Sermon - Christ the King (11/24/2019)
Jer. 23:1-6; Ps. 46; Col. 1:11-20; Lk. 23:33-43
Three times they told Jesus: Save yourself.
“The leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others. If he is the Messiah of God, God’s chosen one, let him also save himself!’” Jesus healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, cast out demons, and raised the dead. Jesus walked on water, calmed the seas, took one kid’s lunch and fed five thousand. If Jesus has the power to do all those things, if Jesus had the power to save countless people whom he met in his life, then surely he has the power to save himself. Right?
“And the soldiers also mocked him, saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.’ For above Jesus’s head was the inscription: This is the King of the Jews.” Crucifixion was how the Empire demonstrated who really had power: For the Roman soldiers, their source of power, their King and their God was the Emperor, whose local representative was the Emperor’s representative, the governor Pontius Pilate. For the Roman soldiers, the gospel, the good news, was that Rome had the power to establish order and security. The Empire has the power to take troublemakers and evildoers and strip them of their clothes and their dignity, nail them to trees and hang them for all to see until they are dead. So Jesus, you claim you have power from a source that is higher than the Emperor? Prove it. Here is what the Emperor’s power can do to you; if you are a king, if you have a greater power, then save yourself from us. Go ahead and try.
“And one of the criminals hanging there insulted him, saying, ‘Aren’t you the Messiah? Then save yourself, and us!’” If you’re the Messiah, then get yourself out of this mess, and us too while you’re at it. If you’re not going to save yourself, and us, then what’s the point of calling yourself the Messiah, the King? Isn’t that what self-respecting kings are supposed to do? What a fraud!
Three times Jesus was told: Save yourself. If you are who people say you are, you can save yourself. And why wouldn’t you? If you can’t, or won’t, save yourself, then what kind of a Messiah are you? What good is a Savior who can’t even save himself? Three times people told Jesus: Save yourself. And three times Jesus said nothing to the people who told him to save himself. And then he died.
Why? Jesus ignored three separate pleas to demonstrate that he is the Messiah, the King, the Savior by saving himself. Why didn’t he do it?
I suppose one possible answer is that he couldn’t. People thought he was the Messiah, the Savior, the Son of God, but maybe they were wrong. Maybe he wasn’t. Some of his followers came to that conclusion, at least at first. Think of the two disciples on Sunday morning walking home to the village of Emmaus. As Luke tells it, a stranger came up to them and asked what they were discussing. One of them responded: “Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people. We had hoped he was the one to set Israel free.” But maybe not.
And yet before that first Sunday was over, those two disciples changed their minds and so did many others. In the light of Easter, they confessed that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the Savior, that he truly is the King of Israel, and not just of Israel, but the true King and living Lord of all creation. Which would mean that he did, in fact, have the power to save himself on the cross – but that he made an affirmative, conscious choice not to do so. And that makes the question even more urgent: Why? If he could have saved himself, and chose not to, why?
And maybe one way to answer that question is to ask ourselves, What if, in fact, he had chosen at that moment to save himself? Hands and feet fastened to the cross, high above the ground, it would surely have been an impressive feat, a miracle for sure. Those who saw it would have said, Well, maybe he is the Messiah. Maybe he is the King of the Jews. Maybe they would have believed that he was the Son of God.
But what good would that belief have done for them? They would have come to believe that God was like a superhero in the movies, that God can sweep in at the last moment, what the drama people call a deus ex machina. Just when all hope had gone, the hero somehow comes in to save the day, beat the bad guys, get the girl, and live happily ever after. And then what? When they eventually experienced loss and failure themselves, as all of us do? When they eventually came face to face with their own deaths, as all of us must? What good will their belief in a Superman God do for them when they are up against the wall, and no help from Superman is forthcoming? What then?
In his cell at a Nazi prison camp, awaiting execution, the great Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote these words: “Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Human religiosity makes them look in their distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. But the Bible directs them to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.”[1]
We may think we want the Superman God, the deus ex machina that miraculously saves the day. But this God does nothing to save us from the fear of the next day, and the day after that, when our luck runs out and no miracle comes to rescue us. What we need, Bonhoeffer said from prison, is the God who is with us in the midst of our darkest night, who has chosen to come down from heaven and to share this world of struggle and loss with us, who has taken upon himself all of this world’s brokenness and shame, all the way down into death and hell. Jesus does not exempt himself or save himself from this world’s evil but absorbs it, and takes it all with him down to hell – and leaves it there, where it belongs. And just as he now lives, free from the fear of suffering and from the power of death, Jesus can help us by bringing God to us in the midst of our suffering and shame, so we too can be free from their power.
It was in another prison cell that Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians, from which we also read today. “God has rescued us from the power of darkness, and brought us into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son.” Notice that Paul does not say that God rescued us from darkness; Paul at that moment was in prison, and I don’t imagine that Roman prisons in the first century were light and airy places. But he says we have been rescued from the power of darkness, precisely because Jesus, God-in-human-flesh, freely chose to embrace darkness and death for our sake, choosing not to save himself from suffering and shame so that we, with him, could be free from their power.
Three times people advised Jesus to save himself, and three times he didn’t even respond. But there was a fourth person in today’s Gospel passage who addressed Jesus, and who got an answer. One criminal had asked Jesus to be the deus ex machina: Save yourself, and us! But then the other criminal rebukes him. Have you no respect? You and I, he says, we have no right to complain, but this man has done nothing to deserve this. And he turns and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus says, “I say to you, today you are with me in paradise.”
Today you are with me in paradise. Today. I’m struck, as we conclude this year’s readings from the gospel of Luke, how often that word appears at key moments in Luke’s story. I give you tidings of great joy, for today is born for you a Savior. Jesus rolled up the scroll and said, Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Jesus looked up and said, Zaccheus, hurry and come down from that tree, for today I must eat dinner at your house. Today you will be with me in paradise. The good news that Luke has for you is that the kingdom of God is here, today, right here, right now. Not in a little while, after we die, when we go to heaven, but now, today, if you have faith, you are with me in the kingdom.
You may not have imagined that you could be in paradise while you are hanging on a cross, but if in faith you have seen God in an innocent man accepting death in order to defeat its power over you, then God is fully with you, and you are with God, and if that’s not being in God’s kingdom I don’t know what is.
In this Thanksgiving week it is customary for us to acknowledge the many good things in our lives, and these are indeed blessings from God for which we should be grateful. But in our most difficult times, when blessings seem far away and we don’t know where to turn, only the suffering God can help us. We can truly be thankful that God in Christ chooses to be with us even in the deepest darkness and shame. And whether your blessings this year are many or few, be grateful that today, you are delivered from the power of darkness and brought into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son.
1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Eberhard Bethge, ed., enlarged edition, 1972), p. 361.