The King On The Cross

November 25, 2007     Christ The King C

Jeremiah 23:1-6          Luke 1:68-79  

Colossians 1:11-20       St. Luke 23:33-43

The Feast of Christ the King stands in stark opposition to two contemporary trends in some Christian circles. The first trend is the rejection of honorific titles like "king" or "lord." The second is the proposal that Christ is not pre-eminent as a revelation of God, but merely one among many equal sources of truth and salvation.

The distaste that some Christians have for the notion of kingship mistakes the very nature of Christ's dominion. His is a total reversal of the roles usually assigned to royalty and servitude. He refuses to be the master of the world, the mighty monarch, the spiller of blood. His reign subverts our notion of kingship.

He is the king who serves the other. He is the king who dies for the other. He is the king who is ridiculed, scorned, and mocked. Most insufferable, most repugnant of all, is the fact that he is a powerless sovereign. Dying on his cross-throne, Jesus is thrice taunted for the fact that he does not save himself. "You a savior?" they jeer. "Then save yourself." Soldiers with their sour wine chide, "Aren't you a real king? Save yourself." Even a criminal scolds: "I thought you were supposed to be a Messiah. Prove it."

As opposed to every other king, Christ is unguarded. He disavows the protection of armies. He rejects self-defense. He abjures force. This is a king? No, this is a scandal. This is a stumbling block.

Thus, to repress Christ's title of king is to repress the earth-shaking revolution of his realm. The crucified king is also the secret key to Christ's uniqueness. There is none other like him in the fables of human consciousness. No cult or culture could dream it.

The kind of king Jesus is finds its clearest expression on the cross. In Luke's gospel the cross does not appear unexpectedly. Luke has been preparing for this moment throughout his gospel and he presents the crucifixion in such a way as to allude to earlier episodes in the gospel.

In Luke's temptation scene (4:1-13), Jesus "passes" the temptation that Adam "failed" (Genesis 3). Adam was tempted to eat forbidden fruit. He did and lost status as "son of God" (Gen 3:1-7). Jesus was tempted to turn stone into bread (4:2). He didn't and remains truly  "Son of God."

Adam had dominion over all things (Gen 1:26-30) but yearned to "be like God" (Gen 1:26-30). He yielded to Satan and lost his dominion as he became subject to sin and death (Gen 2:17; 3:19). Jesus was offered power over the whole world (Luke 4:5-6) but rejected it. He remained subject only to God's will.

Adam was told that by eating the fruit he would "not die" (Gen 3:4). He obeyed Satan and died (see Gen 3:19). Jesus is tempted to defy death by jumping from theTemple but he allowed God to remain Lord of life and death, obedience to God rather than to Satan (Luke 4:12). Jesus is a welcome "second Adam."

There are similarities between Jesus' new temptations on the cross and his previous temptations by Satan. Like the earlier temptations, these challenges are based on Jesus' relationship to God: "If you are the Christ of God, his chosen one" (23:35). In both instances Jesus urged to defy death: jump off the Temple and live; escape execution.

While Satan and Jesus' opponents propose that since Jesus is "Son of God," he will not die, the Lukan interpretation claims that precisely because Jesus is truly "Son of God" he will die in obedience to God's will. Jesus' obedience will have life-giving consequences far surpassing the death-dealing disobedience of Adam.

At the outset of his public ministry, the question of Jesus' identity framed the temptations: in the first and last temptations, the devil taunts, "If you are the Son of God," do such and such  (4:3, 9).

On the cross, the identity of Christ is questioned three times: "if he is the chosen one, the Christ of God" (v. 35), "if you are the King of the Jews" (v.37), and "are you not the Christ?" (v.39).

In both episodes, the nature of Jesus' identity is not what others think.

In the temptations, Jesus would not use his power to feed himself  (4:3 4), though later he would feed the 5,000 (9:12 17). Although Jesus used his power to save others (7:50; 8:36, 48, 50; 18:42; 19:10), he would not use it to save himself. Jesus does not use power in the way others might expect.

The rulers sneer and wonder whether Jesus is "the chosen one"; this recalls the transfiguration in which God announces that Jesus is "my chosen son" (9:35).

Being "chosen" by God is not about privilege as others might expect.

The crowd had welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem with palms and with shouts of "blessed is the king" (19:38); at the trial, they had accused him of being a king (23:2), and the charge on the cross identifies him as such (23:38). While the language is accurate, the concept is wrong.

The kingship of Christ is not about power, certainly not the political or juridical power to "save yourself and us" from the ignominy of crucifixion. But, ironically, his power to save is revealed as he tells the criminal, "today you will he with me in Paradise."

The Gospel centers our attention and prayer upon the life and death of a King who is defeated by the Romans and some of the Jews in that same city of Jerusalem. There is jeering and sneering and provocative, yet prophetic, words hurled at this King. "He saved others let him save himself," have a bit of irony about them. He saved others and does so finally, by not saving his own self.

The Gospel ends with a three-way conversation among Jesus and two co-hangers-on. Luke's account of Jesus' ministry has a consistent theme of Jesus' offering himself and some "jeer and sneer" and others marvel and respond personally.

So here we have the final offering and on one side is the scoffer and on the other side a receiver. The King on the Cross is as much an inviter as he was as he walked his whole life's road up toward Jerusalem.

The mystery of the Cross is so difficult for humans to comprehend that even Christians have devoted their lives and scholarship to ignoring the awful truth of Christ's sovereignty. Christ's kingship is an abomination for any earthly royal aspiration. It is an assault upon the desires of every tribe or nation that ever craved ascendancy.

More baffling yet, Christ the king, utterly innocent, completely accepts the appearances of utter guilt. One of the criminals crucified with him saw and embraced this startling truth?and he was saved. "We deserve it after all. We are only paying the price for what we've done, but this man has done nothing wrong."

In celebrating Christ the King at the end of the church year, we force ourselves to remember the appalling fact of our salvation. God has spoken, become enfleshed Word, in a way that defies human cleverness.

Our hunger for pre-eminence, our desire for dominance, which may well motivate our every choice and predilection, is spurned by this king.

In Christ there is no envy, greed, or lust for power. He, the innocent king who executes none, is executed. He seeks no vengeance. Christ the king is the only sovereign to embody such principles.

Jesus is the sole king who saves fallen humanity from its twisted wish. In this respect he is truly original, truly exceptional, the divine challenge to a world which imagines kingship to be enslavement of the other.

How appropriate it is, then, that St. Paul's letter to the Colossians professes Christ's cosmic centrality paradoxically revealed in the triumph of a cross.  "He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creatures. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created, things visible and invisible. . . . In him everything continues in being. . . . He is the beginning, the first-born of the dead, so that primacy may be his in everything. It pleased God to make absolute fullness reside in him and, by means of him, to reconcile everything in his person, everything, I say, both on earth and in the heavens, making peace through the blood of his cross."