Most Reverend Jerome E. Listecki
Archbishop of Milwaukee
 

My father enjoyed watching game shows. I think if he were alive today, one of the TVs would have to be devoted totally to the GSN (Game Show Network). The GSN channel features many of the recent and former game shows. It’s sort of fun to watch old game shows. Many of the celebrities who are on the panel are deceased. But, their wit and insights remain fresh even twenty or more years later. I have also discovered that some of what would have been popular knowledge concerning products or personalities have faded into distant memories.
 
In a TV program called the Match Game, where contestants need to match answers to a question, a specific question was posed as “______Wilson.” I thought immediately of Woodrow Wilson, an American President, but the most popular answer was Flip Wilson, the comedian. I doubt that most people in their forties would even know who Flip Wilson was. It is a reminder that who or what we consider popular today is often merely fleeting popularity or simply a passing fad.
 
Recently, family friends and I were watching a movie that was created in the early sixties. A woman was driving a car down a lonesome road, when suddenly the car ran out of gas. It was establishing a scary moment. Suddenly, my friends’ little daughter stated, “Why doesn’t she just use her cell phone to call for help?” We laughed. Her life experience was never without a cell phone. How many things do we possess today that just didn’t exist two or three decades ago?
 
When something stands the test of time, be it a person, possession or concept, then they have really been embedded into our psyche. Imagine explaining to someone about talk radio – yet, in the mid-sixties talk radio and interactive TVs, not to mention computers, did not exist.
 
Our lives continue to change radically as we are constantly integrating personalities, possessions and concepts into our life experiences and treating them as if they have always existed.
 
This past Sunday was Christ the King Sunday. “Kingship” occupies little attention in our experiences. The concept of king is past history. We cannot possibly know what it means to be a king, to represent in this “person” the people of a country.
 
In Matthew 25, the Lord Jesus is a king who judges His subjects on how they treat the least among them. Being a king, He even goes further to suggest that in treating or not treating those in need, His subjects were responding to or rejecting Him. Jesus places a new twist on this familiar concept. The king, who is set apart and often served by many, is replaced by a king who seeks to serve rather than be served. His kingship is the unity of all in and through His person – and we are His subjects if we LOVE ONE ANOTHER.

Note: This blog originally appeared as the November 28, 2017 "Love One Another" email sent to Catholics throughout the Archdiocese of Milwaukee by Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki. If you are interested in signing up for these email messages, please click here.