HW: Christ the King — the paradox of God's "weakness" and love

A reflection for Christ the King, keeping in mind the second reading from Colossians and the history of the feast. Written and spoken by Kieran J. O'Mahony OSA.

Gentle piano music to close the meditation

Transcript

John’s Lane
23 November 2025
Christ the King
Colossians 1:12-20

Welcome
The feast of Christ the King was first celebrated in 1925, one 100 years ago. It was a time of upheaval: the catastrophe of WWI, four great empires had collapsed, the world was in chaos. Only a few years later, the Wall Street Crash sent seismic tremors across the globe. Unpalatable and extreme alternatives were presenting themselves as solutions, such as European fascism and Soviet communism, neither destined to last but each causing incalculable harm. The then bishop of Rome, Pius XI, desired to remind people that the Christian faith proclaims a very different way of living: “…Jesus Christ reigns over the minds of individuals by his teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one's life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example.”

Topic
We also live in a time of upheaval and collapse, the world around us, in society and not least in the Catholic Church. Can the feast still speak to us today?

Steps
The hymn or poem we heard as our second reading is worth pausing on.

He is the image of the unseen God
and the first-born of all creation,
for in him were created
all things in heaven and on earth:
everything visible and everything invisible,
…
all things were created through him and for him.
Before anything was created, he existed,
and he holds all things in unity.

The contrast between those claims and the Gospel story of the crucifixion is clear. A great American biblical scholar, Raymond Brown, expressed his shock in these words:

How within fifty years (at the latest) did Christians come to believe that about a Galilean preacher who was crucified as a criminal?

Here we touch the enduring fascination with the Christian message: the person of Jesus, his message and his destiny. We believe in a God who has drawn near to us in the paradox of the cross, a God of love and even of vulnerability. In the words of St Paul:

We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:23–25)

This portrait of God signals the upending of conventional ways of thinking. As RS Thomas put it in his poem The Kingdom,

It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life.

It is an extraordinary vision, a reversal of the conventional way of seeing thing, capable of moving us to great acts of love and unselfishness both as individuals and as a society. It still has power to fascinate the mind, move the heart, and change our lives for good. It is why we are Christians in the first place.

Conclusion
As in the time of Pius XI, we also live in a chaotic and unpredictable time. We need the resources of what we may call Christian humanism to confront the challenges. It is easy, if short-sighted, to be individualistic and self-interested. The Christian vision works for and towards the common good, unselfishly and lovingly, at cost. Pope Leo is emerging as a clear moral guide, a good leader in all of this, lifting our sights and our hearts. May we not be afraid to embrace and to live the vision.