Solemnity of Christ the King

Today is the Solemnity of Christ the King. This comes from Fr. Hardon:

The spirituality of St. Paul derives all it’s meaning and finds all its purpose in one dominant mystery of the Christian faith—namely, the person of Christ as the natural Son of God.

After all, what is Christianity except the religion of a human being who was and proved Himself to be the Incarnate God?

It is not so much that Paul knew this, as though his letters somehow serve to confirm what, as Christians, we believe. It is rather that the revelation of Christ’s divinity is found in St. Paul. His fourteen letters are a mosaic of many things, but of nothing more surely and clearly and fundamentally than that Jesus is the Eternal God.

We could almost close our eyes and choose any one of more than a score of passages in Paul’s writings testifying to Christ’s divine nature. In fact, for Paul, Christ is simply the Lord, Kyrios, the same title as he uses for God.

But the classic passage in which the apostle synthesizes all that Christ is and means to mankind occurs in the first chapter of Colossians. It reads like a symphony, which it is, because it contains in six verses all that the Church believes about her Founder.

Says St. Paul of Christ:

He is the image of the unseen God and the first born of all creation, for in Him were created all things in heaven and on earth; everything visible and everything invisible, Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers—all things were created through and for Him.
Before anything was created, He existed, and He holds all things in unity (Col 1:15-17).