Thought for the week - 23 November 2025

Some years ago, sailing into Plymouth harbour, the boom vang on my yacht snapped. Boom Vangs are small things, but of crucial importance if you want the boat to move in the way you wish it to, because it connects the wheel to the sail, via a device known, amusingly, as a ‘tabernacle’. The snap came about fifty metres from the harbour wall, beyond which all was still and calm and the onboard motor would have been quite sufficient, with the sails down, to pootle into the marina and moor up to get the thing repaired. However, those fifty metres were the issue – it was a high wind and the boat could not be steered, the sail was flapping around uncontrollably and I thought I would have to allow it to scupper on the harbour wall, leap out and save myself. Instead, I reached up, caught the boom with my hand while attaching my belt to the wheel, steered with my feet and got to safety, where the boom slowly flapped overhead and banged me on the head, cracking my skull and making me quite dizzy. The Doctor in the hospital later on was fussing around in an irritating fashion, and I just thought ‘it’s not the end of the world’.

“It’s not the end of the world!” Everywhere I’ve been, people say this. For our world to end would be a disaster: it would be the end of everything familiar, everything we know. The trouble is that when suffering comes to us – losing our job, relationship break up, illness, bereavement, being banged on the head by an errant boom – we can indeed feel it’s the end of our world. And in a way we’re right: the old certainties, the old comforts, have gone – perhaps forever, we have no idea if things will return to how they were – but then, they never do, we keep on growing and moving on.

As Christians, we don’t try to explain suffering and change away. We don’t try to pretend either that it’s just not happening or frantically try to avoid it. We see Christ on the Cross, suffering with us, changing with us, the Old Covenant giving way to the New, through this most painful rebirth – the Gospel today is simply a beautiful picture of our own pilgrimage, in which we both suffer, turn to Christ and rise again.

And we see more. In today’s Second Reading, St. Paul, perhaps quoting an early Christian hymn, gives us an essential insight into the cross. Jesus, who is “the Beginning, the first-born from the dead” reconciled “things in heaven and things on earth” on the Cross. Stretched between heaven (the invisible) and earth (the visible), between God and creation, and his arms wide to embrace the whole of time and space, Jesus embraces all that is good and all that is broken. And he makes peace: he makes it new, and He makes it new for us as an act of love, as a King would do, living for his people and caring for them – this is not the feast day of a King we can admire beyond a velvet rope, but a King who is part of us and us Him, there is no divide, just love.

But how does he and therefore we make peace? I suggest Jesus offers us an understanding of suffering which is beginning to be appreciated by modern psychotherapy. Suffering is not good in itself. We should not seek it. But when it comes, we have to go through it – we can’t avoid it. And we will only get through it with the strength that comes from understanding more deeply what is behind our suffering. As Christians, we don’t need to do that on our own. Knowledge and love, bring us a larger view of reality. We start to see things more as they really are. This might bring us to make changes in our lives. An old world might come to an end and a new one start to come into being. “Today you will be with me in paradise,” says Jesus to the good thief, and that ‘today’ is ours to give as well, through Baptism and living authentically our Christian life.

War and climate chaos are major causes of suffering, and I find the flagrant defence of either to be challenging, as though a nation can deserve suffering, and a major cause of that is human sin: exploiting and polluting nature and each other, and manipulating people, rather than tilling the garden and keeping it, as God directed Adam to do . And the brunt is borne by people who live far from us. We have forgotten we are part of creation, not its consumers. Changing our ways, living by the true knowledge of creation which comes from God is to reign from the Cross of creation’s suffering. It is to put to death the old world of power as tyranny and exploitation. It is to understand instead what it means for us to be baptised as priest, prophet and king. A good king is a wise king, one who serves justly in universal love. It may take suffering to open us to receive this insight. And to start to know and love as God knows and loves is for the Resurrection to begin in us.

Christ the King is the feast of the end of a fallen world and its worldly ways. Next Sunday we begin Advent, as we long for the coming of the Risen Lord in glory. We long for the new heaven and new earth. And as we begin to live the Kingship of Christ, we will see that even in the smallest things, heaven begins now.

So cheer up, it’s the end of the World! It only comes once a year.