Dear Parishioners of Mary Immaculate and Saint Rose,

The last Sunday of every year is dedicated to Christ the King. It is a feast to crown the Church year. How fitting for us to begin each Advent with the longing for the birth of the Messiah and then to proceed through the annual commemorations of the events in the life of Jesus and then to complete the year with the triumphal acknowledgement that Jesus is our Lord and King.
As Americans, we are fiercely jealous of our freedoms and so the idea of bending our knee and head to a king can be more than a little distasteful. But when we are speaking of Jesus, we are to surrender all to Him. We as Christians must fall on our knees before the mystery of our God who loves us so much. For it is only by taking on the yoke of the Cross of Jesus that we will find our true freedom, which lies not in the promises of this world, but in our life with God.

When we reflect on the humble life of Jesus from the moment of the Annunciation, through the hidden thirty years in Nazareth, to the three years of His ministry on Earth, to His death upon the Cross, His love becomes for us the most amazingly awesome reality in our frail existence! The shameful death on the Cross is not a tragic, senseless execution, but the ultimate expression and triumph of Divine Love! The Cross is no longer a humiliation but a glorification of Jesus, our Lord and King.

Jesus rises from the dead, and through the Resurrection opens the gates of Heaven for all of us who believe. So today we celebrate not only that Jesus is Lord and King, but that we, through our life in Christ, hope that we too shall enter into the glory of God. So it is with humble and grateful hearts that we bow before the glory of Jesus this day and proclaim Him our Lord and King!

Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself and took on the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. He was known to be of human estate, and it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross! Because of this, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name above every other name, so that at Jesus’ name every knee must bend in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, and every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father: Jesus Christ is Lord! Philippians 2:6-11
Msgr. Cox
Christ the King, detail from a monument to Pope Pius VIII  by Pietro Tenerani (1830) in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
The full sculpture is here