"The King of the Jews is ...this one?"
Emily Martin
Seminary Intern
November 25, 2007
I think that Jeremiah’s partly to blame for all the confusion about Christ the King.
Listen again to this promise he makes:
5 The days are surely coming, says the LORD,
when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
and he shall reign as king and deal wisely,
and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety.
Jeremiah says this King will come from the right family, from the Branch of David—today we’d say, he’ll have good genes. But he won’t be a spoiled rich kid, you know, he’ll be wise. He’ll be clean-cut, moral, righteous—no drugs, no skipping school, certainly no criminal record. He will reform society so that its systems will be good and fair, and not leave anyone behind. But he won’t be a pushover either, he will keep us safe from outside threats, from terrorists and crazy dictators and foreign armies. And he’ll be able to save us from any mess we might find ourselves in.
I don’t know about you, but this King Jeremiah promises sounds to me a little bit like he’d have to be some sort of superhero, especially by the time you get to the first century, and salvation for the Jews means taking on the Roman Empire.
And a superhero is what it sounds like we’re getting when the angel Gabriel makes his announcement about a baby to be born, “He will be great, and he will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.” I hear that and think, “Ooh, ooh, this is the one. This is that King Jeremiah was talking about!!!”
Mary thinks so, too. She starts going on about justice and the overthrow of the powerful. Zechariah is filled with the Holy Spirit and says that God “has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.” Then the angel of the Lord appears and says, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” And those of us who are familiar with modern day superheroes and the league of justice are all ready with our lines: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Jesus!
But then we get to the end of Luke and he’s a… a criminal on death row?
That can’t be right. Our king was supposed to be righteous, not a criminal. And how’s he supposed to save the Jews from their Roman oppressors if they’ve nailed him to a cross? This can’t be right. Perhaps we were mistaken. This wasn’t the King Jeremiah was talking about after all. But Luke is insistent, This is the one. He even puts a sign on the cross saying so: “The King of the Jews is this one.”
For the Romans, I imagine it’s all one great big joke. Don’t worry, the Romans say, you can rest easy tonight, knowing our guys are hard at work getting crazy nuts like this off the street. I mean, really, this guy, a King?
It may be a laughing matter for the Romans, but for the Jews, it’s the ultimate humiliation. This man, hanging on the cross, is not the King they’d all been waiting for. This man was supposed to drive out the Romans, reinstate Jewish law, be the new and improved King David. Instead, he’s a convicted felon, sentenced to death, for perverting the nation, for conspiracy to commit tax evasion, for blasphemy, and for being a threat to national security.
If he really were a king, if he really were the messiah, the savior, the least he could do is save himself. That’s what all the superheroes do when they get in a bind, when they are captured by the enemy. I mean, if you can’t look out for number one, how are you going to take care of number 2 and 3 and so on? It’s what we tell pastors all the time—you have to take care of yourself—George, take a vacation!!—you’re no good to anybody if you burn out. You certainly can’t help anyone if you’re dead.
If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!
This challenge gets put to Jesus three times, by all levels of society. The leaders, the ones who know how to get power and hold onto it, scoff at him, saying, "He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!"
The soldiers, just working class guys, doing what they have to do to survive, also mock him, saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!"
Finally, even one of the other criminals, someone with all the cynicism of the powerless, keeps deriding Jesus and saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!"
Three times they challenge him to escape, to save himself. If you’ve read the rest of Luke, this pattern should tug at your memory. It should remind you of another time when Jesus was challenged to prove his Sonship, his Kingship, his claim to power…
“If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread (Lk 4:3).
“If you then will worship me, [all glory and authority over the kingdoms of the world] will all be yours (Lk 4:7).
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you…” (Lk 4:9-10).
“If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.”
The Devil is good. He’s really good. He hits Jesus the hardest when he should be the weakest, at the very beginning of his ministry and at the end. The first time he is tempted, Jesus has just spent 40 days in the wilderness fasting—the devil makes sure he is nice and hungry before he offers him that bread. He knows how idealistic and full of energy new ministers can be, so he offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. He makes sure Jesus is isolated and lonely out there in the wilderness with no one to talk him down, then he dares him to jump off the top of the temple.
Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!
Satan knows this is Jesus’ last chance to prove himself. His last chance to show these ignorant clowns, these puffed up “authorities” who really has the power. If this were a Hollywood film, right in the middle of all the taunting, Jesus would burst his bonds, miraculously heal himself, save all the other innocent people, and wipe out all the bad guys—hang them all up on crosses. See how they liked it. The crowds would go wild! Then he really could save everyone, he could crown himself King, and go on feeding and healing and teaching and liberating but with all the authority and resources of the empire…
But what does Jesus do? Nothing. He just hangs there, dying. Some king.
