Cross-Shaped King

Christ the King C: Luke 23:33-43

This morning we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. It is admittedly an odd feast for us to observe, if only because the title “king” doesn’t really have much purchase on the American mind. This past summer, protestors held a “No Kings” rally in objection to the current administration, but the fact is, almost no one in our country has had any experience with real-life monarchy. Most of our understanding of kings comes from movies, or celebrity gossip about the British royal family, and maybe a little from history lessons vaguely remembered from school about “bad ole King George” of England, who was King during the American Revolution. It’s not much to build a theology on. So what does it mean for us to call Jesus “King”?

At first glance, to call a man who never in his life wore a crown or commanded an army or ruled a people a “king” seems inappropriate, if not outright presumptuous. And yet the Church has long hailed Jesus Christ as king, and not just a king, but the high king, the supreme authority. In many churches, particularly Eastern orthodox churches, the image inside the central dome is that of “Jesus Pantocrator,” Jesus the Ruler over All.

And Jesus rules, as all kings do, from a throne. Thrones are special. Have you heard of the “Throne of Scone”? There’s a scene in the film, The King’s Speech (which takes place in 1936), where George, the heir to the British crown, is getting ready for his coronation, but he has discovered that his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, isn’t a true doctor. They’re standing in Westminster Abbey, and George is going on a rant about how he’s been deceived, how the people of England deserve someone better than him – a stuttering sovereign, and then he turns around and discovers that Lionel is sitting on the ancient Throne of Scone (which is the throne of Scotland). The soon-to-be king goes ballistic: “You can’t sit there, that is the Throne of Scone!” And Lionel answers, “It’s just a chair.”  King George is outraged. It’s not just a chair, it’s the seat of authority and power – it belonged to King Edward and to his rightful heir.  Eventually Lionel gets up, helps King George find his voice, and the movie continues. The point being, thrones are special, almost sacred things. They aren’t meant for just anyone – they are meant for royalty.  They symbolize power, authority, dominion. 

Jesus’ throne, we just heard, is in heaven. Symbolically, this means, because heaven is above the earth, Jesus’ throne is above all earthly thrones, all earthly powers, the seat of ultimate power and authority. All other authorities, all worldly kings, submit to his authority, symbolically casting their crowns before him. It’s a powerful, dramatic image!

Now, this claim, “Christ is king,” and all the vaunted imagery and language, is certainly comforting to believers: it assures us that, no matter what we might suffer, Jesus is in charge. He’s ultimately in control. But that same assertion is likely to spark fear and distress among those who don’t follow him. Nonbelievers are, understandably, skeptical of claims to power, at least power exercised by someone they didn’t choose. To them, to assert Jesus is king sounds like a threat, an attempt to force Christianity upon them, or as justification for Christians taking political power.

But our claim isn’t just that Jesus is king, but about the kind of king he is. We’ve already established that he’s not like any king we know—he has no crown or army or subjects or claim to territory. About the only people to call him king, in fact, are a thief, who with Jesus has been condemned to die, and their executor, Pilate, who writes it on a sign in mockery.

His is certainly a strange kind of kingship. Tortured and dying, rather than reining in glory. Pardoning his enemies as opposed to enacting revenge against them. Ruling not from a throne, but from the ancient equivalent of an electric chair. On the face of it, the scene shows weakness and vulnerability, the opposite of power and authority.

I mean, if Jesus had any real power, we figure, he’d jump down off the cross and pummel his executors into submission, or else send his army to do it for him, to kick out the Romans and establish an everlasting kingdom. That’s what we’d expect of a king, what we’d expect of Jesus, if he really was king. Or maybe he’d let the crucifixion play out so that, three days later, he could burst from the tomb, like Superman from the phone booth, wearing his Easter suit, and, with a single bound, leap back up to the planet Heaven.

If that is in fact how we expect a king to act, what then does it mean that Jesus as king stays on the cross until he’s dead? It’s clear Jesus is not like other kings. And his “coming into his kingdom” is not like other kings coming to power. It’s not simply about supplanting one ruler with another, swapping an earthly king for a heavenly one. As we’ve seen in politics, as soon as with we get rid of one rotten politician, another one gets elected to replace them.

No, in heralding his coming kingdom, Jesus was not just advocating for regime change.

Rather, Jesus was announcing the advent of an entirely different way of being, a new kind of politics, a new relationship with each other and with God. It's not just the ruler that changes, but the nature of the rule we are under changes too

This makes matters a little more complicated for those of us who claim Christ as our king. For, if hailing “Jesus as king" meant simply giving our allegiance to a different ruler, then most of our lives could remain untouched. We could more or less go about our lives as usual. Jesus is just another cause we agitate for, Christianity just another party to elect into office. On the other hand, if Jesus’ rule is purely “spiritual,” we could continue to think of faith as a largely private affair, unconnected to how we act, to what we do with our money, our influence and our vote. But the “kingdom” that Jesus proclaims represents a whole new reality where nothing is the same—not our relationships or rules, not our view of ourselves or others, not our priorities or principles. Everything we thought we knew about kings and kingdoms, in fact, gets turned right on its head.

