Christ the King Sunday
- glcbmn
- Nov 25
- 5 min read
He has a crown of thorns instead of gold. A cattail in his hand instead of a scepter. They wrapped him in a borrowed purple cloak to make fun of him, instead of draping him in the beautiful royal robes we expect on a king. Instead of a throne of gold, he has a bloody cross. Instead of shouts of “long live the king!” he hears, “Crucify!” and his people laughing at him. Instead of a palace in his capital city, this king is outside the city walls on a garbage dump called Golgotha.
Christ the King. That’s what we call today. The last Sunday in our yearly life together as the church. The great pause before we plunge again into Advent and the cycle of Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Easter. But before all of that, we stop for a moment to see the end of all things, the completion of all time: Christ our King.
But he sure doesn’t look like a King, hanging on a cross instead of sitting on a throne, a crown of thorns instead of crown of jewels. Bloody, whipped and spat upon. Jesus doesn’t have the accessories of modern monarchy, or modern presidency, or modern power. He doesn’t have limousines and lots of money and the Secret Service and fancy clothes and powerful friends. No celebrities hanging around. No reporters following his every move.
Instead, he's in the ugliest place possible, surrounded by thieves and criminals. It is here that he reveals his kingship, what it really means to be the King of kings and Lord of lords. And the revealing actually comes through the words of a thief.
Beautiful words about God can be spoken in ugly places. And there’s no telling where the Lord might hammer together a temporary pulpit and use an unlikely preacher. Like this criminal. He doesn't have a name, though tradition has called him "Dismas." We usually just call him “the thief on the cross.”
His nine words in Greek translate into nine words in English: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom," These are the only recorded words of this man. Of course, never in his wildest imagination would he have dreamt that every year, for centuries on end, he—a good-for-nothing, a lawbreaker, a bad and broken and bleeding man—would preach his brief but eloquent sermon in churches around the globe.
But isn’t that just like God, to chisel the gasping plea of a dying man into undying stones of remembrance? And isn’t it just like God, to use this seemingly un-theological crook, who was executed by a worldly kingdom, to teach us the theology of an entirely different kind of kingdom?
People in the Bible often say more than they realize. Their words, conceived by the Spirit, are pregnant with prophecy. Our dying friend was certainly like this. What he meant by Jesus “coming into his kingdom” is uncertain. But what the Holy Spirit meant, who inspired this unlikely prophet, is much clearer.
I ask you: where is the kingdom of God? Where? We can’t use the GPS on our phones to pinpoint it. Nor was it an ethereal location galaxies away in heaven to which Jesus was journeying. So he couldn’t really “come into” his kingdom, like one comes to a town or house or faraway planet.
The kingdom of God is not a place, a thing, a concept, a philosophy, a spiritual force, or a state of being. The kingdom of God is a person. In the splendid language of Origen, a 3rd c. teacher of the church, Jesus is autobasileia, which means “the kingdom itself” or “the kingdom in person.”
The way Jesus “came into his kingdom” was precisely by being himself: God in the flesh, a human being fully divine. His mission is to re-create humanity in his own person as the New Adam over a New Creation. Those of you who were at the evening Bible study on Tuesday heard me talk about this: “Behold, I am making all things new.” Jesus undoes everything the first Adam did, and re-makes everything through his blood, most especially us.
So the King says to the thief, “Truly I tell you, ‘Today, you will be with me in Paradise.’” This word “Paradise” is the same word used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to describe the “garden” which God planted in Eden. What is Jesus saying? “Today, with me, in me, as part of my body, you will become part of a new creation, for I have come to remake everything—including you—in myself.” The tree in the Garden of Eden whose fruit brought sin and death, is undone by the Tree of the ross, whose bloody fruit brings life and salvation.
The dying thief is about to truly live in the one who is Life itself. A few feet away from him hangs the kingdom of God in person. The autobasileia. The kingdom with skin on it. Today, this believer, executed for his crimes, is exalted in the Christ. Though he die, yet shall he live in the new and better Garden of the kingdom of God called the body of Jesus. As it was for this man, who was crucified with Jesus, so it is for all of us who are crucified with Jesus. In baptism we are co-crucified with him. We sink into his grave, and enter into his own death. St. Paul says, “we buried with him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life." I say those words standing at the church door before every funeral as the white funeral pall is draped over the casket.
Why are those words from the book of Romans said then? Because the dead person lies there, but they are covered over with baptism into Christ, and in Christ they will live. But this "newness of life" isn't just for after we die. It's also now. We enter a innovative kind of life, a “Jesus-life.” Since we’ve been crucified with Jesus by the liquid nails of baptism, it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us. We have died and our lives are hidden with Christ in the Father. Who we are is wholly enfolded by who he is. We are all part of his body, his flesh, his very being. And in Holy Communion, his flesh and blood are in our very bodies, and we become what we eat.
In short, we are in the King who is the kingdom.
This thief may have done many bad things, but at the end of his life, he gave us a beautiful confession of Christ the King. We can repeat it every day, and every day know that it is heard. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus will respond, “I tell the truth, today you will be with me in Paradise.” And he means it, because every day we are alive in Jesus, we are in the paradise of the Kingdom that is himself. Amen.