Reign of Christ Sunday
“The Days Are Surely Coming” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Jeremiah 23:1-6/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 23:33-43/NRSVUE)
For the past few weeks, I’ve been waking up way too early — and by that I mean before five am (that’s been fun). But hey, at least you can watch reruns of “The Golden Girls” at all hours of the day and night these days (thanks be to God for that).
After this had happened to me a few mornings in a row, it dawned on me that setting back the clocks an hour on November 1st was likely the cause of my sudden circadian misalignment (yeah, there really is a name for it). I must admit I was kind of surprised that such a slight change in my relationship with time could throw me for such a loop. And this week certainly hasn’t helped the situation any.
For starters, the recent arrival of our kids for the impending holiday means that two of us in the house are used to living on Mountain Time while three of us are accustomed to Eastern Time. On top of that, the church calendar says that today is the end of the year while on the calendar most people pay attention to the current year doesn’t end for another thirty nine days.
As if this weren’t disorienting enough, the gospel reading you just heard recounts the events that took place on Good Friday even though it’s four days before Thanksgiving. Oh, and while today’s passage talks about Jesus’s death, we’re going to be celebrating his birth in about a month. It’s all pretty chaotic; small wonder I can’t sleep.
Then again, when it comes to Jesus, the chaos shouldn’t be a surprise at this point — it’s just part of the whole Jesus experience. Heck, we knew it was coming before he’d even showed up — you know, when we heard a pregnant Mary singing about her soon-to-be-born son scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, sending the rich away empty, lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things. And the whole story of Jesus’s life and ministry to has really been about him turning things upside down wherever he goes.
But we knew that what happens in today’s reading was coming from the very beginning too — and so did Mary. Foretelling the great things that Jesus would do, Simeon told Mary back in chapter two that her child “was destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed,” and all of that ended up being true.
But anyone who’s experienced the way the world works knows that the proud don’t like being scattered and the powerful don’t like being brought down and the rich don’t like being sent away empty — and they’ll do everything they can to do make sure that doesn’t happen.
And so Simeon also told Mary that a sword would eventually pierce her own soul, and that’s the moment at which we find ourselves today. The thing is, though, nothing was going to deter Jesus from doing what he had to do — not the proud, not the powerful, not the rich, not even death — because that kind of commitment to God is part of the whole Jesus experience too.
Jesus came here to let us know that death no longer has the final word, and it definitely doesn’t in today’s passage. It begins with Luke’s account of the crucifixion itself, which is incredibly terse and matter of fact for an event of such importance; here’s what he says: “When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.” That’s pretty much it. And Luke does this on purpose because he wants us to focus not so much on the way Jesus died, but rather on the way Jesus lived — right up until the very end, in fact.
Most of today’s passage describes Jesus’s interactions with the people who are there with him at his crucifixion — the soldiers who cast lots to divide his clothing and mocked him, the people who stood by watching, the leaders who scoffed at him and, of course, the two criminals who were crucified alongside him.
And these conversations — which take place at the conclusion of Jesus’s earthly life, and are considered by us on the last Sunday of the church year — bring home two of the most important things that Luke wants his readers to know about Jesus’s life and ministry: the nature of forgiveness in God’s reign, and what it actually means for Jesus to be the “Messiah.” Unsurprisingly, Jesus’s understanding of these things is very different from how the world tends to see them.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they are doing.” These are Jesus’s first words here — and they’re ones that generally make top ten lists of his most memorable quotations. But if you were reading today’s passage closely on the screen, in your bulletin or in your pew Bible, you may have noticed something odd about the sentence I just read: it appears in brackets. And it appears in brackets because there are some ancient manuscripts of Luke that don’t include it. For this reason, Bible scholars are still torn about whether it was part of the original text or was added later and, if it was added later, whether Luke himself was the one who added it. At the very least, it’s consistent with the way Luke speaks about forgiveness — on the expansive availability of God’s grace — throughout his entire Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles (which Luke also wrote).
Forgiveness is really important to Luke because it’s really important to Jesus, and Jesus’s willingness to ask God to show forgiveness in today’s passage — even to those who taunted and crucified him — is the culmination of so many of the stories we’ve heard him tell over the past year. And if we haven’t realized it yet, it becomes incredibly clear here that, when it comes to grace, Jesus played by a way different set of rules than the rest of us do.
