Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism, Christ the King 2013

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43

A while ago I came across an online game called Geoguessr. It drops you at random in Google Street View, somewhere in the world, and you have to work out where you are just by the clues you can see in the street scene around you. It’s a little bit addictive, but it’s also quite educational. You learn all sorts of subtle differences in street signs and road markings, style of houses, and other things that vary from country to country.

One thing that changes is the way in which a nation marks its political identity. The USA is a dead giveaway - most people seem to have the stars and stripes flying in their front gardens. But then the USA is a republic, and the flag is an important national symbol. 

But, in this country, we are in a kingdom. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to be precise. But if we were to be dropped at random in this country, and didn’t know where we were, how could we tell?  Well, there are clues. The Queen’s image is on coins, banknotes, and stamps. My tax return, which I must get round to filling in quite soon, is headed “Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs”. British passports request and require in the name of Her Britannic Majesty that the holders be allowed to go without let or hindrance to, say, Benidorm. So there are signs everywhere of the kingdom we are in.

There are signs in today’s Gospel reading, too. In fact there are signs of two kingdoms in the story we’ve just heard. But one is obvious, and one is hidden. The one that you would see all around you, if you imagine yourself in that scene on Calvary, is the Kingdom of Caesar, the Roman Empire, by whose authority Jesus and the men with him are being put to death. In fact the signs are there to the point of oppression, soldiers everywhere, the banners with the Roman eagle, public gratuitous violence used as a tool of social control. Rome is a kingdom of violence, oppression and exclusion, where might is right. 

And of course Rome is not unique. It was just the particular example, at that time and that place, of how human societies have tended to run from the beginning. The Gospel is the story of that: of how human beings have been living trapped in violence and rivalry and fear. But it is also the story of how we are now being liberated from these things by Jesus.

Because Jesus spent his ministry preaching the Kingdom of God. This is a kingdom of peace, not violence; a kingdom where the oppressed are set free, the excluded brought back in, the untouchable are embraced. The Kingdom of God is founded on love. 

So when we say that Christ is King, we don’t just mean that Christ is the ruler instead of earthly authorities like Caesar or Herod. We also mean that Christ rules in a completely different way. His kingdom is not founded on violence and fear, but on truth and life, holiness and grace, justice, love and peace. 

These different understandings of kingship collide in today’s gospel reading. Those who crucified Jesus mock him as “the King of the Jews”. He is being put to death by a system of violence which will not tolerate rivals. The priests and authorities imagine that this is what Jesus is, a rival, a threat to their own power, a would-be king according to their understanding of what a king is. 

But in truth Jesus was the entirely innocent victim of the system of violence in which he had never collaborated. He simply wasn’t a king, a rival, in that sense at all. And one person in this scene realises this: the penitent criminal crucified next to Jesus. 

We often think of this person as the “good thief”, but the word Luke uses simply means an evildoer. It’s quite non-specific. He could be anyone. He could be one of us. He has become the victim of the violence by which he has lived. But he sees in Jesus how different things could be. Jesus is the innocent victim who forgives his murderers. In the light of Jesus the dying criminal sees that his whole life has been wrong. He has lived his life governed by the lie that violence and rivalry and fear determine who we are. The false identity he has constructed for himself collapses before the truth of Jesus.

But he does not give way to despair. He responds with some of the greatest words of faith that have ever been spoken, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” 

Those words can only be spoken out of faith in the resurrection. They only make sense if God will raise Jesus from the dead to a new life which he can then share with those who believe in him. And of course we only read this story because of the Resurrection, and the Resurrection is the lens through which we read it. No-one would have bothered to record the death of yet another victim of the system, unless something new and unexpected come out of it. Something that would change the world.

And because God raised Jesus from the dead, he really is a king. Not in the way of the world, whose kings construct their false identities out of violence and fear. Jesus is King, because he receives his Kingdom of life and peace and justice as a gift from his Father. The God in whom there is no violence or death has vindicated Jesus as King of all creation.

And this enables us to understand not just Jesus, but ourselves. Our story is transformed by his story, our life and death by his life and death and resurrection. The presence of the crucified and risen victim enables us to re-imagine the world. The Kingdom of God is something that God gives to us entirely freely, when we have nothing of our own to bring. Like the dying criminal, we discover that the loss of the life we have lived according to the world’s standards enables us to receive the gift of true life from Jesus, and to enter the Kingdom which is God’s free gift.

Jesus changes our story, from hopelessness and death to life eternal. This is shown symbolically in the sacrament of Baptism which we shall celebrate shortly. We begin by making the sign of the cross on Ja’Kai and Tayannah, as that sign was made on all of us at our own baptism. The cross is a sign of contradiction. It stands for loss, for rejection by the world, for death; but its meaning has been changed by Jesus. Because of him, it is also the sign of the ultimate victory. By his death he has destroyed death. Seen through the lens of the Resurrection, the cross is a sign of glory.

And then Ja’Kai and Tayannah, marked with the cross, will pass through the waters of baptism. Just as Jesus passed through the deep waters of death, so we too die with Christ and rise with him to new and eternal life. The font is both a tomb and a womb. The tomb of sin and death, and the womb that gives birth to eternal life.

That life is freely offered to all. Like the dying criminal, we too can respond to Jesus in faith. No matter what our life has been up to now. No matter what issues of violence and fear and half conscious compulsions we still struggle with. Jesus is liberating us from the past. 

Our true, eternal, life is God’s gift in his Kingdom and therefore will never be taken away. The kingdoms of the world, governed by violence and death, will not triumph. Jesus, their victim, is risen from the dead, and is the true and eternal King. At the blast of the seventh trumpet in the Book of Revelation a great shout goes up in heaven: “The Kingdom of the world has become the Kingdom of our Lord and his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.”