NewCreation

Homily for Solemnity of Christ the King, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the last Sunday in the Church's year, the Solemnity of Christ the King, or the 34th Sunday in Ordinary Time. So it's on this occasion that we get our last chunk of St. Luke's Gospel, ending our run through with Luke, the cycle of readings which we, I hope, have allowed to speak to us throughout this year. And because it's the Feast of Christ the King, we come upon some of the very, very few places where Luke actually uses the word "king" with relation to Jesus. And it's interesting: Luke doesn't go in, unlike John and other Gospel writers, for bringing out how Jesus was a king. The only place he actually uses the — talks about Jesus as king — is in these passages. Pilate asks Jesus after the authorities have said, "This one says he is Christ, a king." Pilate then says, "Are you the king of the Jews?" And Jesus says, "You have said it." And then the only other times we get a reference to Jesus as king is the soldiers, who are also Romans, mocking him and offering him sour wine and saying, "If you're the king of the Jews, save yourself," and then the plaque over his head saying, "This is the king of the Jews." But I'd like to point out, therefore, that in St. Luke's Gospel, strictly all references to Jesus as king of the Jews are mockery — either false accusation or mockery. Even the title "This is the king of the Jews" is, I think, mistranslated in most of our Bibles, because the word order is "the king of the Jews, this one" — "the king of the Jews, this." It's more mockery than it is a solemn proclamation. It comes across as a solemn proclamation in the other Gospels, but here it's part of Gentile mockery of Jesus and therefore also Gentile mockery of God's holy people. That's how this is set up in Luke's Gospel. Now what I'd like to do, in order to show how what actually Luke is bringing out even with this mockery is actually far richer than any of our normal understanding of kingship — it's how Jesus is the principle of all the structure and power of the world, but in a far more gentle and subtle way than we're used to with simply straightforward references. So I hope that'll become clear as we go through this. So just to remind you: before this has happened, Jesus has fulfilled being the real human, the real Adam. He's been in the garden of Gethsemane; sweat has rolled down his face and his body acquiring a reddish hue, so that it's as if coagulated clumps of blood — because the ground was reddish, so it looked like a sweat as if of blood. It wasn't blood; it was a sweat with the red earth. And the words "red earth" and "Adam" are linked together in Hebrew. So here he is fulfilling the promise to Adam from Genesis: that "by the sweat of your brow shall you earn…" "your living until you know it thus flows down to the earth" — that's Genesis 3:16. So prophecy concerning Adam is being fulfilled, and here this is the true human, the one who does follow the will of the Father rather than the first Adam, who followed his own will. So the first Adam is being brought to life, and then shortly after this, within the next couple of sentences after today's Gospel, we get the sensation of creation running down. The sun goes out, the veil of the Temple is ripped, so we go outside the created order into before creation, and Jesus breathes out his spirit. So that which had been hovering over creation before creation is now going to rest until it comes back in to fill the new creation. So light going out, creation retreating outside creation, and then the spirit coming back in. All of that is what's going to be brought out in the next few verses in some books. So there's been a massive build-up to this point, and every one — almost every one — of the words in today's Gospel is part of an indication that something hugely powerful is really going on. So we start: "And the people stood by watching, but the leaders scoffed at him." I'm not sure that the "but" is right there. It could merely be "and the leaders scoffed at him" — the contrast is not necessary to make them apart. And why is this important? Because the mixture of watching and scoffing comes in Psalm 22, which we of course know very well from our Holy Week services, where "all who see me mock me, they make mouths at me, they shake their heads." Well, "all who see me" and "mock me" — those literally are the two verbs here, the same verbs: watching and scoffing. So literally Psalm 22 is being fulfilled here — the one which we know as "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Here Jesus is living it out on the cross. And the leaders scoff at him, saying, "He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Messiah of God." Now this takes us straight back to Nazareth and Jesus's first day of his ministry in the synagogue, where after he's finished speaking he says to them, "No doubt you will say to me, 'Doctor, save yourself.'" And so here, exactly as predicted, they're saying, "Save yourself — Doctor, save yourself." So his own prophecy is being fulfilled there. And we'll see very soon another prophecy from very early on in the Bible being fulfilled. "And if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one." And it's interesting that it uses both of those. The Messiah of God — that's the anointed one, so that's the Davidic figure brought out in our first reading this Sunday. And the chosen one — the chosen one was Israel rather than a particular figure. Saul is sometimes referred to as "the chosen one" — the beginnings of the kingship of Israel. But "the chosen one": this is a reference to Isaiah 28, where God is setting a foundation in Zion by placing a chosen stone, a precious one, one that is precious in his eyes. We see how important it comes to be, because the distinction is between precious and shame. The one that is chosen is the one that people think, "Yes, this is something being done for us," and the other one is a shame. So they're saying it right, but they're saying it serves to shame him. We're going to see how important that dichotomy between the chosen one and the shamed one is, because everything in today's Gospel is around that fundamental dichotomy. The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine. So of course the Romans — please remember that while from our point of view this is simply a collection of individuals who were reading into the history in a story — the