Which Kingdom do you belong to?…And who is your King?

Today Holy Mother Church commemorates the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe……When we pray the Rosary on Tuesdays & Fridays, we pray the Sorrowful Mysteries…..The third Sorrowful Mystery is where Jesus is crowned with thorns and faces off with Pontius Pilate…This is a powerful scene…Two men of power…One of this world and one of another…”Pilate said to Jesus, "Are you the King of the Jews?”……Pilate speaks to Jesus as if he was “conducting business”…His words are “masked”…Jesus cuts through the subtle inferences and gets to the heart of the matter…”Jesus answered, "My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants 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, "Then you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say I am a king.”…..Two Kings facing off…One with a crown of jewels and another with a crown of thorns….Which Kingdom do you belong to?…And who is your King?

“His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, his kingship shall not be destroyed.”

Americans have a way to sanitize Christianity…There was nothing “sanitized” about the way Jesus lived or for that matter the way he died…..In many places of worship in America the corpus (Jesus broken body) is removed from the cross…We do not want to focus on that…Let’s just stick to the Resurrection and forget about Good Friday….When Jesus and Pilate faced off, two worlds collided……And to this day, when we live our Catholic faith in the world…To a certain degree, the same thing happens…Are you willing to “face off” with the world?…To live differently?………..One year I was in India and Mother Teresa’s sisters asked some of the volunteers to help take a group of handicapped children to the Air & Space Museum in Kolkata. This museum, like in any city in the world was visited by well to do and educated citizens, no different from New York City…..…I remember the faces of the people on the line, as they stared with wide-open eyes, almost in disbelief as a bunch of foreign volunteers and Catholic nuns carried severely handicapped children into the museum….Such a scene echoes the image described by St John in the Gospel from Holy Mass today…..”My kingdom does not belong to this world”….This is the choice we all must make…..Which Kingdom do you belong to?…And who is your King?…No need to answer…The way we live our life gives the answer

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!….Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!”

In the Gospel today from Mass Jesus tells Pilate something very important….”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”……This statement does not only apply to Jesus…It applies to each and every one of us…To testify to the Truth….Not “our truth”, whatever that means - But the Truth!…We do that by our words but more importantly by the way we live our life each and everyday…When we commit to living in this way…We follow the example of Jesus Christ, who “faced off” with Pilate…Two Kingdoms collide!……Which Kingdom do you belong to?…And who is your King?