Year C
Luke 23: 35-43
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The King We Follow
Today on this last Sunday of Pentecost, we stand ready to enter a new season, Advent and a new church year. We celebrate this “other” new year’s eve not with champagne but by honoring Jesus Christ as King. We decorate the church with white and gold and sing hymns that crown Jesus with many crowns. Yet, on this “Christ the King Sunday,” to proclaim this Jesus as king of heaven and earth is to proclaim a very different kind of king. The power of this Kings reign is marked not by the world’s idea of power or with pride but by humility and love. The majesty of this king is revealed, not when we look up, but when we look down.
Jesus’ kind of kingship is in fact servanthood: he bends to wash the filthy feet of his followers, rises to serve at the table so that others might eat, heals sickness, and casts out demons, raises up the lame, and gives sight to blindness—all for the sake of the abundant life he came to bring. This king treated the outcast and poor as part of his royal family and invited the lame, the lost and the least to his banquet table. This king did not come to sit on a throne but to hang on a cross and welcomed a criminal into his kingdom while dying beside him.
All the themes we have heard all year long in Luke’s gospel now come before us today for a last time for in this new year we will read mostly from Matthew’s gospel. Today’s reading is not the last scene in Luke’s gospel, for that belongs to Easter and to the resurrection appearances in the days after Easter. On this Christ the King Sunday, we visit again Luke’s version of the story of the crucifixion of Jesus because it is in the cross that we find the truth of Jesus’ identity. And it is only here in all the New Testament that we find this story of the two thieves crucified with Jesus. Jesus’ last words to another human being before his death and resurrection were words of forgiveness to the outcast, to the marginal, and to those where it is not expected. This is the king we follow.
Even on the cross as he is suffering and dying, he is still preaching release to the captive just as he proclaimed in his first sermon in Nazareth. Jesus spent his life preaching and teaching about the liberating and healing kingdom of God. His ministry had been controversial, powerful, and world altering to the point that those whom he threatened, condemned him to death by crucifixion. When we look at our world today, it seems we can be more like the thieves who hung next to Jesus than we are like Jesus. Caesar’s empire is still very much alive today and viable in our world.
In his book God and Empire, John Dominic Crossan lays out a striking comparison between the Empire Kingdom offered by Caesar and the Kingdom Empire offered by Jesus. Caesar’s empire was based on power that was exercised through violence, repression, oppression and cruelty. Peace was an illusion, merely a time of quiet created by the power of the legions to punish and quiet all dissenting voices. The kingdom offered by Jesus was a kingdom built on love and kindness, whose goal was justice and whose end was shalom—true peace. In this kingdom the first are last and the last are first.
This is the alternative kingdom that Jesus offers for those who would accept and follow him—not as elected leader, as president, but as Lord. We don’t know what happened to the thief who hung next to Jesus’ cross and who asked Jesus to “Remember him when he came into his kingdom,” but we can be sure of the truth that he is with Jesus in Paradise. Not a word here about it being too late. Not a word exploring whether his confession is sincere. Another prodigal has come home, and the dying Jesus welcomes him and promises him eternity, even as the waiting father rushed out to welcome his erring son.
In this exchange, the repentant thief becomes the only person in the whole crowd, except for a few of Jesus’ followers and his mother, to comprehend and to confess that Jesus, though he seems to be dying and a rejected failure, is in fact the true and righteous king. This Jesus, who died for outcasts and executioners, for men and for women, for Jews and for Gentiles, for the righteous and the prodigal, forgives a repentant thief to show us God welcomes all God’s children. This kind of forgiveness is challenging for many of us to understand. Part of our inability to believe and trust the forgiving power of God’s grace and mercy is we want to limit that forgiveness. How can God forgive me a sinner and we would prefer God didn’t love those other people.
And if we only look at the surface, we might cast our lot with Caesar, Herod, Pilate and the religious leaders or watch silently with the crowd. Yet, thank God as Paul tells us in his letter to the Colossians “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” All have sinned and fallen short; but God so loved the entire world that whosoever, whosoever, believes shall get the grace that God has to give. Jesus comes as a servant who gives himself away on a cross so that we might be saved. So those who are powerless, lowest, and lost might be lifted up as heirs of his kingdom.
The gospel of Luke has taught us the true marks of the king who comes in the name of the Lord. He is the child of peace, at whose birth the angels sing. He is the friend of sinners and outcasts and at the cross Jesus showed us that there is sufficient grace for all people regardless of who we are. And if we vow to follow this Christ as our King, we also vow to live in the ways of his kingship. This means we do not need to seek power for ourselves but seek to empower those around us. This means that the greatest power we have is to give ourselves to the service of our neighbors in need. Not forcing or oppressing others to be like us, but instead through love and graciousness, invite others to share in the mercy and compassion of God.
To be able to do all these things means we have to accept him as a king who rules from a cross and redefines kingship. There was no way that Pilate could know who Jesus really was and he never really believed that Jesus had done anything worthy of crucifixion. He only gave in to the demands of the religious leaders to keep the peace, yet he was crowing the King of kings and carrying out the strangest coronation that the world has ever witnessed. The cross as we know did not have the final word because in rising from death, this king reigns victorious over the powers of sin and death. His victory is not about power and domination but about love. Because of the resurrection Paul can proclaim, “I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, nor angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.”
That’s the Christ whom we follow and celebrate today-the Christ who was crowned King on the cross. And we pray with even greater confidence than the penitent thief, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” because we know how the story of Jesus’ crucifixion turned out. With the crown still on his head, the risen Lord is forever Christ the King.