What Curious Kind of King is This?

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Christ the King Sunday, November 24, 2019 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

It seems a curious way to celebrate Christ the King Sunday, to focus our attention on the crucifixion, doesn’t it? We can all think of a whole host of other passages that might do better in its stead—Peter’s Confession, a healing or feeding miracle, Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, or the calming of the storm. So why focus on the crucifixion? Why focus on Jesus at his most vulnerable, despised, and outcast? What curious kind of king is this who is mocked and scourged, offered sour wine to drink and hung under a hastily scribbled sign—“This is the King of the Jews?”

There are really two things going here. The first is that the crucifixion shows us how our ideas of what it means to be a King don’t match up with God’s ideas of Kingship. The second is that Jesus on the cross is actually embodying what James Allison calls, “a strange act of communication.” Jesus is showing us our imprisonment in human-all-too-human modes of scapegoating violence and showing us a new way to be as a community of forgiving love where no one is sacrificed, or cast out. Let’s take these in turn.

It’s pretty clear that the disciples around Jesus don’t really understand what it means for Jesus to be King in God’s sense of it. The disciples identify Kingship with power, control, domination, and triumph. They expect Jesus’ Messiahship to look like every other form of rule they have encountered. And when they think of Jesus as the Messiah they likely have visions not of sugar plums, but of corner offices, and triumphal parades dancing in their heads. That’s why, of course, immediately after Peter’s Confession of Jesus as the Messiah, he gets a dressing down from Jesus (an exorcism really) for his objection to Jesus’ pronouncement that he will be imprisoned by the authorities, executed, and on the third day rise again.

This picture of Kingship doesn’t fit with Peter’s picture of who and how Kings are. What about the gold and the riches? What about the sumptuous feasts and dancing girls? What about people bowing and scraping before him since he hitched his wagon to the winning train—Jesus? Jesus explodes that whole picture of what it means to be a King and shows us, climaxing in his death upon the cross, what the true nature of Kingship actually looks like from God’s perspective. It’s the same thing with the leaders and the soldiers around Jesus—“He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” and “If you are King of the Jews, save yourself!” We see how deeply they don’t understand what it means to be a King. They think being a King is about saving your own skin, and Jesus shows us he is one for others, the one who wants to save our skins, not his own. What curious kind of King is this?

When we look at Kingship as it’s revealed in the person of Jesus we see that it presents a totally upside-down picture of what King looks like when compared to our images of Kingship. This is a King who doesn’t sequester Himself away in a fortress with alligators roiling in the moat, but who goes out indiscriminately, squanderously, as boundary-crossing love, as water to wash, oil to heal, bread to feed, and wine to slake the thirst of the parched. This is a King who comes not to be served, but to serve. This is a King who feeds instead of being fed, who washes the feet of the disciples instead of getting a pedicure and being fanned by palm fronds. This is a King who pours himself out, who empties himself for others instead of storing up and hoarding. This is a King who on the way to his death forgives his persecutors instead perpetuating the cycle of violence, who recognizes their blind unconscious participation in mob violence and has compassion on them. This is a King who gives Himself away, who runs out to meet us while we are still far off, who touches us in our perceived uncleanliness and declares us beloved children of God.

I remember this time last year, a seminary colleague of mine was wondering aloud about how one can preach Christ the King in a culture of toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and mansplaining. Aren’t Kings just more of the same old same old? I was a little surprised, because this brilliant priest had written a powerfully evocative thesis on the centrality of the Maundy Thursday liturgy where we, in imitation of Jesus, have our feet washed and wash the feet of others. The whole point is that Jesus is a radically different kind of King, the true King who lays down his life for others. Christ the King Sunday actually shows us in a powerful way how upside-down and backwards our human ideas of Kingship actually are. How do you preach Christ the King in a culture of toxic masculinity? Easy. Show us how the true nature of Kingship as it is revealed in the person and work of Christ Jesus—the washing one, the feeding one, the healing one, the forgiving one. What curious kind of King is this?

So that’s one thing that’s happening on this day—we are getting a true picture, an icon, of what Kingship looks like through God’s eyes. And we’re called, each of us here, to imitate the servanthood of Christ, to look to the boundaries of our selves, our community, our city, our nation, and the world and ask who’s being left out, cast out, shoved aside and go towards them as the love we see in Jesus that is who we really are. But the other thing that’s happening on this day is that Jesus on the cross shows us something pretty stark about how we as human beings structure our society through scapegoating violence heaped on the backs of innocent victims. The crucifixion shows us something about the largely unconscious and mechanical way we go about securing the peace by casting out some individual, or group of individuals, in order to make ourselves feel more safe, more in control. If we could just get rid of “x” person or group, then our life would finally be ok. So we cast out. We expel. And for a moment there is a flood of relief, of temporary peace. But it’s always fleeting and sooner or later we have to cast about for someone else to expel. And so it goes.

This whole process is what Jesus lays bare on the cross. This is what you do, he says. This is what your estrangement from the source of all beauty, goodness and truth looks like. This is the cost of your illusion—that you hang the Son of God on a tree outside the city walls between to thieves and quibble over who gets his clothes. That is one way to see how the cross actually saves us—it reveals, once and for all at the place called the Skull—how human beings habitually create false community through violence, and reveals to us a different way to see and be.

What if, the crucifixion asks, instead of creating a community by expelling those dirty others who aren’t like us, we actually welcomed them in as our own hearts, as precious members of the body of Christ? What if, the crucifixion asks, instead of scapegoating others we saw them with the eyes of love, with God’s eyes, with the eyes of “in you, and you and you, and you, I am well-pleased?” That’s why we can say that the Church, the new community founded in love that knows no boundary, is founded at the foot of the cross. Jesus, forgiving his persecutors on the way to his shameful death, shows us what true community looks like—the Peaceable Kingdom. That’s how the author of Colossians can say that he has “rescued us from the power of darkness.” Jesus lays bare the scapegoating violence that is at unconscious heart (“forgive them lord they know not what they do”) of how we do business, and shows us a new way to see, a new way to be, our true inheritance with the saints in light.

Christ the King is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, sacrifice itself is sacrificed, that we, like the Dismas the Thief, might be with him today in paradise bathed in the light of loving embrace as Rembrandt’s etching so powerfully evokes. Revealed once and for all, that scapegoating urge gradually comes undone, victim by victim, water-cooler conversation by water-cooler conversation, and we see little flickerings of paradise even here, even now, the face of Christ in the outcast stranger. That’s what it means for Christ to have first place in everything. That’s what it means to call Christ King. Amen.