On the night of Jesus’ birth, angels sang and shepherds marveled. There was joy in the air, and the small cradle was big enough to hold all our hopes. “Do not be afraid,” the angel said to the terrified shepherds; “see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”[1]
The songs of the heavenly hosts grew fainter, and soon there were other voices: tempting whispers about the possibilities of power—stones turned into loaves of bread, global rule over all the kingdoms of the earth. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; God’s angels will protect you.”[2]
At the cross, the devil’s rhetoric is amplified many times in the taunts of leaders and soldiers and even a man who was crucified with Jesus: Are you not the Messiah of God? Are you not the king of the Jews? Show your power, do something, come down, save yourself and us.
Jesus remains silent amid their mockery. When he opens his lips, he prays, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Forgive them, he prays, and we wonder who they might be—the soldiers who, as always, were only following orders? Those who gave the orders? The leaders who are always quick to assert that they only act with the best interest of the state in mind, or the temple, the church, the nation? Forgive them — those who stood by watching the scene? Or is he praying for all of us who stand by and watch when the witch is burned, the wimpy kid is bullied, the black man is lynched, the inmate on death row is executed?
For a moment, the waves of ridicule and abuse subside, and we hear the curious king who lives up to nobody’s expectations pray for forgiveness. Many of us have been in his company long enough to know that he wouldn’t ask for armies of angels to swoop down and smite the enemy. We have been in his company long enough to know that his kingdom is not of this world, but very much in the world.
In the gospel of Luke, only three characters say the word kingdom. The first one is the angel Gabriel who comes to Mary and says, “You will bear a son and you will name him Jesus. He will reign forever and of his kingdom there will be no end.”[3] After the angel, it is Jesus who speaks of the kingdom in teaching after teaching. And he doesn’t just speak the word, he manifests it with healing and food, by breaking the power of ungodly forces, and with his faithful refusal to follow a different path. The third character in the gospel according to Luke who says the word is a dying convict. After rebuking his fellow convict for taunting this man who has done nothing wrong, he turns to Jesus and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He speaks of a kingdom hidden in the improbable future of a crucified man, and in this kingdom he wants to be remembered. He doesn’t know any better than you and I what it might look like, this kingdom. All he knows is that it is Jesus’ kingdom. All he knows is what we have noticed in the life of Jesus: a heart of immense compassion, the determination to end the reign of exclusion and condemnation, and the unfolding of a reign of mercy. What this convict knows is Jesus’ refusal to save himself or to curse his executioners. What he sees, perhaps, is an end of the ancient cycle of violence and vengeance, and the promise of a reign of forgiveness.
As requests go, “Remember me” is modest; but Jesus responds with royal extravagance. “Today,” he says to him, “you will be with me in Paradise.” Like one of the kings in his parables, Jesus generously lavishes gifts on the humble petitioner, granting him life in the presence of God. And in the face of death, this man finds himself closer to life than he may have ever been. Today, Jesus says to him. Like he said that day at the synagogue in Nazareth, after reading from Isaiah, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”[4] Like he said to Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector in Jericho, “Today salvation has come to this house.”[5] The last occurrence in Luke of this full-of-promise “today” is here, at the cross, in the hearing of a dying man, and in the hearing of all who long for a fullness of life no earthly kingdom can offer.
The reign of Christ is not a new and improved version of the kingdoms of the world. It is the end of our royal ideologies and the dreams of domination that feed them. It is a new way of relating, thinking, speaking, and acting in the name of Jesus.
Many say, offering good reasons, that we shouldn’t continue to call Jesus “the King.” Our imagination is already overstuffed with men on thrones. Some of us watch The Crown and follow the gossip on Harry and Meaghan, William and Kate, but royals don’t rule us, and we no longer think of power in royal terms. But first-century Galilee was a time of kings and rulers, as Katie Givens Kime urges us to remember. “The roots of our faith are located here, not in isolated issues of individual piety, but rather in resistance to the idolatry of power.”[6]
The crucifixion was a spectacle of humiliation, designed to project Rome’s power in even the most remote parts of the Empire. And the crucifixion carried a message: the crucified one is not a person, but a thing, an object of derision and complete subjection, a tool of terror and intimidation, a means to further the power and interests of Rome.
The first Christian witnesses, however, countered that arrogant assertion with the divine protest of the resurrection. In Colossians, Paul makes an audacious attempt to sort out the powers of the universe, declaring that this crucified victim is indeed the cosmic ruler whose reign is founded on the experience of suffering, and whose peacemaking is accomplished through the absorption, not the perpetration, of violence.[7] He is the firstborn of all creation. All things were created through him and for him, and in him all things hold together. All of creation, all of life, all people and things have their purpose and fulfillment in him. Nothing is outside of Christ.[8]
And because he is the firstborn from the dead, all of creation is redeemed through him. In Paul’s vision, “salvation is not the rescue [of individual souls] from a totally evil world but the claiming of the rightful possession of this world by the one who was an agent in its creation.”[9] The world does not belong to the Empires, but to Christ. Therefore, the powers that exercise authority in the world may in part shape the structures of the world in which we live. “But the cross, not the powers, determines the shape of Christian existence. Christian discipleship, therefore, seeks to live in keeping with the power of Christ, a power that challenges and overthrows the ungodly powers of the world.”[10]
As those whom God has rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into the reign of Christ, we serve the flourishing of life. “We are as the power that rules us,” says Arthur McGill.[11] Yes, God has transferred us into the reign of Christ, but we must constantly ask ourselves, to whom do we give the power to tell us who we are? To whom do you give the power to define your dignity and worth? Who or what has the power to shape our moods and our minds? Who has the power to determine what is important and what is not? And how might we act, who might we become, if we knew in our bones that all authority has been given to Jesus Christ, that the Crucified One whom God raised from the dead is the Power of Powers?[12]
The reign of Jesus Christ is not a new and improved version of the kingdoms of the world. His reign does not call for crusades and invasions. His reign is the end of our imperial ideologies and the dreams of domination that feed them. It is a new way of relating, thinking, speaking, and acting through him and for him. In Colossians 3, Paul writes,
You have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!
In celebrating the reign of Christ on the last Sunday of the church year, we rejoice in God’s renewal of creation in Christ. We rejoice, because nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord—and in that love, nothing will ultimately be able to separate us from each other and from the blessed communion of life which the universe was created to be. Thanks be to God.
[1] Luke 2:10-11
[2] See Luke 4:1-13
[3] See Luke 2:30-33
[4] Lk 4:21
[5] Lk 19:9
[6] Katie Givens Kime https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-10/sunday-november-24-2013
[7] See Andrew Lincoln, Colossians (NIB), 609.
[8] Jennifer Wyant https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/christ-the-king-3/commentary-on-colossians-111-20-5
[9] Andrew Lincoln, Colossians (NIB), 610.
[10] Marianne Meye Thompson, Colossians & Philemon, 35.
[11] Arthur McGill, quoted by Michael Pasquarello III, Connections, Year C, Vol. 3, 510.
[12] See Katie Givens Kime https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-10/sunday-november-24-2013