What exactly this new order is like is hard to imagine, and even harder to get across to people. That's probably why Jesus tended to talk about his kingdom in parables. Parables don't pretend to describe reality directly. They are regularly outrageous, exaggerated, humorous, and almost always there’s a shock, a hidden trap door that only drops open a little while after the telling. Parables get at reality sideways, disrupting our sensibilities and overturning our assumptions in order to point to how different it is in the world under God’s rule.

Looking at the parables, we see the kind of king Jesus is in the story of the scandalously generous employer who defies our notions of fairness by paying the same wage to those who have been working all day as he does to those who labored just a few hours. We get some sense of the relational priorities at work in this kingdom in the tale of the father who pursues his prodigal and legalistic sons with no concern for respectability, an old man deigning to run to meet them. We get a hint of what will be expected of his subjects in the story about the wounded man who is ignored by the religious types but tended by the despised foreigner, a Samaritan. Glimpses only, perhaps, but enough to know that everything in the kingdom of God will be different.

In these parables, we see a king who doesn’t use his power to dominate, to lord it over others, but instead to serve them. A king who is not content to rule from afar, but rather comes to meet us in our weakness and need. A king willing to embrace all, forgive all, save all, because that is who he is, what he has come to do. That is the kind of king Jesus is, the kind of king we follow, a king who has come to bring us into the gracious rule of his kingdom.

Jesus has come not to be just one more king (or prime minister or president or whatever). He has come rather to usher in an entirely new order, characterized by new hope, grace and above all love – the kind of love that never gets tired of extending and receiving second chances.

This is power, only not power as the world understands power. But it is in the end the only power that really matters, that has the chance of making lasting change.

In 1935 Jospeh Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, was asked during a meeting with French Prime Minister, about the opposition he faced from the Roman Catholic Church. He dismissed the matter, with the quip, “The Pope? How many divisions does he have?” In other words, what power does the Pope have to stop the military might of the Soviet Empire?

What Stalin, and most world leaders, don’t recognize is that there is a power greater than military power—moral power. That point was made plain fifty years later when, on the night of October 8, 1989, more than 70,000 citizens mobilized in the streets of Leipzig, a city in Communist East Germany. Before the march, the pastor of St. Nicholas Church admonished the demonstrators to be nonviolent, to put down their rocks. Meanwhile, security officials waited for instructions from Moscow and Berlin on using force to subdue the demonstrators. The order never came, and the police gave up. A month after the Berlin Wall fell, the security chief who wanted to subdue the rebellion is shown in the film staring out at the crowd in front of his headquarters. "We planned everything," he says. "We were prepared for everything, everything except for candles and prayers."

Jesus as king doesn’t rule as other kings, through military might or economic pressure. Jesus rules through his moral authority, his witness and his willingness to give himself to God’s truth and to us.

And his rule, Christ’s kingship, is not a distant, abstract reality. It is present among us today, wherever people pray the way Jesus taught us to pray, wherever his followers disciple and baptize and celebrate communion, wherever the behaviors and attitudes we call the fruit of the Spirit are manifest. It's present wherever we refuse to go along with some scheme we know is wrong, wherever we treat the money we have and the earth we live on as gifts from God and not our possessions, wherever healing and forgiveness and grace are extended to others in Jesus’ name. It may not be conspicuous or flashy, but the realm and rule of Christ is all around us, beckoning us to live by its vision and values even now.

In some sense, then, you can understand why this “kingdom” has failed to take hold more broadly, why the rule of Christ has been ignored and resisted, even by many believers. For, if we believe that Christian faith isn't just a matter of giving loyalty to a worldly ruler but is in fact an entering into an entirely new realm, then we cannot but expect to look weird by the world’s standards, like we are marching to the beat of a different drummer.

Because we are. We serve a king who forgives his enemies, who rewards those who don’t deserve it, who disregards the prerogatives of the wealthy and powerful in order to speak truth about sin and death and other unpleasant facts of life. To follow a king like that, to live in a kingdom where these are the rules and norms, means we will be out of step with this world. As Flannery O’Connor liked to say, “You shall know the truth and the truth will make you odd.”

Yet we risk being odd because we know the truth, the truth that all these other kings, all these other kingdoms, are pretenders and will pass away. Christ is the king over all, and his reign is eternal. We who follow this king, this crucified king, as strange as that is, as strange as that makes us, do so because we believe he is the true king, the only one deserving of our complete allegiance, the only one worth living and dying for. No nation, no ideology, no political or economic or philosophical system, but Christ alone, who rules over all of creation and throughout the ages. This is the kind of king we follow, whose righteous and merciful rule we live under. Thanks be to God!