A reflection on ‘time between times’

The week between Christ the King Sunday and the First Sunday of Advent every year invites us to be reflective.  These few days are a “time between times.”  The annual liturgical rhythm of seasons and Scripture leads us, again and again, through the story of our creation and redemption.  It’s a cycle not only of worship, but also of teaching; a cycle that forms us in a deeper biblical understanding of the world and our purpose in it.

The solemnity of Christ the King, which we celebrated this past Sunday, closes the Church year.  It reminds us that Jesus Christ is not just our teacher and brother, but the Lord of creation—the sovereign to whom we will one day make an accounting, and by whom we will be judged.  The First Sunday of Advent, which we celebrate next Sunday, begins the new Church year.  Advent is a time of hope in God’s promise of a redeemer; a season of anticipation for the birth of a Savior at Christmas.  But it’s a time of self-examination as well.  The reason is simple and sobering. 

Advent also speaks of the passing of this world.  It reminds us of the coming of Jesus again at the end of days, this time in grandeur and power, to weigh each of us in the scales of justice and separate his followers from God’s enemies.

Two facts are worth praying over this week.

Here’s the first fact.  Modern American life runs on a number of key fictions.  In practice, our culture preaches an unofficial atheism that ties happiness to material goods, belittles claims of religious truth, breeds vanity and personal selfishness to sell products, and avoids reminding us too often or too vividly that our time in this world is limited.  But a central truth about every human life is its brevity.  Each of us is going to die.  So is every person we know, including those we love the most.  Our time is precious because we have so little of it, and our eternity depends on what we do with our time here and now.  Only a very foolish person would live today without preparing for tomorrow, especially when “tomorrow” sooner or later means eternal joy in the presence of God, or its alternative.

Here’s the second fact.  Christianity is a religion of resurrection and new life.  But the only way to that new life involves naming sin for the evil it is, repenting of it, dying to ourselves and calling others to do the same.  St. John Chrysostom said that when we confess our sins to men we are punished for them.  But when we confess our sins to God, we are saved.  This gives us hope.  But conversion is an unwelcome message for the proud and self-satisfied.  Therefore Christian teaching will be reviled just as Jesus the teacher was reviled.  Christians will be hated just as their King was hated and then murdered on a cross. 

We see this derision for Christian believers and their faith increasingly today in our politics, mass media and courts, but also more brutally in acts of desecration against Christian churches and holy places; and not just in faraway places like Pakistan or Iraq, but right here in Colorado. 

When vandals smashed four statues at Cabrini Shrine here in the archdiocese last week,  they were simply adding to a national pattern of blasphemy and violence against Christian places of prayer.  Sometimes the motive for this sort of desecration is adolescent recklessness.  But more and more often, the motive is hatred for the truth which Jesus himself taught and which the Church continues to teach.

This Thursday is Thanksgiving Day—a uniquely American holiday, and one with profoundly Christian origins.  We have a lot to be grateful for in this country, beginning with our religious freedom.  But we need to vigorously insist on and defend that freedom, or we’ll lose it.  More importantly, we need to remember that the real author and guarantor of our freedom is not a Constitution but a King—the only true King, Jesus Christ.  Only in him is our hope, and to him we owe our allegiance, our love and our deepest thanksgiving.

Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M., Cap. is the Archbishop of Denver. To read more from Archbishop Chaput, click here.  

To listen to Archbishop's homily delivered this past Sunday for the Solemnity of Christ the King, visit www.archden.org/archbishop/homilies.