Sermon: The King. 24 November 2013.
Jeremiah 23:1-6.
Colossians 1:11-20.
Luke 23:33-43.
May I be helped to speak in the name of the Living God … Amen.
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely. He shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety.
So said the prophet Jeremiah some time around the year 600BCE, words we heard in our first reading. Well, 600 years or so later the people of Israel thought they’d finally got their king. He didn’t turn out to be quite what they expected.
Just five days earlier the crowds had lined the streets of Jerusalem. Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem, mimicking what David had once done – he was telling them he was the king they awaited, he had come to claim his city. And they knew it: they’d shouted out Hosanna. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. The King of Israel.
But look where he is now. In the few short days since then the crowd has deserted him. Sure, there are a few people left, watching events unfold. But the heady moment of hope, of excitement, has passed. The Sanhedrin and Pilate have arrested him, the mob has forsaken him, and he hangs helpless on a cross – to all intents and purposes alone in all the world.
When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there. … And the people stood by, watching; the leaders scoffed at him; the soldiers also mocked him. … There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews’.
That doesn’t look much like a king to me. It looks rather more like a pretender to the throne who made his claim a little too strongly, failed to carry his supporters with him, and paid the price.
And yet … Luke thinks differently. He tells us a rather strange story which doesn’t appear in any of the other three gospels. He tells us of a conversation passing between Jesus and a couple of criminals hanging on their own crosses, nearby.
One of them says, Are you not the Messiah? which means, Are you not God’s chosen king? Save yourself and us! It seems he pretty much agrees with what the crowd are thinking: how can this man possibly be the chosen King when the people desert him and he ends up hanging from a cross as a common criminal?
I ask you: what kind of king ends up like this? Never crowned; executed for treason before he’s even claimed his throne. We might be forgiven for sharing his doubt – no, actually his disbelief.
Luke’s second dying criminal thinks differently though. He’s the mouthpiece for Luke, he voices Luke’s own thoughts. He rebukes his fellow miscreant, then turns towards Jesus saying Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
It’s a statement of belief. Belief that despite all that has happened, despite not actually claiming a crown, despite the desertion of pretty much everyone who had thought, five days ago, that this was the one they’d hoped for, despite the indignity of his end … this is the Lord’s chosen one, the righteous branch.
So is Luke right? Is Jesus a king? If he is, then he is a very different sort of king, not the kind of king that the crowds or the first criminal expected. Not the kind of king that we would expect even now. He doesn’t strut around with great majesty. He rejects such shows: he rides into Jerusalem not on a war-horse but on a donkey. He surrounds himself not with lords and nobles, but with fishermen, prostitutes, despised tax collectors.
He doesn’t wield authority and power to achieve what he wants. He sits and teaches people, tells them stories. If he has powers to use, he uses them to relieve the pain and woes of others, not himself. He stands before Pilate, before the Sanhedrin, and he refuses to defend himself … and so ends up hanging from a cross.
If Jesus is a king, he is a different sort of king. He turns the world’s expectations upside down. He who might judge us, who might lord it over us, who might exercise power over us declines to do so. Instead he lets us judge him, he lets us walk as his equals; he refuses to exercise his power and authority.
As I said, Jesus doesn’t look very much like a king; he doesn’t act very much like a king. But then it is a matter of belief. Either you believe he isn’t a king because of the way he behaves. Or you believe he is a king in spite of the way he behaves.
I guess all of us here have pretty much made up our minds. We side with the second criminal in Luke’s story. We say that Jesus was a king – is a king; a servant king; a king who leads, who rules, by serving us … his subjects. These were his words: The last shall be first, and the first shall be last. They were also his actions. He taught it, and he lived it – even to the end.
Rev’d John Routh, Rector of Holy Trinity Church Sutton Coldfield.
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