Today’s readings: Ezekiel 34, 11-12.15-17; 1 Corinthians 15, 20-26.28; Matthew 25, 31-46.

Today’s celebration of Christ the King is an opportunity for us to realise the gigantic leaps we as believers have been through in the way we think our faith. This feast started at a time when the Church was verging on narcissism, when it was extremely triumphal, and I would say even totalitarian in its vision of faith in the world. Undoubtedly, that is a false way of representing God’s power in the world.

Today, this same feast, seen more in line with the Scriptural readings, is understood from a radically different perspective. Our times now, changed both as regards mentality and practice, seem more in sync with the times of the prophet Ezekiel in the first reading when Israel was in exile and in search of an identity and true, authentic leadership.

We are all experiencing today a delusion with life itself, with politics, with religion, with what we expect and what we actually get in return for our daily efforts. Even the Church has come to be part of this problematic scenario. The Church, not to remain part of the problem, needs to transcend all that in its past glorious history has been transforming it into an institution very similar to any other institution in the world.

Ezekiel, in one of his ‘shepherds’ discourses’ in the first reading, speaks loud and clear on reality even as we experience it today and on the vision that only the Lord can provide. The Church is called, as in the time of the prophets and to quote Kierkegaard, to exit from its domicile. The kingdom of Christ sets out an alternative to all that enslaves and distorts what brings true salvation.

We can inhabit diverse kingdoms here on earth or subject ourselves to diverse sovereignties, authorities and powers. But to aspire to Christ’s kingdom is something totally opposite, and at the end of the day can be most rewarding, not in terms of reward and punishment, but in terms of wholeness and fulfilment.

Christ’s kingdom is not an institution but an event, a kingdom coming, which stands for the historical opposite of all we experience in life and which distorts our perspective. As an event, it presupposes personal earthquakes that cause upheavals, not astronomical but personal.

Ezekiel is actually articulating an anticipated well-being for the displaced community in exile. He presents Yahweh as the protective God of Israel who willingly accepts governance of the community that had suffered because of bad shepherds. To grasp the deep meaning of his words, it suffices to dig deep down in the realities which we ourselves live today.

Ezekiel was himself an exile in Babylon and shared with his people the sense of being lost and rudderless. His message was and is one of consolation and one capable of envisioning God’s future. We also at times are overtaken by the feeling of being lost, of not knowing who we are and whom to believe. Worse than that, it often occurs that we feel betrayed within the Church we belong to, just as Israel was betrayed by its leaders and kings.

On this feast of Christ the king we do well to engage in a stock-taking exercise of where we stand and how we can come to terms harmoniously with all that is rocking the Church in these times. Ezekiel reassures that out of the ruins, God promises and projects something radically new. He Himself will look after His flock. He Himself will show us “where to rest”, He will bandage the wounded and make the weak strong.

The lesson God teaches us here is that after the exile, whatever that may stand for in our life, nothing will be the same as before. As in Ezekiel’s time, God will take over and build anew. This is a promise. And God is faithful. Matthew, with his singular judgment scene, shows how Christ’s real sacramental presence is made manifest in time in the poor, needy, and marginalised of society.

It is only this presence, whose only measure is love and attentiveness to the needs of others, that makes religion true and authentic, distinguishing it from all forms of false religiosity only posing as being God-centred yet alienating from Christ’s real presence.