So, what is God’s grace like? Well, if we’ve paying attention to what Jesus has been saying all along, apparently it’s like a father who welcomes home his prodigal son; it’s like a rich man who throws a party and then, when the other rich people can’t be bothered to show up, throws opens the doors and welcomes society’s outcasts; it’s like a shepherd who refuses to give up on that one lost sheep. And here, at the end of Jesus’s earthly life, the nature of God’s grace is brought into tighter focus.
I say this because we’re no longer talking about an abstract parable; today it’s as real as it gets. And as Jesus finds himself crucified between two criminals, he asks God’s to forgive “them” — to forgive all who have conspired to bring him to this point.
But then the focus gets tighter still. Jesus is there, dying between two criminals — one taunting him as he begs Jesus to give into the temptation to save himself and to save them all; the second rebuking the first, acknowledging whatever wrongdoing brought him there, and then asking Jesus not to save him but only to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. As a result of this memorable exchange, the tradition has labelled the former as the “bad” criminal and the latter as the “good” criminal; us humans love our labels, don’t we?
We’re never told what these other two guys did in order to find themselves on the receiving end of this most terrible of punishments. Some throughout the ages have referred to them as “thieves” but that seems unwarranted. The Romans generally didn’t execute common criminals by crucifying them because it took a lot of time and effort. Crucifixion was a public display of torture and dominance reserved for those who committed the most unforgivable of crimes against the empire: namely, challenging the social order and the emperor’s authority; it was meant, above all else, to remind everyone who was in charge.
But maybe, in the context of this story, it doesn’t really matter what these two did; perhaps we just need, for whatever reason, to think that the good criminal did something worse than Jesus did, and that the bad criminal did something even worse still. But it is kind of odd that the so-called “good” criminal responds to his “bad” counterpart’s taunting of Jesus by declaring that Jesus has done nothing wrong because, at least by Roman standards, he most definitely had.
Jesus responds to the good criminal by telling him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” They are dying Jesus’s last words to another human being, so they’re pretty important. And they’re so simple, right? Good criminal, bad criminal; the former will be with Jesus that day in paradise, and the latter not so much, right?
Even this late in the gospel story, hearing all that we’ve heard, knowing all that we know, we’re still tempted to cling to our worldly ideas of who’s good and who’s bad, who’s worthy of God’s grace and who’s not, who gets into paradise and who doesn’t. We always want to be judge and jury with respect to who deserves and who’s earned God’s favor (even though, deep down, we know that none of us deserves God’s favor).
Let’s be honest, folks: after all we’ve heard and learned from Jesus about God’s capacity and willingness to forgive, what do we really think happened to the “bad” criminal — and to all of the other people we don’t like, for that matter? Do they get to be with Jesus in paradise too? Then again, maybe we’re still not ready to think about that one too much because it’s not fair, it’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Like I said earlier, it can be really uncomfortable when our understanding of and relationship to the order of things is upended.
But the bad criminal does raise an interesting question here: if Jesus is, in fact, the Messiah (which, of course, he is) then why doesn’t he save himself? That’s what a rational king would do, right? Well, apparently not this king.
Again, we’ve heard this one before — way back at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry when the Spirit leads him into the wilderness and the devil tempts him to exercise the authority that any worldly monarch would exercise. But he refuses to do so then, and he refuses to do so now. This king, this Messiah, who certainly could save himself if he so chose, consistently decides to put his call to serve God and to tend to the needs of others (namely, us) ahead of himself.
Can you imagine how hard this choice would have been for Jesus in this moment? Love God and love your neighbor as yourself sounds so simple, in theory, but what about in practice? What about when it means self-sacrifice? Be honest — what would you have done? What would any leader or king you can think of who happened to be in possession of absolute power have done — even in circumstances way less extreme than the ones Jesus faces here. Would he worry about himself or would he worry about other people? I think we all know the answer.
But what kind of king would you rather have, what kind of kingdom would you rather live in? Jesus might not the be the Messiah folks expected, he might not even be the one they necessarily wanted, but he’s the one they needed — even if they didn’t appreciate that at the time. And he’s the one we need — even if we don’t necessarily appreciate it these days either.
It’s pretty simple, really: If you want stability, you’d best look to Rome; if it’s some good trouble you seek, then look to Jesus. But by this point you should probably understand what you’re getting yourself into.
Jesus: scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, and sending the rich away empty; lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things; practicing radical forgiveness, creating chaos and turning the world’s expectations upside down for two thousand years and counting.
May his words and actions inspire us to do likewise.