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Luke 23:33-43
A Sermon for Christ the King Sunday
How does it all end? We are at of the church year. We are looking back and also forward. I remind us that “the end” has two meanings.
One meaning of “the end” is termination; it’s over. The other meaning is goal: The end, the goal, has been reached.
We ask ourselves both: It’s all done? And we ask ourselves what does it all mean and ultimately where is it all going?
In detective stories there’s a puzzle, a detective, and at the end, the person who committed the murder is caught and punished.
To be sure, there are some detective stories where the criminal escapes. Those stories aren’t satisfying. You want it to work out in a positive way.
Of course this is basic to the way we think. Fairy tales have a particular form. They start out: “Once upon a time,” and they end: “And they lived happily ever after.”
The same is true for Westerns. And the same is brought out in religion.
There is the dying and rising God. Of course, there are problems, obstacles, but it all ends up in some positive way. In other words, God is nice, we are nice, and that’s nice.
There’s a famous line from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, and it comes in Macbeth’s soliloquy after he’s learned his wife has died and his enemies are closing in. He says: “Life is . . . but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Life starts out with a big bang and ends with a whimper.
On that cheery note, let’s see what texts the lectionary committee has given us for this final Sunday of the church year. They give us Jeremiah 23 about the false prophet. A prophet, of course, is simply a preacher. A real temptation for the preacher is, as said often in the Old Testament: “Tell us smooth things. Make us feel good. Give us a positive message.”
Then in the New Testament the pastoral letters talk about another problem, which is that people have “itching ears.” We want something interesting. Something different. Entertain us.
The preacher’s problem is often called the “Noah problem.” You remember Noah. He built this ark out in the middle of the flat lands, the prairie, and the people scoffed at him. That’s a dumb place to build a boat. But he said: “There’s something happening; there’s an end coming.”
The people scoffed: “Show me! The proof of pudding is in the eating. When it happens, I’ll believe you, but until then, you’re just a religious nut.”
The same thing is happening in this text in Luke 23. “Jesus, you say you’re the king? Well, come down from the cross. Save yourself and save us!”
That’s the Noah problem, the preacher’s problem: “Why should I believe that?”
And it’s even a greater problem than that.
One of the most important places in the Old Testament talks about false prophesy. That place is in Deuteronomy 13:1-5, where it speaks to the fact that some preachers, some prophets will give you a sign. Such a prophet will say: “Okay, I’ll show you,” and it says here that prophet then gives you a sign, does something, and it actually comes to pass, and then he says to you: “‘Let us go after other gods’ which you have not known and ‘let us serve them.’” That one, that preacher, that prophet, is a false prophet.
The point is: It’s not a matter of the sign, the proof. Don’t get fooled by that. The question is: Is it about the true God? That’s what the test is. Not: “Prove it to me; show it to me.”
And then in the end of this text in Jeremiah 23, it says: “When the right one comes, when the king comes, Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely, and this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness’” (Jeremiah 23:6). That’s the test. The Lord is Lord. The Lord is the one who makes things right, and anything else that pretends to, that deceives you into thinking that it is, is false.
That’s the task of the preacher. It’s not something that I can tell you that you can prove by whatever—some kind of logic, or feeling, or even a miracle.
No, the question is: Is the Lord, Lord?
With that we come to this text in Colossians 1:13-20, where it says: “He is the very image of God.” He is the fulness of God. He is the one who created it all. He is before all things. And the reason he did it and is the one is because he made peace by the blood of the cross. That’s verse 20. That’s why he is Lord, and that’s what righteousness is.
It’s parallel to what Paul writes in Philippians 2:5-11. Those verses are a hymn sung by the early Christians, and they go like this: “He is the one who emptied himself and even took on death, even death on a cross.” And then in verses 9-11: “Therefore . . . at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.”
In a different way in 1 Corinthians 15:28, it says that at the end God will be all in all, King of kings and Lord of lords. It says that also in the Book of Revelation and in Handel’s Messiah.
What does that mean for you and me?
Let’s give this question cosmic perspective.
They say that the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years in diameter. How big is that? It’s ginormous.
We fall into two temptations, two ditches. When you thing of how enormously big it is, who am I? I am so small in comparison that I think I can escape judgment. I am a minute nothing, a tiny grain of sand, so I can do my own thing, because it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the universe.
Of course, that is corrected by the fact, as it says here in the text, that he came and took on our flesh and our history, that which happens here and now on this earth with you and me, and made it all infinitely valuable and precious.
He sent his own Son here. That means whatever happens here is really important. It’s not only that he watches over every bird that flies and every blade of grass, but every moment of our lives is precious. He is Lord of that and is concerned about that because of the making him flesh, the incarnation.
But then we can fall in the opposite ditch, which is to say: “My little kingdom is important.” It’s important to keep here in mind what is said in Mark 13:31: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
That’s the perspective, and it’s there in the Bible. There was the great kingdom of Egypt, and it rose and fell. There was the great kingdom of Assyria, and it rose and fell. There was the great kingdom of Babylon, and it rose and fell. And there was the great kingdom of Persia, and it rose and fell. And there was Alexander the Great. After him there was the Ptolemaic kingdoms. They rose and fell. Then there was Rome, and then after the New Testament there is the great Emperor Charlemagne who came and went. There is Spain which rose and fell; France rose and fell. England rose and fell.
Kingdoms rise and fall, but his word continues.
The same is true for our little kingdoms, for whatever kingdom you’re building. All of these things come and go. They’re important, but always in perspective. The perspective is that it is his kingdom, and he is Lord. The question is, as in Jeremiah 23:26: “The Lord is our righteousness.”
That’s the text and the context, the perspective under which everything comes.
In conclusion, recall another place, Psalm 118:6, which says the same kind of thing: “The Lord is on my side, what can man do to me?”
The parallel to that is in Romans 8:31: “If God is for us, who is against us?”
That’s our comfort, but we remember, too, the flip side is not whether God is on my side, but whether I’m on God’s side.
It’s not my kingdom, me, me, me. But rather: He is Lord and he will be Lord. We may fool ourselves sometimes that he isn’t Lord, and we think we can get by building our own kingdoms and being Lord ourselves.
But the comfort is: He has made himself Lord by his blood on the cross and that makes everything well.