Your King Is Out There on the Streets
Solemnity of Christ the King
We had a professor in the seminary who made the argument each year that our standard interpretation of today’s Gospel is wrong. Christ gives a teaching about care for the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned, and we almost immediately conclude that he is talking about whatever person is standing there in front of you suffering. Go and give care to that person, and you will be giving care to Christ. The standard interpretation gives us a teaching about a universal love for the poor and the oppressed.
Our professor gave us a different interpretation. He told us that based on the narrative structure of Matthew’s Gospel, Christ at this moment is really talking about those disciples who have gone on mission for the sake of the kingdom and who are suffering. ‘The least of these’ are those disciples who are hungry or thirsty or sick or imprisoned because of their labor in building up the Kingdom of God. Go and find a person who so loves Christ that he or she is suffering greatly for the Kingdom, and give care to that person, and you will be giving care to Christ. This alternative interpretation gives us a teaching about the cost of discipleship, and the care we need to give to those who labor for the Kingdom.
You can see that these two interpretations don’t really fit together. Christ is either talking about his disciples when he talks about ‘the least of these’ or he isn’t—there isn’t much room for ambiguity. Why go look for an alternative interpretation of the Gospel? Our professor told us that one of his motivations for finding a better interpretation for these verses came from his deep dissatisfaction with coming to Mass for the celebration of The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, and getting a Gospel reading on care for the poor. He told us that we’ve taken a powerful moment to focus on the divine kingship of Christ, to talk about the need for Christ-followers to kneel before God in humility, offering our lives as an oblation to his majesty, and turned it into ‘soup kitchen Sunday.’ Our professor thought we could do better with the Solemnity of Christ the King.
I guess at this point I should tell you that the professor I’m talking about is a deeply good man, who was very good to me over the years, who I consider a friend—and who I think is absolutely, without a doubt, 100% wrong regarding his alternative interpretation of Matthew 25. Let me give you three reasons why I think the teaching Christ gives is about a universal love for the poor and the oppressed.
First, the plain reading of the Gospel gives us the meaning that Christ himself possesses a universal love for the poor and oppressed. The simplest and most straight forward reading of the Gospel gives us this teaching. If you must work so hard to find an alternative interpretation, your alternative is probably wrong.
Second, the tradition of the Church has always interpreted the teaching of Matthew 25 as commending a universal love for the poor and the oppressed. Fathers of the Church like St. John Chrysostom say that to not give to the poor is to steal from them, because the wealth we possess does not belong to us but to them. The tradition of the Church matters, it counts for something, and we should take seriously the traditional interpretation of today’s Gospel.
The third reason I think the standard interpretation of Matthew 25 is right is my favorite: it is the interpretation I want to be right. What we get with the standard interpretation of the Gospel is a remarkable teaching on Christ’s divine kingship. Christ is a king to the extent that he identifies with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned—that is what it means to be a king, to identify so thoroughly with the poverty your subjects.
I think the fear of losing sight of the meaning of the Solemnity of the Christ the King is unfounded and follows from the fact that we use a human measure of kingship to make sense of the kingship of Christ. We hear the word ‘king’ and start thinking of royal palaces and expensive robes. But Christ gives us the real measure of kingship. You can look out into the world of politics, remember the reality of Christ’s teaching in Matthew 25, and come to a pretty clear understanding of what is broken in modern society. The kings of our age do not so thoroughly identify with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned, that they live with the impoverished and oppressed, and then die for them. The kings of our age live comfortable lives, push whatever policy initiatives, and stop by for the right photo-op whenever necessary—and that kind of politics rejects the measure given to us by Christ.
If we are honest with ourselves, we recognize that we too often fail to live up to the measure given to us by Christ in the Gospel. We forget—or choose to forget—that Christ is giving us a teaching about judgment and salvation. Here is what I think has happened to us: the culture in which we find ourselves today is so broken that we have casually, almost accidentally, reduced the good life to matters of sexual morality, substance abuse, and personal piety. The good life now is a matter of getting to Mass, getting to a holy hour, marrying the right person, living free from addiction to drugs and alcohol and pornography, choosing life, not contracepting, and affirming your given gender identity. You get those issues right, and you are living the good life.
Those issues matter a great deal. If we get those issues wrong, there will be something deeply wrong with our lives. But Christ gives us a measure of the good life in the Gospel today that really ought to terrify us. Maybe you want to close your eyes for a moment. Imagine that you have died. You are standing before Christ awaiting judgment. You give Christ an account of your life. You own your mistakes, you beg for mercy, you tell Christ that you’ve never been judged like this before, that you have worked your whole life to prepare for this moment, and you want to get it right.
And Christ tells you that you have been judged before. You have been judged thousands of times before. When? How? You have not died before. How is it possible that you have been judged? You are confused. You ask for an explanation. And then Christ tells you that he so thoroughly identifies with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, and the imprisoned that your every single encounter in life with someone suffering resulted in an act of judgment. Christ is the hungry person in front of you. He is the one who thirsts, who needs clothing, who lives as an unwelcomed stranger, who finds himself sick and needing care, the one imprisoned who has been forgotten. Christ tells you that you have already stood before him awaiting judgment thousands of times.
Sometimes I wonder what life would look like if we did a better job of remembering that when we stand before a homeless person out there on the streets or run into a drug addict on a corner asking for food or meet an illegal immigrant struggling to provide for their family or stumble upon a sick person needing care or meet someone about to spend some years in prison, we are standing before Christ our King. We take the teaching of Matthew 25, and we make it about the life of charity—it is good to perform works of charity, more charity means a better life, and we could all perform more works of charity.
But the teaching of the Gospel is about more than the goodness of works of charity—it is a teaching about who Christ is, where we find him in this world, and about standing before Christ our King in judgment now, today. Christ our King is the person there before us who needs food or water or clothing or welcome or care or the simple goodness of being not forgotten and ignored. Your King is out there on the streets. Go kneel before him.
Homily preached on November 26, 2023 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary