting in all their other classes at Columbia.

I've endeavored to catalyze the charity that's characteristic of the kingdom. So remember that Christ said that those will enter into his eternal kingdom will be those who recognize him, the king, and disguise. And those who are hungry, thirsty, sick, a stranger, or otherwise in need. I've tried to foster the common life of the kingdom. As Christ the king came, not just to save us as individuals,

but to form a real family, people who care about each other, a loving royal family, what a great joy it was for me. To be able to be present for the opening of the Merton Institute on February 11, 2023, the first fully dedicated center for Catholics at Columbia in the 270 years of Columbia's existence.

and a place in which all of these aspects of life according to the kingdom can happen far more effectively. You remember the name of Columbia when it was founded. It was founded as the king's college. Little did they know. We Catholics are the ones who are meant to keep that identity alive.

By the way, we live in the king's kingdom and help everybody else to remember the king. Altogether, I've spent 10% of my 25 years as a priest here at Columbia. And I have to say that while I'm grateful to God for all of my assignments, for the work that's been entrusted to me, and for the people that have met, served, and learned so much from, these last five semesters with you,

have certainly been among my happiest years. For the rest of my life, I will cherish the memories I've had here, especially the way I've seen so many of you grow, not just physically as I get shorter by the year as you continue to grow, but intellectually and especially spiritually. The convergence that I've witnessed in our OCIA program on our retreats and recollections and in the confessional.

And the spiritual upgrades of the hell just people made commitments to daily mass, even before they were Catholic or adoration or learning the faith, serving each other and caring for those in need have filled me with so much joy and hope. I thank you for your faith in Christ the King and the way your faith is inspired and buttressed by all. I want to thank in a particular way the generosity

of the founders of the Merton Institute for making all of this possible force. The focus missionaries and the Merton staff for being my trusted and diligent collaborators and the CCM officers for their love for the faith and their spiritual maturity in making the decision to serve their fellow Catholics at Columbia. It's been so great for me to see what we've been able to accomplish together.

The essence of a chaplain's work of a priest's work is summed up in today's second reading from the book of Revelation. St. John tells us that Jesus Christ, the ruler of the kings of the earth has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father. To live in the kingdom is to live as priests for God the Father, as referring not to the ministerial priesthood of the New Covenant.

which 407,000 men across the world with me sheer, but to our common priesthood by baptism, that all 1.3 billion Catholics sheer. Three days ago, we marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of the Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gensium, referring to Jesus as the light of the nation.

In that foundational document, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council underlined the role of the ministerial priesthood in catalyzing and facilitating the priesthood of the baptized and clarified what that baptismal priesthood means. Listen to them. They taught Christ the Lord made the new people a kingdom and priest to God the Father. The baptized by regeneration in the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, by the sacraments of baptism and confirmation, the baptized are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood. In order that through all those works that are those of the Christian, they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the power of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.

Therefore, they continued all the disciples of Christ, persevering in prayer and praising God, should present themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Our common baptismal priesthood is the way we live in the kingdom. It involves a life of prayer and offering our existence as a loving oblation to God and for others. Lumen Gentium continues.

The common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are interrelated. Each of them in its own special ways of participation in the one priesthood of Christ. The ministerial priest acting in Christ's person makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice and offers it to God in the name of all the people, but the faithful in virtue of their royal priesthood join in the offering of the Eucharist.

They likewise exercised that priesthood in receiving the sacraments in prayer and thanksgiving in the witness of a holy life and by self-denial and active charity. Therefore, the supreme act of the kingdom of God that Christ came into the world to inaugurate is for us. Each one of us has priests for God and for our God and Father.

through a baptismal priest and through the ministerial priesthood that supports it, to offer the Eucharist and together with Christ on the altar, offer ourselves. That's what I've tried to prioritize as your priest, Chaplain, to help us all make Jesus in the Mass the source, summit, root, and center of our life so that we might live each day with Christ the King, reigning humbly at Mass and in the tabernacle.

who wants to set up his throne in each of us through Holy Communion. Sweet tonight, for the hundredth time in the history of the Church,

prepare to celebrate this supreme expression of our adoration of Christ the King and the apex of our life as a kingdom of praise for God our Father. We ask Christ the King and we're about to welcome on this altar and many of us receive in Holy Communion to help us make him the most present and decisive reality in each and every aspect of our life in each and every moment of history, especially

every second of our blessed time at Columbia. As we prepare to cry out in the Our Father, thy kingdom come. We ask God the Father and Christ the King to send the Holy Spirit to help us bring every part of our existence into the kingdom, the kingdom of truth, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace, as we'll soon pray in the preface.

We also ask Him to strengthen us so that we might be His emissary, going out to the campus and indeed the whole world, joyfully and courageously proclaiming that we believe in love and serve Christ the King, not just because others have told us about Him, because we have come to know Him, to be changed for the better by Him.

and now can't wait to help others come to no love serve and reign with Him too. Now, right now tonight is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is within our reach. Let us make haste to enter and long live Christ the King.