Two years ago, on Election Day, my friend’s son, who was 12 years old at the time, asked me if I had voted.  I told him that I had, but then I went on to make a statement that shocked and confounded him a bit.  I told him that he should always remember that democracy, while a good thing, was not the natural order of the universe.  The natural order of the universe is monarchy.

 “Monarchy?” he asked.

“Yes, monarchy, a king,” I replied.

 “But a king will kill us,” he said, somewhat outraged at the idea.

 Of course, he was thinking in human terms, conditioned by all that he heard and learned in school and in society about the evils that kings have inflicted on their people.  And, indeed, in human terms, he was right.  The history of monarchy as practiced by human beings is, by and large, a story of exploitation and victimization of the weak by the strong.  The number of truly good, truly humble, truly royal human kings, concerned above all with fulfilling their responsibility to their people, can probably be counted on ten fingers.

 “Remember, you have a king,” I told my friend’s son.  “Jesus Christ is your king.  And you owe Him your loyalty before anyone or anything else.”

 My brothers and sisters in the Lord, today (the last Sunday in Ordinary Time) we acknowledge and celebrate our King: the Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.

Our King presents us with a very different model of kingship than what we find when we look at the example of human kingship.

For Jesus did not become King by fighting battles or by exploiting or crushing competitors around Him.

He became King through humility, through love, through service, and through sacrifice.

We see that in the encounter between Jesus and Pilate in today’s gospel reading.  Jesus could well have commanded all the angels to come to His aid and crush Pilate, the Romans, and all His enemies.  He could have exercised His kingship through force, in other words.

Instead, He allows Himself to be handed over to Pilate and to suffer under him.  Why?  Because His kingdom is the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of love.  And love cannot be won by force.  Love must be freely chosen.

Christ offers Himself to the Beloved, that is to each one of us, and leaves us free to make our choice to love Him in return.

He does that in a myriad of different ways, but here in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, He does so in a special way.  Here, in the Mass, Christ invites us into His own sacrifice.  He makes us a part of it.  He joins us to it.

When we accept that and open ourselves to that, we become adherents of the truth.  And we are made “into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father….”

Each of us is then able to join the sacrifice of his or her own life, with all of its joys, sorrows, struggles, and sufferings to that of Christ.  Our whole lives become those spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God the Father.  We find true meaning and true purpose for our lives.  And we find eternal life.

How are we to respond to all of this?

First, with a spirit of gratitude.  St. Ignatius Loyola calls ingratitude the fundamental sin.  We must cultivate a sense of gratitude.  The fundamental way of doing that is to take time to reflect on our lives.  To sit quietly, in prayer, and see how God has led us to where we are and been with us the whole way.

Second, we have to be willing to share.  Gratitude leads to the recognition and experience of God’s love in our lives.  Love does not collapse in on itself.  Loves reaches out; it seeks to share; it offers itself.  Love looks to serve.  It wants others to experience the same gift of God.

The most basic answer to the question of why did I become a priest is that I know God loves me.

You are all a kingdom of priests, and I hope and pray that each of you knows that God loves you.