This week, we celebrated Christ the King Sunday, the final week of the church calendar. The lessons for this week are Colossians 1:11-20 and Luke 23:33-43.
Does anything seem odd to you about today’s gospel reading? We’re in the holiday season now; did anyone wonder if perhaps we mixed up what holiday we’re celebrating this week? Reading the Good Friday story, the passion narrative of Jesus on the cross seems a little odd in the fall, doesn’t it?
For those of you who might not have the church calendar memorized, this is actually the last Sunday of the church year. We’ll start the new year next week, with the first Sunday of Advent as we get ready for Christmas.
Every year in the church, the basic idea is that we hear the story of God coming to dwell with us. It starts with getting ready in Advent for the first major holiday, Christmas, where we celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus.
Then we move through one of the Gospels, following the story of Jesus. We interrupt the sequence in the spring to hear about Easter and the birth of the early church, then we go back to the story of Jesus’ adult ministry.
This year, we’ve been going through Luke, and we’ve reached the culmination, the point of the story. The story that started with shepherds and angels and a baby born in a manger leads to proclaiming that baby as king on this last Sunday of the church year, Christ the King Sunday.
The Sunday School kids are practicing for the beginning of the next telling of that story as they’ve begun working on the Christmas program.
So today is about the triumphant climax of the story, the triumph of the King. So with that in mind, I ask again, does anything seem odd about today’s reading? Because in case you missed it, the king is getting crucified. Executed. Publicly, shamefully, painfully, humiliatingly put to death.
He’s hanging on the cross, about to die. This is not where you expect to see a king. We’re so used to this story that we forget what a cross actually is. We have a fancy cross up on the altar. Maybe you wear a cross necklace, or a cross earring.
It’s become so common of a symbol of Christianity, that we forget it’s a brutal, terrible instrument of execution, a symbol of oppression.
How would you react if you saw someone wearing an electric chair necklace? Or if you came to worship and there was a nice wooden gallows up on the altar? What a strange note to end the year on!
What is a king doing hanging on a cross? This is where criminals belong, a place of defeat, of despair. The description hanging over him says “This is the king of the Jews” but it’s intended to be mocking, not serious.
What is Jesus doing there? Well, if we look at the story, he’s doing two things.
He forgives the people who are torturing him, and he promises one of the real criminals next to him that today he will be with him in paradise.
The cross is where this king does his best work.
In his letter to the Colossians, Paul describes Jesus as the image of the invisible God. Jesus is God in the flesh. Everything that exists was created through him, things visible and invisible, what we see and what is beyond our comprehension.
In him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. That sounds more epic, more regal, a little more like the kind of king I expect.
Paul summarizes the entire reason God came to earth, the entire reason for Jesus’ birth, God’s entire mission by saying through Jesus, God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things. That word “reconcile” means to bring together, to restore to relationship.
The story of the Bible is a story of people rebelling against God. God creates a perfect world, people try to take control for themselves and mess it up. They sin. Sin creates a separation from God.
Over and over, God calls his people to return to their Lord, and again and again, no matter how hard they try to do better, they sin again, they separate themselves from God.
Finally, God comes in person. God’s goal is to reconcile to himself all things. God’s goal, God’s entire mission, is to bring us back into relationship with him. The reason Jesus came is to bring us back into relationship with God.
Now, it might seem like that mission didn’t go so well, because instead of coming back into relationship with God, instead of following Jesus, we killed him.
But it’s in that moment, in that place, at the climax of the story with Jesus dying on the cross, that God succeeds. Remember, God’s work is forgiveness and reconciliation, and that happens through the cross.
The cross isn’t a barrier to God’s work of forgiveness; it’s the place where it happens.
God restores us to relationship with himself by becoming one of us, by experiencing the worst we can offer, by willingly dying in our place. The king does what we couldn’t do, and brings us back to God. This is not where we expect to see a king.
That’s because Jesus is not a normal leader. Jesus doesn’t come to be merely another king. Many of the people at the time wanted him to be a strong earthly leader, a military leader, one who would lead them to victory over their enemies. They misunderstood his mission.
Jesus isn’t just another earthly king, just another chapter in the story; he’s the key to the whole thing.
All the normal rules of living before Jesus don’t apply anymore. All the things that separated us from God don’t matter anymore.
Jesus ushers in a new realm, a new kingdom, God’s kingdom. In the kingdom of God, everyone gets another chance. Everything you’ve done wrong, all your sins, everything that separates you from God gets put to death with Christ on the cross.
Because of the cross, I can stand up here and say to you that your sins are forgiven.
The criminal hanging there next to Jesus gets to hear the good news about this kingdom, that it’s not something off in the future, but something present here and now. Jesus tells him, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Not sometime in the distant future, not after the second coming, but today.
The kingdom of God is here. Its king is hanging on a cross, at work forgiving. At work reconciling the world, reconciling us to God.
This is the point of the story, the point of the entire church year. When we rebel against God, when we separate ourselves from God, God comes to us, in the most unexpected ways. First, it’s as a little baby. Eventually, that little baby is revealed as a king, again, in the most surprising way, on a cross.
And of course, we know the next chapter of the story, where Jesus doesn’t stay dead. Instead, on Easter, he rises from the grave, giving us the ultimate proof that he really is the king. After all, any of us can die. Defeating death and rising again is something special.
I can’t talk about God’s work of reconciliation in a sermon without mentioning one of my favorite verses from 2 Corinthians 5. Paul writes, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation… We are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us.”
In baptism, we get commissioned as witnesses to God’s work, as ambassadors for the king. Jesus has done the work of reconciling us to God, bridging the gap created by our sin. We’re made members of Christ’s body, the church, and sent out to share the good news of our king.
Now, we get to carry on Christ’s work. We get to share the good news of the king who comes to be one of us, who even dies for us, and who is still alive and at work today.
Amen.