point of the soldiers is that these are Romans, these are Gentiles. So the Gentiles are mocking him, and thereby fulfilling Zechariah 12.3: "See, I am about to make Jerusalem a cup of reeling for all the surrounding peoples. It will be against Judah also in the siege against Jerusalem. On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it shall grievously hurt themselves." And in the Greek version it's "I will make a mockery," so that the foreigners should be doing the mocking is very much part of Zechariah. And also it's in Habakkuk 1, chapter 10: "Kings they scoff at, and of rulers they make sport; they laugh at every fortress and heap up earth to take it." So the Gentiles again are scoffing at the king. It's the Gentiles who apparently realize that this is a king, even if ironically — that's what they're doing. And then furthermore they behave properly, as it were, by offering him sour wine. They come up and they're offering him vinegar, which of course is referenced in a psalm — Psalm 68, or is it 69 in our version? — at 69 in our version: "They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." Let's remember that again the fulfilling of the psalm is quite plausible in those circumstances, on the grounds that one of the things that people genuinely did do at public executions was to give people an anaesthetic drug mixed in wine for them to drink, so as to make it less painful. There was an element of humanity in public executions: that given what is going to be a terrible show, you diminish the pain somewhat by offering some sort of anaesthetic in wine. But here the important thing is that it's fulfilling the psalm. And they say to him — the soldiers, so remember this is the Gentiles — they're taking a slightly different form of mockery. They're saying, "If you are the king of "The Jews: save yourself!" So here they are, enacting – rather as the leaders had enacted – the fourth temptation. Remember, when Jesus had been at the very beginning of his ministry, or before his ministry, he was tempted in the wilderness. Satan had asked him a whole lot of questions: "If you are this, do that." So here's the fourth one: "If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself." So whereas at the beginning of the Gospel the remark had been, "The devil then went away and left him until an opportune time," well, here's the opportune time, when the accusation is coming both from Jewish leaders and from Gentiles. There was also an inscription over him: "The king of the Jews, this one." King of the Jews – that's him – a mocking piece of solemnity. Now then we have next to him the criminals. One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah?" – and again the word here is "blaspheme," kept blaspheming him – and saying, "Are you not the Messiah?" And that's a reference to 2 Kings. So here's this rather marvellous reference from 2 Kings 19:22: "Whom did you mock and revile, and against whom did you raise your voice and lift your eyes on high? Against the Holy One of Israel." So the whole notion of this person who is already lifted up on high blaspheming, mocking – the word is the same. So this is the criminal blaspheming him, saying, "Are you not the Messiah?" – so calling him, actually recognising the name, but again in a mocking way – "save yourself and us." So what do we have here? We have the thief – or as it describes him, the evildoer – who has clearly been caught up in the mockery of the crowd, in the mockery of his leaders. So he's showing himself still to be part of that, even though he's suffering the consequences of, if you like, group violence. He's still on the side of the people who are engaging in the lynch mob: "Save yourself and us." But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?" And of course the same sentence of condemnation refers to Deuteronomy 21:22: that the one who is hanged upon a wood shall be cursed by God. So they're both under the same condemnation; they're all under this condemnation of being cursed by God. "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? For we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." And this appears to be again a reference to Job, where Job in the midst of all his suffering says, "I know I have done nothing wrong" – whereas here it's not Jesus saying it, but it's this thief with him, who is going to receive because of that his complete forgiveness, because he recognises the innocence of the one who is being cast out. Then he says, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And Jesus replies, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise." I hadn't picked up the importance of the word paradise until I looked up all the other times that the word paradise appears in the Greek New Testament, in the Septuagint, in the Greek Bible. And it mostly means orchard. Jesus is clearly making a reference to the tree. There's the tree of life, which is of course in paradise, in the garden, the orchard, in Genesis and Ezekiel. And then there is the curse of the tree. So the whole question is: are you part of the lynch mob, in which case there is a curse going on here? Or do you recognize that this is the tree of life? There are two trees — or rather, there are two people interpreting the tree in an entirely different way. And the one who recognizes that this one is entirely innocent, that the one who is being falsely accused is the source of life — that one has perceived that what looked like a place of shame is in fact the precious place that has been put down as a new foundation. In other words, all these references bring out the duality of what is going on here. On the one hand, something positive coming into being, so that Jesus really is the principle of all the powers of the world, he really is going to be able to feed the people, he really is going to be the new Temple — those temptations which he had overcome — and he is actually opening up the tree of life, making it possible to come into the garden, the orchard, the beginning of new creation. So that's how Luke shows both how our forgiveness works, and at the same time how what is going on is vastly more powerful than an individual scene, but a place where all the kings and princes of this world gather together, look at the king as anointed, and don't know what they see. It's Psalm 2 that is being reenacted here, beautifully, at the center of Luke's passion. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.