The solemnity of Christ the King marks the end of the liturgical year. For this reason, the Church has chosen the passage about the final judgment as the gospel of the day. This gospel makes it clear that God is the father of all men and women, not of Christians and Jews only. God is the father of all Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians and even agnostics and atheists. One more detail that we should meditate on for its crucial role in our salvation is that those who were to inherit the kingdom of God were the ones who had ministered to the needy. They were getting into heaven because they showed compassion toward the most vulnerable, not because of their piety, or their devotions, or their knowledge of the Scriptures, or their many prayers, or their religious scrupulosity, not because they were practicing Jews. They were getting into heaven just because they were kind and out of kindness and love they had fed the hungry, clothed the naked, helped the sick and the imprisoned and welcomed strangers.
You may wonder what is then the point of prayers and devotions? Aren’t they supposed to help us get into heaven? The answer is yes, as long as you do them correctly. And how to know if you are praying properly? If you see Christ in every person, if you see Christ in immigrants, the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, the homeless, the hungry then you are praying correctly and your spiritual maturity will lead you to minister to those in need. Now, if you pray a lot but you still, for instance, regard immigrants and refugees as “the problem” or as “others” and “enemies” then you’re not praying properly. You can spend the whole day in prayer but if after that you still think that prisoners are behind bars because they are bad people and that you are free because you are a good person, you just wasted your time because you didn’t pray properly. Are you overwhelmingly concerned over the restrictions on religious gatherings due to the pandemic but you’re not concerned at all about the homeless especially now during the cold winter? If so, you have a very serious problem and I urge you to seek help ASAP. Faith without good deeds is fruitless according to the Letter of Saint James (Cf. Jam. 2:18) True prayer leads to spiritual growth and maturity and spiritual maturity leads to love and love leads to action, kindness, mercy, and service to others.
Saint John of the Cross who is well known for his deep spirituality and mysticism, and for his poem entitled “The dark night of the soul” came to the conclusion that “in the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.” His conclusion became a maxim right away. He nailed it. At the end of the day what matters is how much we have loved, how many times we got out of our comfort zone to help others, how we viewed and treated others; it doesn’t matter how many masses we have attended, it doesn’t matter if those masses were in Latin or English or any other language, it doesn’t matter if you received communion in the hand or on the tongue, it doesn’t matter how many rosaries and novenas you prayed, it doesn’t matter how much time you fasted; all that matters is how much you loved.
May almighty God kindle in us the fire of his love.