Those who might be unfamiliar with the rhythms of the church year and the pattern of the lectionary could be somewhat jarred by the unexpected reading of the crucifixion story on this particular Sunday. Aren’t we detouring into Holy Week, Good Friday, and Christ’s passion a little too abruptly? Aren’t we supposed to be getting ready for Thanksgiving and the holidays? Isn’t Advent coming when we eagerly anticipate and celebrate the birth of Christ? Isn’t this the most wonderful time of the year?
In the church’s liturgical calendar this is the Sunday we celebrate Christ’s divine love for us, his divine authority over all of creation. Then next week, we try not to get whiplash as we turn the other direction and prepare for the coming of Christ, not as a king but as a kid, a helpless, fragile, swaddled and bundled baby. This king to kid contrast is heightened by the Gospel text selected to best demonstrate how Christ is king – Luke’s gruesome account of the crucifixion scene on Golgotha or as Luke calls it, the Place of the Skull. It’s as Jesus hangs on the cross and faces his own death that his divine love is revealed to the world. Christ is thought of as this subversive kind of king not because he saves himself from certain death, but because his sacrificial love restores and redeems the whole of creation. I think the architects of the lectionary are trying to show us something about what it means to rule the world with divine love, to be a king like Jesus.
So instead of a rich and powerful king ruling from the mountaintop, we see that Jesus’ castle was the top of a small hill named Golgotha. His throne was not gilded and set with precious stones, it was a cross of splintered timbers. Though he wore a crown, it was of thorns. He was cloaked in a robe made of rags, and those rags were stripped from him. He held a scepter, but it was a dried-up reed from a creek bed, stuffed scornfully in his hand by heckling guards. Yet Jesus, upon this cross, was more a king than any other ruler in the land. He was the king of the commoners and the criminals, the prideful and prostitutes, the disciples and the down-and-outs. What if we had a king like that? What if we had leaders like that?
Preacher and author, Fred Craddock, tells about a family that was taking a lovely Sunday afternoon drive one day, when suddenly the children began shouting, “Stop the car! There’s a kitten by the road!” The father kept on driving, but his children wouldn’t quiet down. He tried to reason with them. The kitten was probably someone’s pet. It might have a disease. The family already had too many pets.
It didn’t do any good. The children insisted that a true loving father would stop the car for a stray cat. So finally, the father drove back to the spot and reached for the scraggly kitten. The ungrateful little cat scratched him! Fighting an instinct to leave the kitten behind, the father packed it into the car and took it home.
Once at home, the children created a bed for the kitten out of their softest blankets. They fed the kitten droppers full of milk. They petted and fussed over and loved on the kitten. Soon, the kitten was purring and rubbing on family members, especially the father, as if he had been adopted into a new family.
The father looked at the wounds on his hand left by the frightened and stubborn kitten. Then he looked at the comfortable, well-fed kitten rubbing against his leg. Had the father suddenly become more worthy of love? No. His intentions toward the cat had always been to do it good, not harm. Something had happened to the kitten that made it feel secure, loved, accepted.
That is why we have this day, this Reign of Christ/Christ the King Sunday. We are confronted in our lesson from the Gospel with a picture of Jesus dying on the cross. And yet the two are inseparable – Christmas and the cross. It is impossible to appreciate the events of Bethlehem except in the light of Golgotha. For the hand that reached down to bless our lives through a baby in a manger is indeed covered with scratches. That is where we must begin in understanding both the cross and the manger.
Before we get the brilliant star, a soft bed of hay, the lowing of animals intermingled with the sweet songs of Mary, and the gift-bearing magi, we must confront the crucified King. We must hear the taunts of “save yourself” that rang through the air, piercing Jesus more intensely than the nails, thorns, and spear. If we are to truly understand the crucified King we must witness a Jesus who responds with love, joining the criminals and us in our pain. It is through this joining with a crucified King that we find paradise.
We are joining the king of the convicts, crooks, and crucified. We are joining the king of the beaten, bruised, and broken. We are joining the king of the slain, slaughtered, and sacrificed. Christ’s reign is of a different kingdom, more like a kin-dom, a diverse community where healing and hope is lavished on all. He is not simply the King of the Jews, the King of Thieves, the King of the Crucified; He is King of the world and is showing a new way to rule, a new way to lead, a new way to love. The power of this king is revealed not when we look up, but when we look down, amongst one another, in each other’s eyes, when we look at the suffering of the cross.
