I think there were a couple of Sundays, when we were together at this last Mass when I told you about Cara. Cara was a young woman who had just had massive and painful breast surgery. And, a couple of days after surgery, she was sitting up in bed in the hospital. And, as I walked in to say hello, she looked directly at me and she said, "Thank God that we have a God of flesh and blood and bone and feelings." And, I couldn't think of anything else to say. I said, "Amen... Amen."

But you know what she meant. She meant, thank God we don't have a God that's a philosopher, some cosmic force, some surging energy that created the universe.... Ho-hum. Who cares? Thank God, in pain, that we have a God Who knows how it feels. That's what she meant. Now, I said "Amen" because I couldn't think of anything else, but, when we read the word "Amen" in the New Testament, it means many different things.... the word "Amen." In the Gospel today, (which is one of the most beautiful passages in the entire Bible, the Good Thief hanging there, talking to Our Lord) Our Lord turns, in His great pain, to the thief over here and He says, "Amen, I say to you..." ("Amen" there means "Now here this..... Pay attention!" And when we say it at the end of a prayer, for example, it means, "We agree. It's cool. Yes. We agree. Fine.")

And that's our acronym for this afternoon, for the feast of Christ the King.... three men on a cross. Our acronym is "AMEN .... A...M...E...N." A, anguish. M, mystery. E, endurance. And N, now.

Christ the King in ANGUISH.... You don't need me to talk to you about anguish, angst, anxiety. I am always quoting this man because I love his works so much, C. S. Lewis, who became a convert to Christ, a believer, in middle age, a professor at Oxford, first-rate brain, who discovered later on he also had a heart. But he wrote once, he said, "Christ speaks to us in our serenity in a whisper. Christ speaks to us in our conscience, and he talks to us. But in our suffering, Christ SHOUTS! And it doesn't mean, Christ shouts in anger. Christ shouts in our anguish, "Decide! You're in such pain now, you can't be complacent. You really have to decide. Either toss Me away, (and some people do); either toss Me away or trust Me today.... Decide, in this anguish." That's what C. S. Lewis meant, that when we are suffering God is kind of shouting at us.

It's such a great, great powerful gospel. Only St. Luke, of the four gospel-writers, gives us this entire scene. And the other criminal is blasheming Jesus, tossing Him away. But this man is hanging there, and he sees they are calling Him a king. And the sign, of course, as you know, is very sarcastic, the sign over Our Lord's head, "Take a look at the King of the Jews." And the people are mocking Jesus, "You're a king!" But this criminal sees Our Lord the way Our Lord is, and there is such dignity and such strength in Christ that this thief, who is in the same pain and anguish, says, "Listen, when you come into whatever kind of a kingdom you've got, think of me." Now, he's a Jew, the criminal, and a Jew knows that a king can do two things. A king can pardon, and some crimes only a king can pardon, and a king can give you great privilege. And this dying, naked, suffocating, bleeding man is some kind of a king. And the criminal is smart, and he makes a decision in anguish and he asks for the pardon, and he asks for the privilege of Paradise and he gets it!

The next is MYSTERY. And that's a word we can get awfully sick of as Catholics, (...Another mystery!) especially we Americans, who want answers, clean, concise, clear, quick answers. Mystery.... mystery! I also told you about (And I keep talking about..) this great course I took at Menlo Park in 1992. And, after all the years of teaching English, I finally rediscovered the Bible. Weird thing for a priest to say, but it's true! And one of our professors, great Catholic scholar about the Bible, was Father Raymond Brown. What a great teacher he was! I took down every word he said. And when he got to this gospel (Father Brown died a couple of years ago.) he said, "This is the masterpiece of St. Luke's gospel," (Only St. Luke, of the four writers, gives you the whole story.) "because it sums up so perfectly all of Christ's message. I love you with your doubts and your fears and your pain. I love you. I pardon you if you ask for pardon. I will take you with Me to Paradise."

Do any of you remember Bishop Fulton J. Sheen? Any geriatrics, rockettes among us? He was a top TV star for about four years, many years ago. He was, number one! The entire country watched Bishop Sheen on TV, not just Catholics. He was very smart, but he was also very ham-my, with which I identify. I remember when he got to this gospel, on TV, it was just he in his cassock, monsignor robe, and a blackboard. When he got to this gospel about the good thief, the criminal he is called in the gospel today, he said something like this, "And the Good Thief remained a thief until the very end of his life because as a thief, talking to Jesus, he stole..." (Camera closes in....) "He stole and robbed..." (Camera gets to the close-up....) "He stole Heaven!" I thought, "WOW!" Yes, he stole Heaven. He was the only saint canonized before he died. Great mystery, the mystery of God's grace reaching some criminal hanging there who at that moment is touched by grace.

A girl who recently became a Catholic, senior in college, studied her way into the faith, (It wasn't just feeling!) Smith College on the East coast, came back to her room after her baptism, the Monday after. And her roommate said, "Oh, so you're a Catholic now..." And the young woman said, "Yes!" And the other girl said, "Oh, you Catholics with your crutch and your brainwashing, with Jesus and Heaven and...." Now the young lady sat down, (They didn't have a fight.) the girl who had just become a Catholic, and said, "Yeah-h-h. I'm crippled...a lot, emotionally and spiritually. I'm glad I finally got a crutch. And as far as being brain-washed, my brain needs cleaning, regularly." She didn't fight the indictment. She embraced it. How many of you have been subjected to that kind of dismissal, maybe more subtly, of your faith, of mystery? Don't run away from it. It's one of our glories.

