A Sermon for the Christ the King / 34th Sun. in Ordinary Time, Yr C
- Jeremiah 23:1-6--Coming of the shepherd and righteous Branch who will execute justice
- Luke 23:33-43--Jesus is crucified between two thieves: you will be with me in paradise
By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois
November 25, 2007
I hope that I am not the only one here who has figured out that today is filled with more than just a little irony. Irony—something unexpected or, more precisely, something exactly opposite what we expect. First of all, the turkeys have been eaten and the stores have been filled with their “Black Friday” shoppers, and yet it is not Advent yet. Only those few years when Thanksgiving is not the last Thursday in November does this happen. Rather, instead of being the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new year in the church’s calendar, we are today at the culmination the year, Christ the King Sunday. Each year we journey through Jesus Christ’s birth, his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, and here at the end of it all, we celebrate that Christ reigns with God over all creation. As the cycle begins anew next Sunday, we will remember our longings for Christ to come again as we move toward remembering his first coming at Christmas.
The fact that today is Christ the King, or Reign of Christ, Sunday instead of the beginning of Advent is really only a little piece of today’s irony, though. It strikes me as far more unexpected that on a day titled Christ the King, we would find ourselves amongst the crowds at the place called The Skull, standing at the foot of the cross. I don’t think we’ll find too many royal history books that will commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s reign by picturing her on her deathbed. So I think this image of Christ the King as the tortured and almost dead Jesus hanging between criminals on the instrument of the Empire’s oppression is rather ironic, to say the least.
But, of course, hearing the story of the crucifixion today is not the only irony. The crucifixion itself is ironic. It is foolishness and a stumbling block wrote the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthian church. The leader of the movement just isn’t supposed to get killed. And more, even, the body hanging on that cross is the one we believe and proclaim to be God in the flesh, and what kind of God goes through that whole mess?
The scene as Luke tells it is filled with all kinds of signs and words of royalty, but all of them too are given in irony. Perched on his central high throne, Jesus has companions seated at his right hand and his left. The plaque above his head proclaims his title, “the King of the Jews.” Luke makes no mention of a crown of thorns, but earlier in the story, Herod’s soldiers had given Jesus an elegant robe as they mocked him and led him away.
The royal figures in the story—or, well, the ones with king-like power—they too are victims of the irony of the situation. Caiaphas, the recognized leader of the Jewish people, the chief-est of chief priests, he probably didn’t like being occupied by the forces of Rome much more than anyone else, but the price of resistance was way higher than the cost of compromise. If this Jesus guy stirred things up, there could have been a revolt and many people could die. As renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor put it, “No matter how he did the arithmetic, it came out the same: better that one person should die than many. … Caiaphas was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was just doing his job.”
Pilate, the official representative of the Roman Empire, the de facto king, in a sense, he didn’t have it much better. He didn’t even want to get involved. But there was no sense in letting Rome think he couldn’t keep control. If killing Jesus would keep the rest of the people quiet, so be it. He too “was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was just doing his job.”
God has been challenging this kind of bad leadership all along. A few hundred years earlier, the kings of Judah, whether stuck between a rock and a hard place or not, had clearly not succeeded in just doing their job. Judah fell to the Babylonian Empire, and the people were led off in exile. In the words of Jeremiah, we here God’s judgment on them: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture. … It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.”
Of course, the kings of Jeremiah’s time were not the first to exhibit bad leadership, to do evil in the sight of God. And the Caiaphas’s and Pilate’s and Herod’s of Jesus time were not the last. While we may not have anyone titled “King” in our society today, there is still a whole mysterious complex of multi-national corporations and economic policies and government leaders and citizen apathy that works to scatter people all around. The economics of the world today force people to migrate from place to place to find work, and then when they get somewhere, we punish them for being there “illegally”. We “improve” neighborhoods by pushing poor people somewhere—anywhere—else: we have UCC brothers and sisters in a congregation I worked at in Chicago who, for some of them, have seen their community pushed around to three different neighborhoods by the forces of ‘gentrification’.
Like the kings of Jeremiah’s time, we have not attended to the flock of God’s people as we turn a blind eye to war refugees from Iraq and genocide victims from Darfur … or even right here whenever we fail to actually welcome someone into our community when they’re not enough like us or because they might change us. We may not have kings, but we certainly have all the trappings of their misdeeds.
The cross that stands at the center of today’s passage from Luke stands as judgment on all of this. In their own time, it betrayed the farce that was the so-called power Caiaphas and Pilate held. In our time, it still betrays all the hands at which the innocent are killed—whether they die physically or simply die inside. It pronounces judgment on all who scoff and mock like the soldiers and first criminal, the ones who look into the face of pain and torture and say “save yourself.” And it casts its dark shadow over all of us who, like the people in Luke’s telling of the story, stand by watching while our leaders do evil and get away with murder.
Judgment is not the only word we hear from this cross, though. In the midst of the darkest hour, in the voice of one in deepest despair, we hear two signs of a new kind of kingship. We hear the words of mercy and of promise to the outcast. “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” With the signs of earthly kingship standing around him in irony and mockery, Jesus still has one royal prerogative to exercise, the power of pardon. In contrast to the rulers who condemn the innocent, forsaking their power to pardon, Jesus takes it up, asking forgiveness for his executioners. Luke’s gospel is filled with Jesus offering forgiveness and restoration, and that word still sounds forth at the end. Luke’s gospel is also the story of one who stands with the marginalized, welcoming them into a new community—and this sign of Jesus’ reign sounds forth too. “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” To the outcast and to the guilty, even torture and death cannot erase the promise. For the criminal hanging next to Jesus, it was more than he had even asked for, the fulfillment of God’s promise way back in Jeremiah’s time that “I myself with gather the remnant of my flock … and I will bring them back to their fold.” For us, it is the very hope upon which we stand: the promise that the one in whom we put our faith, the one we have been joined to in our baptisms, that he invites us today into a new kind of kingdom, his kingdom.
The Crucified One as the king at whose cross-shaped throne all other kings’ power is proven false? The reign of one who speaks mercy and promise? Ironic? Perhaps, but God wouldn’t have it any other way.
Let us pray.
O God, our true life,
to serve you is freedom,
and to know you is unending joy.
We worship you, we glorify you,
we give thanks to you for your great glory.
Abide with us,
reign in us,
and make this world reflect your divine majesty,
through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.
Amen.
(Prayer of the Day for Christ the King C from Evangelical Lutheran Worship, copyright 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, admin. Augsburg Fortress.)
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