Luke 23. 33-43
The kingdom comes and the king appears …
at the cross!
Well, this is it! This is the day! The destination … the culmination … the reason for the entire church year! For the past fifty-one weeks, we’ve been making our way, one Sunday at a time, to this very moment! Christ the King! It’s the climax! The cymbal crash! In Advent, god’s journey begins. At Christmas, god’s born into the world! Earth becomes heaven! Spirit takes on flesh-and-blood! Epiphany is the time for blossoming, flowering! Lent brings the cross! Easter is the new beginning! And after Pentecost and all those Sundays-after, there’s today! Christ the King! And next Sunday, it starts, all over, one more time!
But for now, it’s Christ the King. This is the Amen for the whole year. The period, the exclamation mark, at the story’s end. But I want you to notice something. It’s not an accident. It’s not a mistake. But there are crowns, no thrones, in today’s gospel reading! Today we celebrate, commemorate Christ the King and creation doesn’t vanish! The heavens don’t roll up like a spring-loaded window shade! And contrary to popular opinion, saints and angels don’t gathered around a heavenly sea! Instead, we’re back at the foot of the cross with the crowd. Watching Jesus break … and bleed … and die …. Jesus isn’t coming on the clouds, like we sang at the start of the service. He’s hanging on a tree. Everyone bunched together. Scoffing. Mocking. Deriding. As Jesus forgives them. Forgives them and us with them. This is Christ the King.
Last Sunday, we started out by singing an old Methodist hymn …
Lo! he comes with clouds descending, once for our salvation slain;
thousand thousand saints attending join to sing the glad refrain:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! Christ the Lord returns to reign.
That’s what we look for on days, at times, like this! Something extraordinary! Something sensational! The “glad refrain” of the next stanza urged us to “See the day of God appear!” But that day isn’t today. That “day of God” isn’t somewhere down the road, at the end of it all. Around the next bend. Over the next hill. It’s behind us! Two thousand years behind us! The “day of God” was goodFriday! When Jesus was crucified! When Jesus died! When Jesus was buried! When Jesus descended to the dead! And chances are we missed the whole thing! But that’s the moment the kingdom came! But it doesn’t make sense. Not to us, anyway. It’s such a contradiction to what we look for. We’re all about clods of glory and armies of angels. The bright! The shining! But that’s not Jesus. That’s not Christ the King.
Contrary to the hymn we just sang, about Jesus coming back, Jesus returning, to reign, Jesus doesn’t have to come back. He never left. And as far as being king … he has always been king! Ever since that first goodFriday! Let that sink in. Christ the King has never left us! Christ the King never went away! He’s been right here! In the church! With his people! Whenever, wherever, two or three! He’s here … in the words spoken! He’s here … in words sung! He’s here … in forgiveness given! He’s here … in the water! In the bread and wine! Not metaphorically! Not metaphysically! But really, truly present! With us! Among us! Between us! It’s goodFriday that’s god’s day! The day – once and for all – Christ became King!
But that’s not what we expect. And to be honest, it’s, probably, not, at all, what we want. We prefer the clouds and the angels, the crowns and the thrones. So, we keep looking ahead. And we miss the King right under our noses. That’s why we Lutherans don’t spend a whole lot of time squinting into the future trying to make that last, great tomorrow. We have goodFriday! We have a past! A past that shapes, a past that inspires the future! We have Jesus and we have the cross! And that gives us plenty to talk about! Plenty to believe in! In goodFriday, we have our new beginning. In goodFriday, the world was born anew. In goodFriday, the king appears! “Christ sent me to proclaim the gospel,” Paul writes, “not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross – the cross – might not be emptied of its power ….”
God loves us because Jesus loves us. And that’s enough. More than enough. God loves us because Jesus loves us! Not because god made us this way. Not because we’re sorry for what we’ve done, for what we haven’t. Not because we promise to try harder and do better. For us, that is the kingdom! And the power! And the glory! Take the spotlight off of that and shine it on us and Christ disappears, lost in the shadows. Focus on what we should … or ought … or must … On whether … we’re grain or chaff … wheat or weed … sheep or goat … And Jesus isn’t important. Christ doesn’t matter. King or no King. Faith becomes a decision, a choice. Believing is transforming into morals and ethics and principles. And there’s no need … for a goodFriday … for a savior … or even, for that matter, a king … Instead, Christ becomes judge, jury, and executioner. No. It’s not Christ that inspires that kind of church. It’s not the cross. It’s commandments! It’s commandments.
“When they came to the place that is called The Skull – to Golgotha, to Calvary – they crucified Jesus … They crucified Jesus! At those moment, the kingdom came and god’s will was done! The purple robe? The crown of thorns? The scepter reed? The inscription above his head? Even the soldiers bowing down? We think of it as contempt, scorn. But this is the coronation! This is the crowning! What we mean as contempt, god takes for glory! And every ever-after is nothing more than an echo, a reflection, of that moment!
No. This day – this Christ the King – isn’t the destination. And it’s not the culmination or the reason. There’s no holy city coming down out of heaven. There’s no sacred Oz at the end of the yellow bricks. There’s just a cross. On a dusty hilltop. Overlooking a dustier town. A cross and the love it holds in its arms for all to see! That’s why we’ve done what we’ve been doing for these past fifty-one Sundays. And that’s why we continue to do what we do … week after week after week! It’s goodFriday that makes us who we are! Even more, it’s goodFriday that makes god who god is! God loves us because Jesus loves us! And my friends, we do the same …