With the celebration of Christ the King, we as Catholics celebrate the shape of Christ’s heart, and the good news that the kingdom of God is meant to include everyone. Everyone is meant to flourish in God’s abundant creation.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus spells out the criteria by which God will determine if we truly see the shape of God’s heart. Jesus says,

For I was hungry and you gave me food,
I was thirsty and you gave me drink,
a stranger and you welcomed me,
naked and you clothed me,
ill and you cared for me,
in prison and you visited me.’

And when we ask when did we do these things for you? Christ the King will answer:

'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did
for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

When I was a young girl growing up in my Cuban American family, I remember hearing about el reino de Dios. The kingdom of God. And I was taught that el reino de Dios meant looking out for the least, the lost, and the vulnerable. We are each called by God to construct the Beloved Community to look like the shape of God’s heart. Every other false authority that doesn’t prioritize how we treat the least, the most vulnerable, and the stranger will fall apart and crumble by the weight of its own untruth.

Jesuit Fr. Greg Boyle says, “Kinship is God’s dream come true. It’s about imagining a circle of compassion and then imagining no one standing outside that circle.”

I believe children are born knowing the shape of God’s heart. A sense of justice is innate in young ones.

Years ago, I remember walking with my large family into a Cuban diner with anticipation of the smell of spices like onion, garlic, cumin and oregano mixed into picadillo or vaca frita or arroz con pollo. As we were heading into the diner, my six-year-old niece noticed two people who were homeless sitting at the corner of the street looking sad. She saw them and asked her Mom why they were sitting there. We tried to explain to her that some people are homeless and sit outside if they have nowhere to go. She stared at us in disbelief, and then we walked in and settled into our seats and enjoyed our Cuban dinner. But my niece, who knew about take-out containers, asked the waitress for a couple of them and as we were eating, started going from person to person, asking, can you give me some of your yuca? Can I have a piece of your chicken? Can you donate any of your bread? And when we asked Cristina what she was doing, she replied that she was going to give some of our family’s food to the two people sitting outside without anything to eat. Her dad went outside with her and with great joy, she gave the gift of food to the strangers in her midst – people she saw as her neighbors who belonged to her extended family.

I have to admit, I had forgotten about them. But my niece had not. She remembered and felt the shape of God’s heart and decided to take whatever action she could as a young person to make el reino de Dios a little more real that day.

A friend of mine recently told me, whatever you do with love has eternal value. And what my niece did that day still resonates in my heart twenty years later.

We live at a time in the United States in which income inequality has grown tremendously. There are more homeless people sitting outside hungry and thirsty without anything to eat or drink. There are more strangers who have been rejected, more children separated from their parents. There are many more people vulnerable to this pandemic, struck by illness or death.

As Catholics, what we believe to be the shape of the heart of Christ the King, determines how we respond and the kinds of communities we construct. And if in our communities we have laws that treat the lives of the hungry, the poor, the sick, the stranger, and the imprisoned unjustly, then it is up to us to take courageous stands and change those laws. The kinship community is constructed when we allow ourselves to be guided by eyes and the heart of the Good Shepherd who sees each one of us and loves each one of us.

God has no hands or feet but ours, so when we work together with people different from us, to make good laws and good policies happen, we are helping to build a reino de Dios, that place where we all belong to one another, no one left outside our circle of concern. We put our faith into action --- because that’s where the joy is.

Because it turns out that God is like a little girl who catches a glimpse of someone without food and collects some of her family’s food to share with her neighbor.