Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Colossians 1. 11-20; Luke 23. 33-43
“The soldiers also mocked him … saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’”
Esther Newport, Christus Rex (1940), book illustration
Being a king can be a dangerous business. William II, aka William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, combined unbridled tastes for the pleasures of the flesh with a steady and wise hand in steering the affairs of state. That didn’t stop him being shot by an arrow in a hunting accident that many believe was no accident. Edward II died in mysterious circumstances while in the custody of his wife’s lover. Richard II was another unlucky second, and was murdered while in prison, just like the much later Henry VI. (Henry II actually survived!)
We might think of Presidents as kings in a democratic era, and Kennedy, Garfield, Lincoln, and McKinley were all assassinated, meaning America’s chiefs have a one in eleven chance of being shot dead in office. The leader of Ireland’s War of Independence, Michael Collins, never even got the chance to become his country’s prime minister, ambushed while Chairman of what was still a Provisional Government, shot by his own side (although the people ultimately to blame were – of course – the Brits). From Pharaoh Ramesses III through Julius Caesar to Yitzhak Rabin and Muammar Gadaffi, the head man of any society has always been in particular danger of losing his head.
So, in being put to death, Jesus is very much in the mould an earthly king, despite the humiliating misery of His circumstances in today’s Gospel reading. To be a leader is to be a target. Yet this is happening to Christ even though He has rejected every attempt to have Him seize earthly power, much to the disappointment of His closest followers. Having sought no power He is sentenced to death with, in Luke’s record, neither Pilate nor even Herod having found any possible charge that could stick to Him.
He is executed merely to appease a baying mob and perhaps avoid a nasty bout of rioting. He is literally a scapegoat, slaughtered for the sins of others in the politically tense and often violent circumstances of Roman Palestine. Put to death because the corruption of the Herods, the arrogant brutality of the Romans, and the Jews’ delusions about their own strength combine to create a land constantly bubbling on the edge of violence.
What is the death of one man if it preserves the fragile peace, and is the price that must be paid to spare misery for a million? All states make calculations of this nature from time to time, from blind eyes turned to obvious injustices through to bloody wars of choice. Perfect justice eludes human attempts to create it. There are always difficult calculations and trade-offs to be made in a world of laziness and prejudice, and even where these sins are avoided, a world of clashing perspectives and imperfect information.
Even the most cleverly cynical calculations, however, like Pilate’s decision to execute Christ, usually turn out to be too clever for their own good in the longer term. In this particular case, the murder of Jesus Christ did nothing in the long run to end the cycle of violence between Jews and Romans in Palestine. The Romans would win in the end, as they were always bound to do, and in the course winning they destroyed the Temple, killed hundreds of thousands, and banished the Jews from Jerusalem for centuries.[1] Such is the stuff of history, one bloody thing after another.
Here’s the complicated bit, though. The Romans were arrogant and cruel, obsessed with legitimising the power of the strong over the weak. Yet they also brought order, and for the most part peace, and they allowed those who didn’t challenge their rule to flourish, and they did indeed make the lives of millions better for centuries. We can still detect how advanced and prosperous their society was from the traces their mining and smelting left in the Greenland Ice Cap. The Romans may have been brutal, but they were better than the even more brutal alternatives, and the age that followed their collapse was indeed Dark.
Is that depressing? Not if we take Jesus Christ and His claims seriously. For He said His kingdom is not of this world.
Indeed, our Epistle reading, part of St Paul’s letter to the Colossians makes claims that go far beyond Christ being a king. It says Jesus is the image of the invisible God, that He already was in existence before all things, that all the fullness of God dwelt in Him, and that all things were created by Him, through Him, for Him. Paul claims that this political scapegoat, mocked and sneered at by powerful men as the crowd stood by stony-faced, is the creator of all things, as fully God as the Father.
And that, if we believe it, should upend all conventional understandings of power, and of God. If Jesus on the Cross is God, every bit as much God as the invisible Father, then God is not some remote watchmaker who set the universe in motion and will mark our homework at the end of time. If Jesus on the Cross is God, then God is actively seeking to rescue us from the consequences of our inability to properly use the gifts He has given us, actively working at the cost of His own great suffering to ensure that the things that we have done wrong will, in the end, be put right.
And how do we live in this fragile world that will never be perfect, and will always contain much cruelty? Let’s return to our Gospel reading. The four Gospels’ accounts of Jesus trial and crucifixion all vary in some details. This morning’s Gospel reading is from Luke, and two important sentences from it are unique to Luke. One is “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” The other is Jesus telling the repentant thief that he would that day be with Him in paradise.
So we should live by showing mercy and forgiveness. It’s hard to forgive when we have been grievously wronged and the perpetrators show no remorse. It’s hard also to know if by forgiving the clearly unrepentant for rationally unforgiveable acts, that we aren’t just enabling them to go on and harm someone else. Yet that extraordinary, near impossible, standard was how the King of the Universe showed us to live when faced with torture and unjust execution at the hands of some petty little men.
Christ the King marks the end of the Church’s year. Advent Sunday, next Sunday, is the beginning of another. The Church’s year begins with Advent, the season of waiting for the light of Christ to break into a dark world; the year ends with Christ triumphant as King of the Universe, yet often unrecognised as such, often rejected explicitly, sometimes violently abused. This King gives us the freedom to accept or reject Him as ruler of our lives. He will not impose His rule on us any more than He imposed it on His tormentors on that bleak Friday in Jerusalem.
In case you are tempted to reject His rule over your life, ponder this: earthly states and empires and kingdoms and republics are as vulnerable than those who rule them. On a long enough timeline, all will eventually fall, as even the Roman Empire eventually did. The Kingdom of Christ began at the dawn of time and will outlast time itself. And if we trust that its citizenship is more precious than any earthly loyalty we could possess, we will live forever in that Kingdom, fully realised in Heaven.
And now all glory and honour be to God, King of the Universe, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] After the Romans expelled the Jews from Jerusalem in AD 136, they were not allowed to permanently settle in the city again until the Caliph Omar, father-in-law and successor to Mohammed, who captured the city in 638. History is full of ironies, some of them rather bitter.
Top image: Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro. © Arne Müseler / www.arne-mueseler.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons
great post , thank you for sharing.