Year C
Luke 23: 33-43
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The True King
A priest sitting with a group of children at the front of the church doing a children’s talk on Christ the King Sunday says, “Okay, children,” “we have been learning in recent weeks about how powerful kings and queens were in biblical times. But there is a higher power. “Who can tell me what it is?” A boy sitting right at the front looks up and says, “That’s easy. It’s aces.” Not quite the answer the priest was looking for but understandable. We, in America, don’t think much in terms of kings and kingdoms. We don’t do royalty here; we are a republic. Of course, lately with Queen Elizabeth’s death and the changing of England’s leadership to King Charles, we have had the opportunity to hear and think more about what it means to live under the citizenship of a king or queen.
In this country, we may not live under the authority and power of a human king or queen but as Christ followers we do live under the authority of a king; a divine king with a very different kind of power and authority. On this Christ the King Sunday we celebrate Jesus as our king. We celebrate the reign of Jesus as the ruler of all. Who unlike the worldly rulers, did not come to control but to save and to bring peace. Yet, when this feast day was first instituted on December 11, 1925 by Pope Pius XI, it was anything but a peaceful time in Europe. Originally set for the last Sunday in October just before All Saint’s Day, it was moved in 1970 to the end of the church year on this last Sunday of Pentecost. On this last Sunday of the church year, we remember how seriously King Jesus took his duties and responsibilities.
Luke, along with the other gospel writers, tell us that this king did not come to sit on a throne but to hang on a cross. 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 welcomed a criminal into his kingdom while dying beside him. Jesus is not a far removed king on high, but one who humbly bends himself into our brokenness so that we might be saved; a king who displays his kingship in his service to others and in his death on a cross. In this servanthood and life-giving love, Christ reigns. His kingdom was and is a true and life giving alternative to that of the kingdoms of this world.
John Dominic Crossan, in his book God and empire, lays out a striking comparison between the empire offered by Caesar and the Kingdom offered by Jesus. It took tremendous courage for Jesus to proclaim this alternative empire to that of Caesar and he paid the price for making it. Caesar’s empire was based on power that was exercised through violence and a false peace built of repression, suppression, oppression and cruelty. The Romans worshiped emperors whose power came through their ability to crush any alternative form of rule. Peace was an illusion, merely a time of quiet created by the power of legions to punish and quiet all dissenting voices.
But Jesus’ kingdom was built on love and kindness, whose goal was justice and whose end was true peace. The first are last and last are first, the privileged and powerful are brought low, and the weak and powerless are raised up. Those who are blind are made to see, and those who see, don’t. The guilty are forgiven, and the lonely are embraced. This is the alternative kingdom that Jesus offers for those who would accept and follow him—not as a president or elected leader, but as Lord. Jeremiah, generations earlier prophesied about a godly ruler who would bring salvation and peace to God’s people. Jeremiah, like Pope Pius XI lived in a time when things were going from bad to worse.
War and devastation were on their way, and many of Jeremiah’s prophecies warn of the destruction of Jerusalem, the temple and the scattering of the Jewish people in Babylonian exile, all of which occurred in his lifetime. But in the midst of proclaiming dire prophecies, Jeremiah hears God promise eventual restoration, and it is from one of these post- exile oracles that today’s lesson comes from. Jeremiah pictures a people whose leadership has left them fragmented pulling in different directions. The people are scattered and have lost any sense of who they are. They no longer remember that they are God’s people and that they belong together in community.
For this, Jeremiah blames the leaders, who should have shepherded their people, but instead have allowed them to get scattered and lost. Their punishment is to suffer the same fate that they have allowed to come upon God’s people. They will be scattered and lost, and their power taken away. In their place, God will raise up faithful shepherds and then at last the people will be ready for the coming of the Messiah because now they will recognize the true King’s reign of justice, righteousness, and peace. The Colossian’s have taken the next step as implied at the end of the reading from Jeremiah. They have made the connection between their shepherd and God.
They have come to see that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation”, “the head of the body, the church”, and in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” These verses today in Paul’s letter to the Colossians are his prayer for the community and thanksgiving for their salvation in Christ: a hymn that emphasizes Christ’s divinity and his kingship. Christ is the One who holds all of existence together. To proclaim Christ as King is to acknowledge his lordship over all of life, all of creation. In everything Christ is to come first. The power of the hymn is that if we believe in the Jesus of the hymn, then we are never alone. God is always with us and we can have confidence that this is true because Jesus is the full reflection of God’s own loving and forgiving Kingship.
Remember Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” We can give our lives totally to Christ because at the end of our lives, we are promised that our King will be waiting for us. Ready to bring us into a kingdom where we will know true peace and wholeness, a state where things will be as the shepherd God envisioned them before time began. Until that day comes, we are to live in the ways of Christ our King. The ways of Christ’s kingship are humble, gracious, loving, self-giving, merciful and welcoming. Jesus took his duties and responsibilities as our king seriously. As we enter this new Christian year, will we take ours seriously? Will we follow in the ways of this king who showed his authority by dying on a cross? If so, then we, like the criminal will hear Jesus say to us, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”