Never Once

Crucified Jesus, by DevCageR

Lections: Christ the King, AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The other night, I lay awake in bed, attempting in vain to fall asleep, my mind crawling with anxieties: homilies, visitations, classes, home repairs, afterschool schedules, medical appointments. I worried over many things, though just one thing was necessary. So I began silently to recite the Jesus Prayer, like a mantra, centering my soul: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

I grew calm, slipped into sleep, and dreamt of vast calamities exploding all around me. Yet in my dream, I did not fear. Though I walked amongst catastrophe, none of it touched me directly. And I awoke in the morning more rested than I had felt in quite some time. When Christ is your King, nothing and no-one else is. When Christ claims you as His own, nothing and no-one else can.

It’s like the three denunciations of the unholy trinity that we recite in our baptismal liturgy. “I renounce them,” we say: the devil, the world, and the flesh. Those are the echoes of what used to be three brief minor exorcisms performed on those about to be baptized—the whole notion being that when we belong to Christ, when we are one in Christ, then no other power can claim us, be it supernatural, or governmental, or the sin within our souls. You are Christ’s and He is yours, forever.

I am reminded of the martyrdom of Polycarp, who at the end of his long and faithful life found himself sentenced to death by that state. The Romans gave him one last chance to recant, to denounce Jesus Christ, to which Polycarp replied: “86 years I have served Him, and never once has He done me wrong. How could I blaspheme my King?” They tried then to burn him alive, but the flames would not touch him. Witnesses claimed that instead of burning flesh they smelled only fresh-baked bread.

Christ the King Sunday is one of the youngest celebrations on the Western Church’s calendar, first instituted in 1925, making today its centennial. The Bishop of Rome proclaimed this festival in response to the rise of totalitarian ideologies. The Nazi Party had been founded five years earlier; the Bolsheviks had taken Russia three years before that. These extremists of the Right and the Left claimed absolute authority over every aspect of life, and of death. They sought to control both body and soul.

And in response, the Church said, “No. You have no power here. Christ alone is King.” The Third Reich and the Soviet Union each at one point seemed unstoppable. Go and look for them now! They are dead, and we are here. And Christ is still our King.

Now, I’ll admit that the imagery of kingship gets a rather bad rap these days. We are Americans after all, and like the Romans before us, we pride ourselves on having fought violently to rid ourselves of kings. Interestingly, the modern gap in asset ownership, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few, by some measures exceeds that of medieval feudal Europe, but that’s a conversation for another day.

We don’t like the idea of a king, be he Mad George III or Tarquin the Proud. Liberty, equality, fraternity, &c. And in this we stand in good company. The Hebrew Bible has a very negative assessment of kingship. When the Israelites demand a king, the prophet Samuel warns them that such a ruler would send their sons to war, take their daughters as servants, steal the best of their crops and flocks. Alas, when the people ignore all his caveats, Samuel then says that they’ve rejected God.

Because if you make a man your king, that means God no longer is.

The rest of the biblical record is a litany of failures, apostasies, horrors, and senseless violence. Almost every ruler, north and south, comes off as evil or stupid or both. Josiah came close to scriptural approval, but died in an unjust war of choice. David, most beloved of all of the kings, destroyed his own dynasty over laziness and lust, having succumbed in old age to the temptation that the king should live above the law. Let me tell you, that did not go well for him, nor for anyone around him.

Or how about the Maccabees, the Hasmonean Dynasty, who fought tooth-and-nail against the Greeks, only to have their grandchildren grow more hellenized than anyone? A conflict amongst them led to the rise of the horrid House of Herod, and we all know how that went, don’t we? Never a good sign, when you’re the irredeemable villain of Christmas. Kings are awful because they are men, handed ultimate authority. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Washington’s greatest triumph was laying his power aside.

But this, after all, is the point of Christ the King Sunday. There are no good kings on this Earth. Humans cannot be gods; when we try, we all become demons. But God is not like us. His ways are not our ways; His thoughts not our thoughts. God does in Christ what we could not. He lays aside His crown, His power, His infinite authority; and He comes down here in the mud and the blood to live and laugh and work and sweat and cry and die as one of us—the perfect One of us.

Nothing in Jesus’ kingship looks like any of the kings we have known. That was the Romans’ point, when they festooned His head with thorns, wrapped His shredded skin in a military cloak, and wrote above His crucified body, “This is the King of the Jews!” They thought that was hilarious. This scraggly desert rabbi, in off the backwater Galilee, riding in on a donkey? What a joke! What a weak and useless scrap of flesh, to discard as we see fit. The strong do as they will; the weak suffer what they must; ain’t that right, Jesus?

He was the opposite of everything we thought a king should be: King of the poor, of the meek, of the hungry; King of this conquered people, the Jews; King of the blind, of the crippled, of the dead! They broke Him—we broke Him—in the worst way we knew how. And what did He say? “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Now I ask you, what sort of a King forgives His murderers even as we murder Him?

The only true King. Only Jesus Christ.

And I tell you, He has conquered. Not with the sword. Not with fire. Not with legions of angels raining righteous indignation down upon us from Heaven above. No, He has conquered by His mercy, by His grace, by His infinite self-sacrifice—by a love that cannot die and fills the pits of Hell to bursting! There is now nowhere where we can flee where Christ is not the King. If we fall down into Hell, He is there; if we fly up to Heaven, He’s there. We cannot escape from His love.

He sees every sparrow fall. He counts all of the hairs on your head. He knows your every thought, every fear, every sin, every regret—and loves you all the more, loves you infinitely better than you could ever love yourself. And yes, He’s enthroned in the heavens. And yes, He has shattered Hell’s gate. But you will find Him reigning here in every wayward soul: every hungry child, every homeless vet, every hospitalized patient, every incarcerated criminal, there is Christ the King!

Don’t look for armies. Don’t look for glory. Don’t look for gold. You won’t find Him there. He is in bread and in wine. He is in water and the Word. He is in the need of your neighbor. He is in your prayer in the night. He is in everyone whom no-one sees: Head of the Church, Firstborn from the dead, He who is before all things, creates all things, holds everything together, and reconciles all Creation to and in Himself. He is with us when we suffer. He is with us when we grieve. He is with us when we die.

And no matter what happens, no matter how we despair, no matter what evil may befall us here below, Christ the King comes now to you and proclaims in the voice that birthed all of existence, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with Me in paradise.”

46 years I have served Him. Never once has He done me wrong. How could I betray my King?

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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