Christ the King – November 21, 2010

Jeremiah 23:1-6

            On this Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the church year, we have an OT text that contrasts the past leadership of God’s people with God’s promise of future leadership.  And it’s a stark contrast – first God condemns “shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture” – presumably the unfaithful kings who got Israel into the mess that eventually led to their exile in Babylon.  That’s a disturbing image: shepherds, who by definition are supposed to keep the sheep together and take care of them (think Psalm 23), instead are scattering and destroying the flock!  It’s like an abusive parent – it’s just all wrong.  And I suppose there are such leaders at times – of nations and of churches – leaders who do more harm than good.  God says he will “attend” to them.  But God has other business too: gathering what’s left of the scattered flock and bringing them back into the safety of their pasture where they can thrive and multiply.  Again, the immediate context was a promise that God’s people would return from exile to their homeland.  Then we’re told God will raise up shepherds who will do their job, so that God’s people don’t have to live in fear – a vision of restoration, renewal.  Verse 5ff. gets more specific, saying God will promote a “righteous Branch” from King David’s family tree who will deal out justice for God’s people.  Christ the King, anyone?  Of course, Jeremiah didn’t have Jesus in mind, but the nature of biblical prophecy is that it can have more than one meaning and be fulfilled over and over – so it’s appropriate that the church sees Jesus in this promise.

I wish verses 7-8 were part of the reading as well, because they really deliver the payoff of this text: Jeremiah says God has such good things in store for God’s people that, when they talk about the “good old days,” they won’t be reaching way back to the Exodus from Egypt – they’ll be talking about what God has just now done.  Good stuff.

Colossians 1:11-20

            This text is from the beginning of Paul’s letter, and Paul typically follows his initial greeting with a prayer of thanksgiving for those he’s addressing.  And that’s what he’s doing here – praying that God will strengthen them.  What were the Colosssians dealing with?  Well for one thing, competing theological points of view.  On the one hand, he mentions folks who are all about the “elemental powers of the universe,” which would appear to be a polytheistic Greek worldview; on the other hand he refers to others who stress things like circumcision and Sabbath-keeping – i.e., adherence to the Torah.  I’m reminded of all the hectoring and “advice” that comes at us constantly through the media about what we’re supposed to be thinking, doing, valuing.  I’m also reminded what a challenge it is to figure out what it means to be a follower of Jesus in a 21^st-century American context.  Well, in verse 13, Paul says something quite profound: through Jesus’ death and resurrection (and our participation in them), God the Father has “transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son….”  So, even though all the other kingdoms are still around, nonetheless in some sense we’re already living in Christ’s kingdom.  Paul then goes into what’s commonly believed to be a hymn about Christ, the basic idea of which is that all things were created through Christ, so even now he is holding everything together.  I observe two particularly interesting points in the hymn.  First, even the rulers and thrones of our world were created through Christ (verse 16).  Second, God reconciled (made peace with) all things through Christ’s death on the cross – a pretty different form of governance (and throne) from those of our world.  It makes me think that, as messy as it seems to work out following Jesus in our context, somehow he can work it out and help us “hold it together.”

Luke 23:33-43

            I’ve always thought it was gutsy to have this text in the Lectionary for Christ the King – here just before Advent we hear this very Lenten reading, which tells us in very stark terms about Jesus’ style of ruling (see also the last verse of the Colossians text).   Notice that Jesus on the cross has a criminal at either side of himself, which reminds me of all his teachings dealing with people’s obsession about where they’re sitting at the table in relation to the host, and what it says about their status (e.g., 14:7-14).  Also, the people standing around the cross, the soldiers and the one criminal taunt Jesus to “save himself,” which calls to mind his earlier teaching about “those who want to save their life” (9:24) and the need to take up our cross.  The second criminal to me embodies Jesus’ earlier teachings about prayer.  When he admits his own guilt and asks Jesus to remember him in his Kingdom, I’m thinking “thy kingdom come” (11:2) and “God be merciful to me, a sinner” (the Pharisee in 18:13).  So it’s no wonder Jesus responds positively to him. 

That response – “Today you will be with me in Paradise” – presents something of a conundrum to me.  If Jesus isn’t raised for another couple of days, and if the Jewish idea was that when you’re dead you’re dead, then how does that work?  I don’t know; the best I can say is that maybe it’s an already/not yet paradox – that, even though the kingdom hasn’t arrived yet in its fullness, the dead already get to take part in it.  I think of Jesus’ words to the Sadducees, that God is “God not of the dead but of the living” (20:38).

Works Consulted:

Richard J. Clifford’s notes to the Jeremiah text, and David Tiede’s notes to the Luke text in the HarperCollins Study Bible