Br. John Forbis, OHC
Last Sunday After Pentecost - Christ the King - Sunday, November 24, 2019
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43
We worship one who is executed as a blasphemer and seditionist. He hangs between two thieves. We institute a feast in which we call him “King”. He never accepted this title himself. When Pilate tries to coerce him to admit he is a king, he responds cryptically, “You say that I am.”
He is a “King” who would not be King: an anti-king. We worship a man nailed to wood; a crown of thorns gouged into his head. He is an object of mockery and derision, including the pièce de résistance – a plaque above his head also calling him King of the Jews, a title reserved only for Herod.
The temptations from the Devil have come back to haunt him. The masses taunt him with familiar phrases, “If you are the Son of God, save yourself.” This execution surely must be the opportune time for the devil to return.
However, despite the jeers that taunt him to doubt God’s affirmation of him as the beloved Son with whom he is well pleased, the King Anti-King will not be averted from the one thing that is the culmination of his mission and fulfillment of his eminence as the Beloved Son of God.
He dies of his own will. He dies forgiving. He dies promising paradise to a thief. He commends himself into God’s hands.
Yes, we, Christians, are strange people indeed. If we are suffering, we are not compelled to look for the quick fix, to desperately seek out comfort and avoidance of conflict – the immediate gratification compensating for our pain and loss. Instead, we are urged to endure … to exercise patience, exude joy and gratitude for sharing in others’ pain, saints in light and embrace God’s grace and transformation pouring from God’s own grieving heart. This costs the King/anti-King everything and costs God his Beloved.
He is also the anti-King who tells us, as we read just two days ago, that unless we are like children, vulnerable and dependent upon God, we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. If we refuse or hinder these children, ourselves and each other, we are refusing Christ, and if we’re refusing Christ, we might as well don a millstone around our necks and jump into the sea and drown in its depths.
This King who would not be King advises us to cut off our hand and foot, tear out our eye and throw them away if they cause us to stumble. Blindness, lameness and being maimed are preferable to the alternative, says the one whose sense of his intimate and familial relationship with God is placed into jeopardy by the devil’s attempt to cause him to stumble and the devil’s anti-victory at his Crucifixion.
But how can he expect us to submit to such horrors?
Well, he is a broken man, derided, mocked, taunted, tortured. Blood blinds his eyes from his ghastly crown, streams from his hands and feet and finally from a deep gash in his side. He is lame, maimed and blind.
The other bitter reality is that I am quite capable to play many roles in this grotesquerie. I could be a Roman soldier vying for his purple cloak, a self-righteous religious judge fooling myself that I am proving Jesus wrong, a blasphemer, a charlatan. I am a part of the crowd who jeers and mocks and can’t turn myself away from the voyeuristic fascination of this blood feast. I could even be one of his crucifiers.
We are drowning, lame, maimed, blind who have no idea what we are doing, people who has and does betray others, ourselves and most of all, God. Yet, from his terrible anti-throne of suffering, Jesus speaks forgiveness. He doesn’t just invite us into his kingdom that is not a kingdom.
It’s a foregone conclusion. We will be and are today with him in nothing less than paradise! A place beyond anything we can ask or imagine, a power of complete surrender, emptying and sacrifice, an anti-power beyond time and space as we know it.
Jesus promises eternity. The Resurrection follows, it has happened. It happens still. It happens now as we celebrate this feast in this place. This paradise permeates all that we do and are, how we are creatively transformed and reconciled to God, how we welcome, clear the way and serve the child to enter community with us as Jesus welcomes and opens the way of life and wholeness for the thief
Not only does Jesus subvert the image of king, but he subverts whom we blindly think and concede we are, a people consigned to greed, self-interest, ignorance, hatred and violence. A gang of crucifiers or ingratiators to kings for our own advancement, a concession to being irredeemable, beyond mercy and forgiveness.
Just when we are drowning in and crippled by tyranny, Christ’s love is stronger than death. As I am seduced, duped into blame and indifference, Christ, the victim of all of these abuses, offers forgiveness for what he endures from and for us. To a criminal consumed by guilt and self-punishment, seeking connection and recognition, he offers not hope but a promise.
From Christ’s anti-throne, the cross, the anti-King lords over nothing. He gives up power for which we can commit the most heinous acts. The anti-King refuses retaliation and vengeance for which we vehemently clamor or coldly expect. In death he insists on life, love and healing.
As Christ is defeated and deposed from his anti-reign he chose for himself, he becomes the triumph of God’s transformative life beyond time, wholeness that gathers us, the crippled remnant, from wherever we are scattered into God’s paradise and love that overcomes tyranny, destruction, violence and finally death. Amen.
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