November 20-21: Preparing for this Sunday’s Mass (Feast of Christ the King)

As we now conclude this liturgical year of the Church, we set aside the Gospel of St. Mark, which we have proclaimed since last Advent. It might be profitable to review what image St. Mark has given us for Jesus. If we think about it, the image which the Gospel has presented has been anything but “regal.”

Half of the Gospel of St. Mark was an effort on the part of Jesus to get His followers to understand that He was not going to establish a Royal and powerful reign that would crush the Romans and restore Israel to some former kind of earthly glory. He repeated over and over that He was going to be a suffering servant, obedient to the will of His Father. The citizens of His Kingdom would not be a privileged few who could presume some claim on His favor or vie for positions of honor to His right or left.

St. Mark, week after week this year, has reminded us that in Christ’s “realm” there would be found a rag-tag, sometimes confused, and sometimes doubtful bunch of misfits who sometimes talked big and then acted small. They would be blind, but yet cry out, “Lord, have mercy.” They would be deaf, sometimes acting as if they were possessed by evil, and they would be not-so-loyal friends who sometimes couldn’t be found at the moment of greatest need. Yet they were the ones who were given the fish and bread and told to feed the hungry. They were the ones in the boat with Jesus. They were the ones who fished all night long and got nothing until He told them where to cast their nets. After all these centuries, are we really that much different?

Let’s remember that in St. Mark’s Gospel there are no singing angels, adoring shepherds, and no visitors from afar with strange royal gifts. There is no gentle Virgin or humble, silent carpenter. There is just a wild man from the desert named John who picked Jesus out of the crowd, and with a reference to the sacrificed Passover Lamb recognized Him and directed their (and our) attention to the Lamb of God. Chapter after chapter, St. Mark has shown us that Jesus rejected and fled from crowds who wanted to make Him their “King.” Jesus had only one crown in mind – and when it came, the crowds weren’t cheering … they will be jeering. 

The end of the Church’s Year is the time to look for what we have been promised: not a King (despite the lofty title of this weekend’s Feast), but a Savior. Will the lessons we have learned from St. Mark about this Savior have, as we say these days, “staying power?” Do we now realize that we are not to look for a place of privilege and ease, ever? Do we now realize that we are supposed to look for a place among the humble, the sick, the broken, the abandoned, and those cast off? Or are we and our world still too deaf to hear the Good News of the Gospel? Are we too blind to see the glory of God in the face of Christ, in our own faces, and in the faces of our neighbors?

Let us pray. “Loving and gracious God, at the end of the Church’s year and near the beginning of a new year, may we find ourselves hard at work for the sake of the One who comes. And when He comes, probably not on a golden cloud, please open our eyes because, once again, He will probably come quite humbly, on a donkey, to gather us all around the Eucharistic Table. And there He will feed us once more on the Bread of Life that lasts forever. He is our Savior and so we pray in His Holy Name. Amen.”

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