And the terror of the cross was real. I know we wear crosses on our necklaces and carry them in our pockets. I know we have them in our sanctuaries and hang them from our review mirrors. But the cross was deadly and terrible. The cross was basically like the electric chair or gallows. The cross meant death.
Yet, it was on this death device that Jesus showed his true self. It was on this execution item that Jesus showed what kind of king he was. Not the kind of king that would have power of his people and rule them with might and fear. No, the kind of king Jesus would be had him experiencing the same pains as the thieves being crucified next to him. This was the kind of king the world needed to know. This was the kind of king that people should take seriously and read the sign nailed to the cross along with the wrists and feet of Jesus. That sign said “King.” Yes, this is the king.
But this king was not like other kings and didn’t just provide forgiveness to his subjects who gave him something in return. No, this king prayed for the forgiveness of God to wash over the thieves hanging next him, hurting next to him, dying next to him. Jesus knew that the world needed forgiveness even though we had no idea what we were doing, not only to Jesus, but to God. Would we kill others if we knew that God was in them? Would we deny life to others? Would we keep homes from others? Would we lock our doors to others? Would we hate others… if we knew God was in them?
Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and stoic philosopher, one of the last emperors who ruled a Rome of peace and prosperity, said to himself every morning, “Today you will meet all kinds of unpleasant people; they will hurt you, and injure you, and insult you; but you cannot live like that; you know better, for you are a man in whom the spirit of God dwells.” That is the kind of king Jesus was and that is the kind of God that is within us. What king, what God will we serve? Will we serve a God who despite death and terror, forgave us and loved us? Or will we serve an earthly ruler who demands that we die alone, covered in the weight and sin of our unforgiven lives. I know whom I want to serve because I know who loves me. King Jesus, the crucified one, the servant of love.
And so, I wonder today, who or what is our king or queen? Is our king or queen one of the flawed leaders of this country? Is our king or queen a television evangelist with a big smile and poufy white hair? Is our king or queen a sports star? Is our king or queen the security we feel from our gated neighborhoods or isolated lives? Is our king or queen the way we ignore those who are suffering so we don’t have to feel the pain? Who or what is our king or queen? Because if we look closely at Jesus we see someone who didn’t rule others from a place above or beyond people, but loved people alongside them in their struggles and suffering.
Dr. Karoline Lewis sees Jesus as that kind of king. She says, “One of the primary characteristics of our king is a commitment to solidarity with and in our suffering. The salvation in which we believe because of the cross of Christ is not just about Jesus’ death. It is salvation that the criminal received, felt, and knew both before his own death and Jesus’ death – that there was someone who saw his suffering, who was willing to stand in that suffering with him, who spoke up against his suffering in the form of empire, evil, and totalitarianism. That someone was Jesus. The criminal died knowing that someone was with him in his suffering.”
She continues, “I am not sure whether or not this lone criminal knew Jesus was the Messiah. I don’t think it really matters. But he did know that Jesus saw his suffering and suffered with him. He did know that the death of Jesus was a death that spoke volumes against the powers that try to shut down justice and shut up the cries of the oppressed.” And she ends her evaluation of Jesus as king by acknowledging, “In memory of Leonard Cohen, ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’”
We must follow a Jesus and worship a king who was pierced on the cross and broken by principalities and powers. It was in that brokenness that the light and love of God spilled into the world. And we must look for the cracks from the cross, the cracks in Jesus’ crown, the places that revealed a Jesus who wanted to heal us and change us, not by ruling us from on high, but by being with us in the pains and problems of our lives. And everywhere there is a crack in the harshness of this world, we must look for the light of God. When there is a crack in the glass ceiling and we see women preaching despite the hinderances of male authority, we find God. When we see the small cracks in Jim Crow and find moments of justice in our judicial systems regarding people of color, we find God. When we see the cracks in the walls that separate us versus them, blacks versus whites, Native-born versus immigrants, gay versus straight, rich versus poor, we find God there.
And when we find the light of God, we see king Jesus in the cracks of the cross. That light of solidarity in our suffering and love in our pain illuminates the hatred and violence in our world and exposes it for what it is. The cracks that appear from king Jesus on the cross reveal a glimmer of hope for those of us crucified each and every day beside the Christ. That is who a king should be, a king with a cracked crown. Because, “there is a crack in everything… that’s how the light gets in.”
Amen.