HOMILY FOR FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING (C)

Fr Billy Swan

Dear friends. Many of you have been asking whether I will continue to edit ‘The Hook of Faith’ website in my new role in Rome and write the weekly homilies. I am happy to report that the answer is ‘Yes’ as the ministry of preaching and teaching the faith remains at the heart of my ministry as it is for every priest.

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Dear friends. Today on the Feast of Christ the King, the Gospel provides us with one of the most poignant, beautiful and merciful stories in the whole of the Bible – the encounter between Jesus and the good thief as both men hung dying on their crosses. In the light of this Gospel, I would like to draw out three themes from this beautiful and tragic moment when God’s mercy is offered generously to everyone through Jesus his Son, especially to those who think themselves beyond it.

The first and perhaps most important lesson we take from this Gospel is that at the heart of our faith is a personal relationship with God who has a human face. Our faith is not primarily about an obligation, an ideology, a denomination or a moral code as important as these things are. It is about an encounter and a friendship with a person named Jesus Christ who looks at us with tender mercy and calls us to a new life in him. We see this with the good thief on the cross who looks across at Jesus only to discover Jesus looking at him. And it is with this look and meeting of their eyes that the good thief asks to be remembered followed by Jesus’ promise of paradise. Jesus came to reveal God’s merciful face and in that face of mercy is our life and hope.

The second is that God is merciful not some of the time, but all of the time. In this episode from the final moments of Jesus’ life, we come to appreciate God’s nature as being mercy itself and that he is not mad with us but mad about us, all of the time. This does not mean that we are free to do what we like or rationalise in thinking that God will forgive me so its ok to deliberately sin. God’s mercy is not some kind of safety net that we call upon when we need it. Human responsibility and the call to repent are also at the heart of the Gospel.

Rather it means that when you have experienced the gift of God’s mercy at first hand, then life will never be the same again. We will not want to go back to the way things were before or risk losing the new joy we have discovered in our friendship with the Lord. From the good thief we discover that it is never too late to turn back and to ask for God’s mercy no matter how dark our past or our present appear.

We also know that God uses our failures to draw us closer to himself. Imagine our friendship with God being like a piece of string. Each time we sin, the string is cut but each time God repairs it with a knot by his mercy. We fail again and he does the same. Each time the string is broken and knotted, it gets shorter and we end up closer to the Lord than before. Eventually, as happened to the good thief, we are united together and forever in paradise.

The final theme is our call to be merciful as God is merciful to us. God’s mercy is not something to make us feel better – it’s much more than that. It prompts us to think beyond ourselves – to think of the poor, the victims of human trafficking, the hungry, the homeless, migrants and refugees. The gift of God’s mercy directs us to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy so that mercy does not become too abstract but is made visible and stays real. Our prayer is that our hearts may expand and our mercy extend to the whole world at a time when the world needs to see that mercy most. At a time of global uncertainty, one man brings us closer together – Jesus Christ our King for ‘this man has done nothing wrong’.

Jesus, remember us and the whole world when you come into your kingdom.