Today’s gospel for the Solemnity of Christ the King notes that after the rulers and soldiers sneered and jeered at Jesus, they said “He saved others, let him save himself if he is the chosen one, the Christ of God.” Then just a short time later, one of the criminals hanging beside Jesus reviled him saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us.”
“Save yourself…and us.”
While the rulers, soldiers, and one of the two criminals crucified beside Jesus were maligning him, all were tacitly admitting the truth: No human being can save oneself. Yes, people will try with all their might and money to save themselves from death. But, in the end, all that time, effort, and money is wasted in what’s nothing more than an exercise in futility.
The attempt to evade death is the final in a long series of efforts on the part of people during their lives to avoid pain and suffering in an effort to increase their happiness, perhaps as criminals do by taking from others and making their own what doesn’t belong to them. More frequently, people attempt to avoid pain and suffering in an effort to increase happiness by lying, committing adultery, slandering others through gossip, and the like. Across the millennia, the decision has always been fueled by pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, or sloth. In the end, whatever form it takes, the attempt to evade pain and suffering in an effort to increase happiness through sinful conduct is a crime against God because only God possesses the power to save humanity.
But the criminal being crucified on Jesus’ left knows the jig is finally up. Time has run out and there’s no earthly power that can save this criminal from his fate…only God does. Yet, even in uttering this truth, the criminal also mocks the very one who possesses that power—“Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”
It’s the same for all of us—nothing can save us from our common fate, pain, suffering, and in the final moment when times finally runs out, death. As the 2022 Liturgical Year (the “Year of Grace 2022”) concludes this week, so also our time will run out one day…of which we know the fact but not the date. As Catholics, the question is: “Given this fact, how ought we best live our lives?”
One person offers an answer to that question: Cora Louise Evans.
Growing up in Utah during the early 20th century and raised a Mormon, Evans began her search for true faith on her wedding day. As Cora later recalled the events, without either God or religion but having gained a wonderful husband, “Mack,” Cora found that looking at him was teaching her to love Mack more and more. Resolving to help find a God for Mack, Cora’s search lasted ten years during which the couple begat three children. Both Cora and Mack finally found God in the Roman Catholic Church.
As a Catholic, Cora believed God had entrusted her with a personal vocation: To evangelize others about Jesus’ mystical humanity in “a way of prayer that encourages people to live with a heightened awareness of the indwelling presence of Jesus in their daily lives”—that is, “God is with us.” Over the decades, Cora’s evangelical efforts inspired hundreds of Mormons to convert to the Catholic faith.
During the 2022 Liturgical Year, that’s what we’ve been doing: Reflecting upon the promise of Christmas Eve—“He shall be named ‘Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us’”—and its power to wake “sleepy” Catholics from their slumber and rise from their sleep for the new life that was dawning each day for those who experience pain and suffering and desire happiness. Knowing we don’t possess the power to save ourselves, we’ve turned to Sunday’s readings from scripture to provide the advice and direction we needed concerning how God has saved us. And we found that God did so by sending His only begotten Son to offer divine guidance: The Way and the Truth that leads to Life, as God intended each of us to live it in and from the beginning.
Heeding to this divine guidance by conducting a different weekly memento mori, Jesus’ mystical humanity provided the inspiration we needed to awaken and walk through each day not allowing life’s pesky problems, worries, doubts, and fears to deter us from living our faith authentically. Instead, persisting in our attempts to live as “WOKE” Catholics—especially as Jesus taught in the gospels of the past four weeks through prayer, humility, evangelization, and enduring those temptations—our hope was to read and discern the signs of the times accurately and, thus, to secure our lives in these end times.
Persisting in these efforts to live the Catholic faith more authentically as “WOKE” Catholics, we practiced what Cora Evans wrote as her death neared:
By loaning Jesus my humanity for Him to govern as well as dwell within, would make my life a living prayer for He was life, living life within me, and my body now dead to me was His living cross, His cross to take to Calvary, Calvary, the door to eternal life….To understand, Beloved, the path of my mission would be to say with deepest sincerity, not my will be done, but Thine.
Cora Evans exemplified what it means to live an authentic Catholic faith, not just during this past Liturgical Year but during every generation over the past two millennia. Undoubtedly Evans was a “WOKE” Catholic this past week the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop referred Evans’ cause for sainthood to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
Securing our lives by placing our hope in “God is with us,” God sent us this past Liturgical Year just as God sent His only begotten Son and others like Cora Evans over the millennia to evangelize others—“sleepy” Catholics, in particular—to stem the destructive force of evil present in these end times. Following Jesus’ dictum “do this, in memory of me,” we collaborated with God in constructing the world as God wills it by offering others an experience of “God is with us.” In this way, our lives were an eloquent sign to others that the Kingdom of God is approaching.
Not all folks responded positively to our efforts as we may have hoped, as Cora Evans knew from her evangelical efforts. But, to the sneering, jeering, and maligning, we responded as Jesus did with love, praying for those people “who know not what they are doing. To the offenses, pain, and suffering people inflicted upon us, we again responded as Jesus did by offering them forgiveness from the heart.
With the time for living an authentic Catholic faith in the 2022 Liturgical Year having drawn to its close, it’s time to assess how we responded to God’s grace this past year.
That represents this week’s challenge from scripture: To identify how well we made Jesus’ teaching central to each day by fulfilling his mission, namely, to experience and bring others an experience of “Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”
In today’s epistle, St. Paul offered the Colossians—and he offers us—a metric for conducting this assessment. During the Liturgical Year 2022:
- In what ways did you offer heartfelt thanks to the Father?
- How did you share in the inheritance of the Saints in light?
- Can you identify how God has delivered you from the power of darkness?
- What experiences taught you about life in the kingdom of God’s beloved Son through redemption and the forgiveness of sins?
Using this metric, each of us probably fell short. Yes, when we woke from our slumber and rose from our sleep each new day that dawned, most of us may have had good intentions. But in retrospect, those good intentions didn’t bear much fruit because we rolled over and went back to sleep. In short, we allowed other matters—like seeking to evade pain and suffering and increase happiness—to impede us from conducting a daily memento mori that would focus us upon living as a “WOKE” Catholic.
Cora Evans lived by that standard because she experienced “God is with us.” Making each day a living prayer and a living crucifix by attaching herself to Jesus’ cross—Evans viewed each day as offering the opportunity to follow “the path of my mission I would be able to say with deepest sincerity, not my will be done, but Thine.”
For those of us who have forsaken the opportunity to arise from our slumber and awake from our sleep during the new days that dawned this past Liturgical Year, time has run out and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to reclaim the gift of time God gave us. However, in His merciful love, God is giving us a new Year of Grace—the Liturgical Year 2023—to recommit ourselves and redouble our efforts to experience “Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.”
To “do this, in memory of me” as Jesus taught, our challenge in the new Liturgical Year will be to seek the true God by looking at others, as Cora Evans did, not with human eyes but God’s eyes—the “eyes of the heart” illuminated by love of God and neighbor—and learn to love them more and more each day. God will then lead us along the Way, in the Truth, and to lead the Life God has intended for each of us in and from the beginning during this new Year of Grace.
Then, assuming God graces us with the gift of time, next Solemnity of Christ the King we will “give thanks to the Father who has made us fit to share in the inheritance of the holy ones in light, delivering us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” And when our time finally does run out, as it surely will, Jesus will say to us as he said to the criminal being crucified on his right:
Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.
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