The Last Sunday after Pentecost: The Reign of Christ, Year C, 2016 – Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43
We are celebrating today the Feast of the Reign of Christ. Christ the King: this is the final moment of the Christian year: everything, the birth and the death and the resurrection, the ministry of healing and teaching and the outpouring to the Spirit; the birth of the church; everything leads up to this day. Crown him with many crowns! We sing. Jesus reigning over all creation. Redeem the time; our own lives redeemed. This is the end toward which the year and our whole life as Christians moves.
It is an end we badly need. The news has been full this week of footage from Aleppo. The whole East section of the city is nothing but rubble, and yesterday the last hospital in the city was bombed. Where now to care for the wounded? Pray for Houri Barbarian, whose home is not far from this area.
The city is being destroyed by rebels and the leaders of the nations. Is it Russia or Syria who is bombing? No one seems to know. The city is being destroyed and the people are scattered. How many million refugees now from Syria alone?
Jeremiah knew about this time.
“Woe to the shepherds,” he cries as Babylon looms on Israel’s horizon. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture, says the Lord.” Jeremiah was talking about the siege of Jerusalem and its eventual destruction. The great city of David was like Aleppo reduced to rubble, and the temple, the place of God’s presence among the nations, the beacon of God’s presence among the nations, was burned, and the people were carried away from their homes into a long exile.
A voice is heard in Ramah, Jeremiah says;
Weeping and loud lamentation.
Rachel weeping for her children
And she will not be comforted,
For they are no more.
Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture, says the Lord.
There is a fracturing that runs deep in the history of the world, nation rising against nation and people divided against themselves; children lost and the noblest works of human hands—Solomon’s great temple in 587 BC; ancient Palmyra just a year or so ago—destroyed. In our own time Aleppo, and in our own place, here in Toronto, in our own diocese, the fracturing of the Anglican church.
Jeremiah finds the problem in the failure of the shepherds, because their task is precisely to shepherd: to keep the people close to their God. But in Jeremiah’s time the shepherds are running scared, and they turn to the pagan nations around them, trusting in the power of the secular state rather than in the power of the unseen God. Behind the destruction and the scattering there is a failure to walk with God, and the failure is often quite concrete. The leaders are politicians rather than people of prayer.
And this too, like the fracturing that haunts the world, is a temptation that runs deep. The two are connected.
If we are beleaguered and threatened, if our churches are bleeding people, let us turn, we say, to the nation around us. Let us seek our strength in its wisdom; let us follow the mind of a majority that does not know God, and find in their ways our salvation.
Woe to the shepherds, Jeremiah says, who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture.
This way lies only disintegration. It is not here that we will find our help.
Our help, as the psalmist knows, is in God, the Lord of heaven and earth. It is not in the world that does not know God. We are here in the midst of the world for the sake of the world, to stand in its midst as a beacon, a people lit and shining and healed by prayer.
We are the people who proclaim Christ’s reign. Yet we act as if Christ’s reign is not true, as if it is not the culmination of everything we do in the worship of the church, the end toward which all our worship leads.
When we ask, “Where is God in this,” in this fracturing that haunts our world and our church, it is a good idea to remember that we choose often to act as if there were no God.
This day, this Feast of Christ the King, stands here at the culmination of the Christian year to call us back. Remember that it is God who is our shepherd. Remember that we are first of all people of prayer. We are the people who turn to God first of all, and last.
Christ the King is our wake-up call, and it is one we badly need.
But it is also—because after all this is God we are talking about, God who is not only judge but also always shepherd—this day is also our sign of hope.
For Christ rises over the world as King on this day, and his throne has the shape of the cross. Do you see the hope that this day speaks?
Luke sees it, and he offers it to us with characteristic grace.
And when they came to the place called the Skull they crucified him there with two criminals—two wrongdoers, the Greek says—one on his right hand and one on his left.
This, the inscription read over his head, This is the King of the Jews.
To the bystanders, to the leaders of the people and the Roman soldiers, it is a joke. Here is the King of the Jews, dying between two criminals on a cross. Some king.
But for Jesus, this is the whole point.
It is on the cross that he is with us. It is the criminals, the wrong-doers, those who have wandered far from God; it is the wrongdoers he cares about. It is precisely when we are at the place of the skull that God is with us.
And when by our turning away from him we bring on ourselves our own destruction, then he is with us to save.
This is what God’s power looks like. It looks like faithfulness, the faithfulness that endures, the love that pours itself out – even to death – for the people who are dying. God is the shepherd who does not destroy and scatter, but gives his very life to save.
Do you not fear God? The second criminal says. We are paying the just penalty for what we have done, but his man has done nothing wrong.
This man has done nothing wrong, and he is standing with us, he is suffering with us, in the place of the cost of the wrong we have done. In the place of our scattering. In the place of our dying. He is suffering with us to save.
This is the love that gives itself, not just to be there with us in the place of disintegration, but to restore. To bring us back. It is not solidarity we are talking about, but salvation. It is Christ the King with whom we have to do.
Jesus, remember me, the wrongdoer says, when you come into your kingdom.
And Jesus, dying there beside him, says, Today. Today you will be with me in Paradise.
For today is the day the kingdom dawns. This is the day of Christ’s reign, this day when he dies between two thieves on a cross. This is the place of his reign, here between the thieves at the place of the Skull.
O love, how deep, how broad, how high.
Luke knows that Christ is king. And he knows that his throne is a cross, because this is where God is with us. To the world it is foolishness. But to us who are being saved, Christ the power and the wisdom of God.
Christ the king. Look at the front of your bulletin. The sun and the moon rise under his lifted arms, his arms lifted on the cross. He holds the whole world in his hands, and the serpent is crushed under his crucified feet: Christ the image of the unseen God, first-born of creation, first-born from the dead. Here is the power, all the saving power of God. Here in Christ crucified, dying between two thieves on the cross.
So in this time, so in all times of scattering and division, Aleppo’s destruction and the fracturing of our church, he calls us to turn to him. We come at the end of the Christian year to the Christ: Jesus Christ, rising over time and all things on the cross.
Christ with us in our failure and in our great need, Christ holding the sun and the moon in his arms. This day he asks us to be with him.
Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. Let this be the prayer of our hearts, at the first moment of every day and at the last. Let this be our hope and our guide. Just this: Jesus. Christ our King. Let us turn to him.
