Christmas, for instance, is not a celebration of the birth of baby Jesus. But we easily transmute this event into some kind of exercise in sentimental self-indulgence. Nor is Easter the vague triumph of good over evil, which equally volatilizes the density, the weight, and the genuine meaning of that central Christian feast.

So, today for the feast of Christ the King we have to be really careful of that too; it is not just "Hurrah, Hurrah, one of our boys made it", so that we all have glory by association. Again the feast becomes - and I think this is the root of that tendency to missing the point - another opportunity for self-indulgence. So, I want to spend just a few minutes talking about what Christ the King means.

First of all, it should be clear we are not celebrating some figure out there. We are celebrating, we believe, the life and the death of somebody who is of central significance to us, and transformative of us. To celebrate Christ as King is to celebrate, therefore, the impact of Jesus on us.

As the readings, of course, all make this fairly clear; the heart of the kingship of Christ is expressed in the passion. It is in this dialogue in the gospel of John, between Pilate and Jesus, which is echoed in the other three gospels. It is that inscription, over the cross: Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews, that we need to examine. Why was Jesus therefore executed, under the very title of kingship, however badly the Romans may have misconstrued that? There is something ironically apt in that title over this dead body. And the meaning is to be found in the reasons for his execution. Why was Jesus killed? Because he was a nuisance. Because he was socially disruptive, and by that I mean that Jesus was, as one Protestant theologian has offered to us, the man for everyone. But I would like to amend that very slightly and suggest that the reason that Jesus was killed is that Jesus was the man with everyone.

It is precisely Jesus' absolutely universal companionship that got him into trouble. Such people are dangerous. The wheels of society grind to an abrupt halt when you have somebody who transgresses all the social borders that keep our lives in place, that make our world manageable, that give us a sense of who we are. And yet there he was hobnobbing with women, even menstruating women, which meant that he would become ritually impure. Eating with social outcasts, paying inordinate attention to crippled people; again, people ritually unclean by reason of leprosy, or lameness, or blindness. And doing it, I think we can safely assume, in not some "lord of the manor" fashion where it is Jesus slumming and being a nice guy, so that after this little exercise he could then repair to his inner circle of friends, wash his hands and say, "well, now that that's over for awhile".

The whole business of Jesus' kingship is expressed in his death because, as I said, the social order is not maintainable with such people. And all we have to do is look at figure after figure of our own century. Why was Anwar Saddat assassinated? Why was Itzak Rabin assassinated? Why was Malcolm X assassinated? Why was Bobby Kennedy Assassinated? Why was Martin Luther King assassinated? Why was Mohandas Ghandi assassinated? And, interesting enough, in every one of those instances, they were assassinated by their own kind: a Hindu, a black, a black Muslim, excepting Martin Luther King, - because they simply broke down the walls which separate us from each other.

That is what I mean by saying "this is why Jesus was killed", and this is exactly the essence of the kingship of Jesus. We do not celebrate some royal enthronement. We celebrate this man who has called us all to each other, all of us. Across every, even the most implausible, improbable, borders of gender, colour, race, social status, and level of education. I have a small footnote to add here: one of the most appalling things that has happened to me in the twenty-five years I have been here occurred after the graduation Mass when a young graduate was standing outside the church with her family. She was probably the first college graduate of her family, and one of the people in the family came up and started to embrace her, "Don't touch me" she said. "I'm a college graduate". That is simply an egregious form of something I think that we are all prone to. And it is precisely this, that Jesus stood athwart. And thus there was a kingdom, a kingdom which was all inclusive. And apart from that kingdom there is no king. And so, when we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King it is absolutely essential that we know what we are doing, because too often we have been misled, or chosen to mislead ourselves by some more comfortable, less hazardous reading of these texts and of this life.