Today is the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year. We celebrate the fact that Jesus Christ is our King. He is our Beginning and End, in Him everything holds together, as St. Paul says in our Second Reading.
On the heels of this day, we will be celebrating what can be called the BIG THREE: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. This would be a great opportunity to reflect on these BIG THREE before they happen, so that when they happen, we can enter into them and celebrate them as they were meant to be celebrated.
What do Christ’s Kingship and the BIG THREE have in common? They were/are both misunderstood. The Jews had major misconceptions about what the long-awaited Messiah would be like, and our culture today has major misconceptions about what these three holidays are really all about.
First: The Jewish people down through salvation history had long awaited a Great Messiah who would deliver them from oppression and to a “land flowing with milk and honey”. They looked back at their great patriarchs, Abraham, Moses, and King David for models as to what the ultimate Messiah would be like. When Jesus Christ came on the scene, the Jews of Palestine in the first century were under the oppressive regime of the Romans. Many of that time thought that the coming Messiah would be a military leader and would release them from the oppression of the Romans. Yet, Jesus came into the world as a poor carpenter’s son, living in relative anonymity until He started His itinerant preaching. And now, as we see in our Gospel today, Jesus is executed as a common criminal – or, more to it, an un-common criminal, because Jesus did not do anything to deserve this sentence.
Did any Jew of that time ever think that their Messiah would be one who would give His life willingly into the hands of the very people He came to deliver? Yet, it is precisely because He suffered and died on the cross that we as Christians call Him our King. This paradox constitutes our Salvation. By His death and resurrection, He has set us free from the grip of sin, from the dictatorship of a relativistic age. Jesus Christ is objectively the Way, the Truth and the Life.
We will soon be celebrating the BIG THREE holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. Each of these have been so misconstrued by our culture that their original intents have been eroded. First, Thanksgiving has become synonymous with the overindulgence of turkey and all the trimmings and flopping back on the sofa to watch the football game. Or maybe it has become equated with all the hard work and rushing around to prepare for such a big feast. Yet, the feast is how we celebrate everything that we have been given. Scripture tells us, “What is it that we have that we have not been given.” The first thanksgiving was celebrated by a group of people fleeing their own country in order to worship God as they were meant to. They suffered a multitude of hardships including losing half their numbers in the transit from England to the New World. Then, once they got here, even more were lost to a bitter winter and to illness. The first thanksgiving was celebrated at a time when these people were finally able to start getting on their feet, and now they are so grateful to God for His delivering them through all the hardships, that they put together the bounty of their harvest.
Our sense of gratitude to Almighty God for bringing us to this point in our lives, at this time in history should overflow into giving of our own bounty to help those less fortunate. ”Thanksgiving” is more than just “giving thanks to God”. It is thanking God for everything we have by giving of what we have to others in need. After all, that is how our King acted, Jesus Christ, by giving Himself, His life on the cross for us.
Second, we often think of New Years as a fresh start, a clean slate to start over again, to leave the past and our past mistakes behind and begin again. Yet, it is the great season of Christmas that is our point of beginning again. Christmas has been misconstrued by our culture as a materialistic frenzy of capitalism run amuck. In fact, in recent years, our culture has tried to rename the holiday and cut Christ right out of the holiday. It has become fashionable to greet people with “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings” because people are afraid of offending. Christmas is the time of year to celebrate birth of the Savior who set us free from our sins, Who gives us all a new, fresh start, if we are willing to accept His gracious gift. It is this incomparable gift of the Father to us in giving His Son that we are meant on the first of the New Year to start living the new life that we have in Christ Jesus.
Let us start today to think differently about the BIG THREE holidays that will be upon us. Let us put Christ in the center of our days. When we do that, then these holidays will truly have meaning for us.
{ 1 comment }
Bravo!!
Happy to read your excellent message.
God Bless!!
Comments on this entry are closed.