Everything belongs to Christ-The Christ King (2025-10-26)

Dear faithful,

If you know anything about the situation of the Church in China, you probably know that Catholicism is often accused of being a Western religion with no legitimacy in China. This is a very common criticism in various Asian countries, such as India and Japan. 

Today, however, we celebrate the feast of Christ the King, a feast that signifies that Our Lord Jesus Christ should reign over all societies in the world, in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. And, at the end of the sung Mass, we will even hold a procession to publicly manifest this desire. But the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ has nothing to do with the domination of a foreign power. We need to understand how and why Our Lord reigns, for his kingship is of a special kind, and to do so we must return to the epistle of this Mass: Our Lord reigns because everything was created through him and for him.

In this sermon, to help us understand the meaning of Our Lord's kingship, I want to comment on St. Paul's expression: everything was created through and for Christ.

I/ Through him.

It is important to understand the term “through him,” because the Christians of Colossae misunderstood this term, which is why St. Paul wrote this epistle to them. What does it mean that everything was created through Christ? A distinction must be made between two terms: the primary cause and secondary causes. The primary cause of all reality is unique, and that is God, but this does not mean that God always intervenes directly in his creation. No, there are laws in nature, established by God. God is behind these laws; he is their creator, but it is the action of these laws that we see. Except in cases of miracles, we do not see God's action directly. 

But there are also secondary causes. In his work of creation, God makes men and angels secondary causes of his creation. For example, in the case of human procreation, God collaborates with man and woman to create a new living being. In the work of generating a new human being, the soul of the little child is created directly by God, but the body of that child is created through the parents.

God also works with angels. Angels were involved in the creation of the world and are still involved in its governance. These purely spiritual beings act on our behalf. We know from the most recent discoveries in quantum physics that behind physical realities lie mathematical realities of prodigious abstraction and complexity, and angels are precisely those superior spirits who deal with these abstract realities. Angels intervene in creation, but as superior creatures delegated by God.

God is therefore the sole first cause of the world, but he delegates his power to a multitude of secondary causes, men and especially angels, through whom creation takes place.

The error of the Colossians was to place the action of these angels in creation, which is at the level of the secondary cause, on the same level as the action of Christ in creation. They made Christ a kind of super-angel. So St. Paul sets the record straight: Christ is not a creature, not even the first of all creatures, he is the eternal Son of God: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (v. 16). This Son is God from all eternity: “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him” (v. 19). 

When St. Paul affirms that everything was created by Christ, he is referring to an action at the level of the first cause, unlike men and angels who collaborate in God's creation. Our Lord Jesus Christ is God, the eternal only Son of God, and he created everything in communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is at the origin of all creation. Before their action, there was nothing. Angels, like men, are only creatures who intervene in this process of creation as God's collaborators, but their action is not at all on the same level.

II/ Everything belongs to Christ

If, therefore, everything was created through Christ who is God, then everything belongs to him, everything comes from him. It is for this precise reason that Our Lord Jesus Christ is king: he is king because he is the creator. He is not king in the manner of Pilate, who speaks in this Sunday's Gospel. Pilate is king because he dominates, because he has the military power of the Romans at his disposal. But the same is not true of Our Lord: he is king because everything was created by him. Everything already belongs to him because everything was created through him, all countries, all nations, all cultures, all people, everything belongs to Our Lord Jesus Christ, nothing is foreign to him because everything comes from him.

This is what it means to become a Christian: recognizing that we have always belonged to Christ. It is therefore a natural movement, a return to the one in whom we were all created and through whom everything was created. This responds to the criticisms I mentioned in the introduction, which present Christianity as a Western religion. Christianity is not a Western religion but the religion of all people, for it is the religion of Christ, through whom all people were created. We have a very beautiful example of this in the history of the Church in Korea. You know better than I that the Catholic faith entered Korea through the Koreans themselves. Yi Pyok and his friends, who were traveling to Beijing for the annual tribute payment, had the opportunity to read Catholic writings in classical Chinese. They discussed them at length and discovered that this was the truth, for it is the religion of the one by whom they were created. Not the truth of Europeans, but the truth of all people.

This is why every man must become Catholic, this is why Our Lord must reign over societies. This is why Our Lord's kingship is a gentle and non-violent kingship, as stated in the opening prayer of this Mass, which describes Our Lord's kingship as a “sweet yoke.” This is why it is good to have a procession for Christ the King. By doing so, we are not imposing anything, but we are showing men to whom they already belong by creation, who is their legitimate leader.

III/ For him

 But St. Paul adds a preposition: through him but also for him. And therein lies the problem and the difficulty. As St. Augustine says: “God who created you without you, will not save you without you.”  All men were created through Christ and in Christ; this is a fact, whether we accept it or not, it is reality. But everything was also created for Christ, which means that all free creatures, men and angels, must submit to him voluntarily; they must accept the “sweet yoke” of Our Lord. And this has been very difficult since the beginning: some of the angels, led by Satan, rejected God, and then when the Son of God came among men by becoming flesh, he was rejected by a large part of his people: “He came to his own, and his own did not receive him” (Jn 1:11). Indeed, the Jewish people, for the most part, did not accept the kingship of Our Lord and preferred that of Pilate. But they are not the only ones. How can we fail to mention the great betrayal of the formerly Catholic nations of Europe which, since the French Revolution, have rejected the dominion of Our Lord by building societies based on the rejection of God?

“Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (Jn 18:37), says this Sunday's Gospel. This means that some people do not listen to his voice because they prefer to live in falsehood.  Our Lord is the legitimate king of the world, but he is a king whose rule is, unfortunately, often rejected.

This is also true for us: if we believe that we were created through him, then we must accept to live for him. Do we truly live for Our Lord Jesus Christ? Is he the guiding force behind each of our actions? This is what it means, in concrete terms, to recognize him as our king.

Dear faithful, “all things were created through him and for him.” With these few words, St. Paul expresses the mystery of Christ the King. Christ is truly the one from whom we come, and therefore he is our natural leader and that of all men. But he asks us to accept his sweet yoke with joy; we must live for him. Do we fully accept that Our Lord Jesus Christ is our king in all aspects of our existence: our social life, our family life, and also our political choices?

fr. Yvon Fillebeen