Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 25, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We start with the term king. King is a term from the worldly realms of politics and power. In today’s world there are constitutional monarchs with very limited power, but historically the term has mostly meant something very different from that. Traditionally, a king is a ruler who wields power. He has a police force to enforce his laws, and he has an army to fight his enemies, real or imagined. He got his position of power either through inheritance, or through some sort of underhanded trickery or deception, or through forceful usurpation. The primary concern of most kings is keeping themselves in power, and they’ll do just about anything to do it. The term king, as it was used in Jesus’ time and in its most common historical context, is inseparably linked with the use of force, with violence as a political tool. The king that mattered most in Jesus’ world was, of course, the Roman Emperor, who ruled for the benefit of the upper classes and who created and enforced the famous Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, through liberal applications of force at the least sign of the slightest disturbance or threat to Roman power. The Roman Emperor had a puppet king in Judea in those days, Herod, who had the title “King of the Jews.” He too ruled by force for the benefit of the Roman occupiers and not in the interest of his own people. All of that is what people in first century Judea would have understood by the word king. It’s pretty much what most people throughout most of history would have understood by that word.

Then Christianity arose in that Roman world, that world where peace, such as it was, was achieved and maintained by force and where oppression was institutionalized as simply the way thing should be. And it began to call Jesus of Nazareth King. King of the Jews certainly but also more generally just King. Or Lord, which was one of the Roman Emperor’s titles and which meant essentially the same thing as king. And, frankly, on its face that claim makes no sense. I’m sure it’s not necessary to say much about all the ways in which Jesus doesn’t fit that traditional meaning of king. Just to hit some of the highlights: He taught that peace comes through justice and nonviolence, not through the use of violence. He said that God’s grace and care were for all people but especially for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed and not only, or even especially, for the powerful and the wealthy. He had no army, and he didn’t want one. He had no command authority, and he didn’t want any. He enforced no laws and fought no enemies, at least not with military force. And he got himself crucified by agents of the one the world called king, the Roman Emperor, without offering any armed resistance and even preventing his followers from offering any, which was very un-king-like behavior indeed.

Yet it is precisely part of that story, the story of Jesus’ Crucifixion, that the lectionary gives us as the Gospel reading for Christ the King Sunday. That reading gives us Jesus on the cross between two crucified criminals; and it includes two references to Jesus as a king, specifically as “King of the Jews.” The soldiers who are killing him taunt him saying: “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” Luke 23:37 NRSV And they put a sign on his cross that read “This is the King of the Jews.” That was the charge that got him crucified, that he claimed to be (or perhaps more accurately that his followers proclaimed him to be) the King of the Jews. Which of course made him guilty of sedition, of attempting to subvert the sacred Imperial power of Rome—sacred in the eyes of the Romans at any rate. Luke’s scene gives us Jesus proclaimed to be king brutally executed as a common criminal. The Christian tradition has called him king ever since.

So the question that immediately arises out of this scenario is: What sort of king is this? The lectionary folks, good theologians all, seem to think that Luke’s Crucifixion scene sheds some light on that question; so we ask: Does Jesus’ Crucifixion somehow reveal what it means for him to be king? And if so, just how does it do that? So let’s start with what Christ’s crucifixion means for us Christians, since apparently we have to understand that before we can understand what it means to call him king.

I have preached many times from this pulpit what I think Christ’s crucifixion means, and some of you have read a fair amount that I have written on the subject; so I won’t spend a lot of time going over it again this morning. Let me just briefly repeat what I have said here so often: Christ’s death is not, for me at least, an atoning sacrifice, a price that God demanded be paid before God could forgive human sin. Rather, Christ’s death on the cross is, for me at least, the ultimate demonstration of God’s solidarity with us humans in all aspects of life, right up to and including unjust suffering and death. Christ on the cross is not merely an innocent man on the cross. He is God the Son Incarnate on the cross. In a lectionary selection we didn’t read this morning from the letter to the Colossians we read that he is “the image of the invisible God,” Colossians 1:15, and that in him “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” Colossians 1:19 NRSV That has been the Christian confession for nearly 2,000 years now. Christ on the cross is God Incarnate on the cross. Christ on the cross is the very person of God entering into and sharing human suffering and death. In that divine act we see that God is present with humanity always and in everything that happens to us. Christ on the cross reveals in fullest measure the true nature of God not as controller of events on earth but as present in grace-filled solidarity with God’s people in all events on earth, even the most horrific and the most unjust.

That demonstration, we are told, is what reveals Christ as king; and it makes no earthly sense. But that’s just the point. It makes no earthly sense, it makes divine sense. We know how Jesus turned so many of the world’s expectations and values on their heads. He said the first shall be last and the last first. He said love your enemies, by which he presumably he meant don’t kill them (to quote a bumper sticker put out by the Church of the Brethren), completely overturning worldly wisdom. He praised those his world despised and said God welcomes the prodigal even before the prodigal has had a chance to beg for forgiveness. He welcomed women as disciples in a world where such a thing was simply impossible. The examples of Jesus upending worldly expectations could go on and on.

Today we see him turning another worldly expectation on its head, the expectation of what it means to be a king. If Christ on the cross reveals Christ as king, and I believe that it does, then clearly the meaning of the word king has been subverted and recast. Christ the King is no earthly king. He does not rule in might, no matter what so many of the old hymns may say. He exercises no power and wields no force, no earthly force in any event. Christ is king precisely because he shows us, in his life, his teachings, his death, and his resurrection, that the world’s ways are not God’s ways; and he calls us to allegiance to those ways, the ways of God not the ways of Caesar, by whatever name Caesar may be going at any particular time or place.

A king is above all else one who demands allegiance from his subjects. Christ demands allegiance from us. A king might kill subjects who don’t give it. Christ forgives them as he forgave the criminal on the cross in our reading from Luke and keeps on inviting a change of heart, a change of allegiance from the ways of the world to the ways of God. That’s what sort of king he is. The king that rules from a cross to demonstrate God’s presence with us always and everywhere. A king who invites rather than demands, who entices with love rather than motivates with fear, who forgives rather than punishes. He is a king to whom we can freely give that allegiance that all kings demand and live in his grace, grace without condition, grace without end. He is a king to whom we cal freely and gladly give our allegiance, our thanks, and our praise. Amen.