And the third (We are half way through.), Christ the King and ENDURANCE. Endure... endure... Our Lord said that: "He who perseveres, endures until the end, will be saved." I heard that quote I think, a few months ago, sitting right over there, and I thought, "Yeah. OK. Endurance. Right to the end. Jesus, You got off at 33. I'm 67, and there are people even older than I around. How long are we expected to endure?".... To the end, to the end.

There was an article in the New York Times, a few weeks back, about endurance and anguish and suffering and so forth. A book was written by a professor of the Yale Divinity School, a Yale University professor, a priest. And the name of the book is about all the stuff we are talking about, "Horrendous Evils and The Goodness of God." I couldn't resist the title. Since 1958, I have grabbed every book I could find on suffering and why God permits it, that gives us some answers. That's not bragging. That's a statistic of morbid neurosis. Every book I could find! And, according to this article, after years of research, all the philosophers, the Latin and the Greek philosophers, and all the great Christian theologians and Catholic writers, at the end of this exhaustive study of all the answers that have been tried to be given, the author evidently says that the best way to endure is, if you can, if you can, to look around and see someone who may be enduring worse pain than you and reach out and help. And I frankly must tell you that, after I read that, I thought, "That's it??" Yeah. That's it. It's the message of the Gospel. Christ is hanging there in agony and the good thief is hanging there in agony and Jesus turns and He lifts him up.

I want to recommend one book. Give it to yourself for Christmas. You can get it in paperback and you can read it in about one hour. It's about endurance and all this other material. It was written, once more, by C.S. Lewis, a middle-aged convert to Christ at Oxford. And he has a shelf of books that he wrote from his great academic heights and his super-brain about faith and Christ and it's true and it's real. And then he fell in love, in late middle age, with a woman named "Joy." In fact, he wrote a book called "Surprised by Joy." She was a Jewish lady, and very spiritual, and in late middle-age he fell in love and they got married. And he writes, "For the first time in my life, I experienced sexual, emotional and spiritual ecstacy and love with Joy." And then she gets cancer and she dies. They made it into a film, called "Shadowlands." It's a beautiful film, but the film ends too quickly because, after she dies, C.S. Lewis, with a shelf of books behind him all about God exists, sits down and he writes a diary all about how he feels, not cerebrally but viscerally. Now I know I am given to melodrama, but when I read this book, my hand was shaking because he's spitting spiritual blood on every page. It's not just philosophical argument, he's in great pain. And the name of the book is... (It has a beautiful ending!).... But the name of the book is "A Grief Observed." It's very British, isn't it? Observed... But the book is visceral and powerful, about enduring.

And finally, we get to NOW, Christ the King and now. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Russian novelist, who was kind of a Christian in name only, was a student radical during the Czar's reign in Russia. He was mad at the Czar, and the Czar had had him and several other students from college arrested, brought to a concentration camp, and they were about to be shot. (Now I am not making this dramatic. This actually happened!) And Dostoyevsky is standing there with these other college kids. He is going to be shot! And he tells you that he looked at his hand and his only thought was "I won't ever see this hand, ever again, the fingers or the nails. It's the last time I shall look upon these things." In other words, some of you may identify, in a moment of terrible crisis, he had kind of this inane distraction. And then he tells us that he felt the power of Christ. There is no other way to put it. And Christ saying, "Decide. All of your life you have been complacent. You know Christ and the Scripture and the Bible and the stories and His teachings and the sacraments.... Decide now! Decide now". And Dostoyevsky decided, of course, for Christ. And it's dramatic, without my exaggerating, that that moment later, a man rushed in on a horse with a pardon from the Czar. But Dostoyevsky went home and he wrote "Crime and Punishment" and he wrote "The Brothers Karamazov," deeply drenched-in-Christ novels, great exciting novels. And all through it he says, "Now! Now, the power of Christ! Now, the grace of Christ! Now! Now!

Now....it is.... 12:47. And many of you are saying, "We know it is 12:47." And maybe right now, and perhaps for the past several minutes, some of you human beings have been thinking, "Let's see... turkey burgers or turkey hash for lunch?" And in one of the great letters Dostoyevsky wrote to his wife, he said, "Christ the Ruler King, He doesn't mind that we are peasants and serfs. And peasants and serfs, even when they see the King walk by, can be distracted. And Christ doesn't mind at all."

NOW, at the end of his talk on the gospel that we just heard, Father Raymond Brown said that, in the two thieves, we see, for most human beings, the two stages that we go through when we are suffering, in anguish. The first stage is that guy over there, blaspheming and angry, just rage. But, over here, taking a little time and just looking at this Christ the King, taking a little time and saying, "Hey, you must be a king of some kind. And that sign over your head says you're a king and whatever kingdom they are babbling about, when you get there, would you remember me?" And Our Lord, in His agony says, "Yes. This day you will be with me in Paradise." Like Cara O'Neil, sitting up in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, after surgery, saying, "I'm glad we've got a God with flesh and blood and bones and feelings." And all of us, at some time, can say "Amen. Amen. Amen."