No, I take that back, he does do one thing, He says, “Father, forgive them.”
“Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
He asks his father to issue a pardon. And that gets somebody’s attention.
After all, only people with power can issue pardons. It’s one of those kingly privileges. Even in the United States, it’s one of the few executive powers that is virtually unrestricted—in fact, that’s part of why it’s so controversial. Technically, the President can pardon anyone at any time during his presidency, and can pardon as many people as he wants.
But I’ve never heard of any president issuing the kind of pardon that Jesus requests. It’s funny, if Jesus were aspiring to be King, I would have expected him to issue the pardon, but he doesn’t. Even at the end, he refuses to crown himself, he bows to God: “Father, forgive them.”
Them? Who is them? The leaders? The soldiers? The people, watching? The other criminals? The text simply says, forgive them. As far as I know, “them” without any specific antecedent just means “not me.” It just means, other people. Everyone else. You might expect Jesus to pardon his disciples for their cowardice and betrayal, after all they were his closest friends. Or maybe even the people who just stand there watching. But Jesus cries out for a general pardon, Father forgive THEM. And the amazing thing to me is…they are not even seeking a pardon! They are not even admitting guilt.
I wonder if it’s that request, “Father, forgive them,” that caught the attention of the other criminal, that made him see beyond the assumptions that the others made, that we all make, about what a King should be. Perhaps he heard Jesus ask his Father to forgive them, and he realized something. Only God has that kind of power, the power to pardon anyone and everyone, regardless of the sin, regardless of remorse.
Only God has that kind of power and might actually use it to pardon God’s own enemies. The God whose mercy is from everlasting to everlasting. The God who says, not “I will punish whomever I will punish,” but “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”
The defining feature of our God’s rule is not military strength, or economic dominance, or cultural superiority, it’s mercy, forgiveness, pardon. And maybe that old saying is true after all: Like Father, Like Son.
Like Father, like Son. I wonder if that’s the connection the one criminal made, when he rebuked the other criminal and said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. It’s funny, isn’t it? The only one in the whole scene that looks at Jesus hanging on that cross and sees him for what he is, a king about to come into his power, is another criminal on death row. But even he still wasn’t quite sure that pardon would be granted, that he would indeed be saved. A lot of us still aren’t quite sure either. Even after the assurance of pardon, we sing, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
When I was doing chaplaincy work in the Metro State Women’s Prison in Atlanta this past summer, one of my assignments was to make regular rounds at the prison infirmary. I had one patient there, Mattie Bird, who drove the nurses crazy. She claimed she was only 59, but she looked about 80. She was mostly skin and bones, missing a good many teeth, and couldn’t walk because of a broken hip. More often than not, her diaper would need changing.
In addition to being somewhat physically repulsive, she had a reputation for being demanding and ungrateful and sometimes downright mean. All during the night, she would yell at the top of her lungs—either in pain or loneliness or boredom, no one was quite sure which. Although I found her unpleasant at first, after a few weeks of talking, reading scripture, and praying together, we developed a relationship of trust, and I could tell that my visits really meant a lot to her.
For all that I had visited with Mattie, though, she never said a word about why she was in prison at her age. When I finally felt comfortable enough with her to ask, the most she would say was that she had violated parole. But she always wanted me to read to her from Revelation, especially the end, chapters 20-22. Now I, in my infinite wisdom and experience, decided I should only read the happy parts—the parts about no more death or crying or pain, the parts about Christ making all things new. I skipped all the parts about eternal torment and the lake of fire. I figured prison was torment enough.
But my supervisor challenged me about my selective scripture reading. If Mattie specifically asks you to read Revelation 20 and 21, don’t you think she knows what it says? Why does she not have the right to decide what scripture she wants to hear? She had a point. So the next time Mattie asked for Revelation 21, I didn’t stop after verse 7. I started reading the list of all the people who will be thrown into the fiery lake of burning sulfur, “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers—” and that’s where Mattie interrupted me. “That’s it,” she said, “that’s what they keep telling me. That I’m a murderer and I’m going to Hell. Is that true? Will God forgive me?”
And I was able to look her in the eyes, and say with confidence, “Yes.”
Because that’s not just what God does, over and over again in the Bible, that’s who God is. And it’s who Jesus is. And I thank God THAT is our King. I wouldn’t want any other.
Amen.
Charge (Luke 6: 35-36)
Go forth into the world,
love your enemies, do good, and lend,
expecting nothing in return.
Your reward will be great,
and you will be children of the Most High;
for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.