Luke 23:32-43
Two
others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with
him. And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there
they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the
left. And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what
they do." And they cast lots to divide his garments. And the people
sto
od by, watching; but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, "He saved
others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen
One!" The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him
vinegar, and saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save
yourself!" There was also an inscription over him, "This is
the King of the Jews." One of the criminals who were hanged railed
at him, saying, "Are you not the Christ? 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 we indeed
justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man
has done nothing wrong." And he said, "Jesus, remember me when
you come into your kingdom." And he said to him, "Truly, I say
to you, today you will be with me in
Paradise
."
Sermon
The
King Who Doesn’t Wear Purple
It’s impossible to read that scripture lesson out loud with out a
certain kind of hush falling over the room.
I felt it just now, and I imagine you did, too.
And you might even thought of it as being incongruous, like it
didn’t fit, because this is Thanksgiving Sunday and our minds and
hearts are filled with images of warmth and welcome and home and family
and friends and all the good things that we think about in connection
with Thanksgiving. And this
scene of Christ on the cross, with its intensity, with its deep emotion,
seems to us to belong in a special time set apart from the other
seasonal events of the church year.
The intensity of this scene belongs maybe in a Good Friday or
maybe a Maundy Thursday service; not necessarily on Thanksgiving Sunday.
It doesn’t feel as if it quite fits in.
I chose this because it was one of the readings for Christ the
King Sunday. And I think
somehow it is right that at the end of the Christian year, which is what
this Sunday is. The new
Christian year begins with the first Sunday of Advent as we start to
prepare for reliving the birth of Christ.
The end of the Christian year is a good time to reflect back on
the kingship of Christ and what it means.
That kingship, I submit to you, is something that we see
perfectly enacted in those moments when Jesus hung upon the cross.
It’s a kingship we remember not with the color purple, but with
the color white. Jesus is
the king who doesn’t wear purple.
What am I talking about? What’s
all this about purple and white? I
am referring of course to the colors that go with the seasons of the
Christian year. There is a
special color for every special Sunday of the year and Christ the King
Sunday is a Sunday to wear white. Like
when you wear white for Easter, or on Holy Communion Sunday each month
or for a Baptism; white has to do with a special moment in which the
glory of God is revealed to other people; that glory is reflected in
white. Purple is also
sometimes appropriate when talking about Christ.
But, if there’s a choice between white and purple, white is the
color to choose; because purple, in the world of the Bible is the color
of royal power. And on
Christ the King Sunday, we’re remembering that Christ was a different
kind of king; a king whose royalty included power, but a very different
kind of power; a whole different order of power; the power that lies
behind and beneath and surrounds in all that engulfing warmth and love
the universe; that kind of power; not the power that controls the
everyday events of peoples’ lives; like kings try to do.
Why is purple the kingly color?
Why does it define power? Well,
in most societies, we know through history that power has to do with
wealth and purple was expensive.
It wasn’t easy to get purple clothing.
The dye for purple that worked the best in the ancient world was
attainable through a certain kind of snail that lived in the eastern
part of the
Mediterranean
. You crushed the body
somehow and extracted the purple color from that process.
And because this was a rare source of dye, you had to have a lot
of money to buy a purple garment. Someone
who dealt in purple garments was selling what was basically a luxury
good. And the color purple
was associated with kings from that point forward because the color was
related to wealth; the king had enough wealth to import purple robes and
purple was a way of displaying your wealth.
Now, we do use purple in a complicated sense in the season of
Lent for the purpose of pointing up Jesus’ royalty.
But here, on Christ the King Sunday, where we’re making a final
and ultimate statement about Jesus’ royalty; the color purple is not
the color that we ought to use. Because
when Jesus was on earth, and his kingship was first realized, first
acknowledged, first declared, it was a peculiar kind of kingship.
He refused to act like a king.
He allowed his followers to greet him with the kingly cry of
“Hosanna” as he rode into the city of
Jerusalem
.
But immediately he made a speech at that moment that turned the
crowd against him. Weeping
over the faithlessness of
Jerusalem
, that wasn’t a very good political move on his part, it
wasn’t the kind of move that would lead the crowd to rally around him
and then start a battle. Jesus
knew that and yet he spoke those words.
He was not acting like a king ordinarily acts.
Pontius Pilate confronted him with the title “King of the
Jews” and offered him a chance to defend that title, to explain that
title and even to engage in an equal-to-equal debate.
The Roman governor, the officer of the greatest power on the
earth wanting to debate this man who was called the “King of the
Jews” and Jesus refused that debate.
He would not say a word in justification or in his defense.
And even then, instead to have his kingship mocked with a crown
of thorns, with a purple robe around his shoulders and the taunts and
jeers of the crowd, of the soldiers, of practically the whole world.
Jesus’ kingship did not include embracing the purple kind of
kingship, but on the cross, in a passage that I read just a moment ago,
I think we see Jesus beginning to act in his own kingly way.
He made two royal proclamations from the cross; in that high,
elevated place where kings make their proclamations.
Jesus, although helpless, yet somehow towering over the world and
defining the world by the shadow that he cast, made his proclamations.
The first – “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what
they do.” “Father,
forgive them” – a royal pardon given to his executioners.
Given to the ones who rejected and despised him.
Given to those who turned their backs on him and refused to help
him. Given to those who ran
away. Given to the whole
world in its faithlessness, in its inability to recognize who he really
is; that pardon, given to us. Forgiveness
for the times we have failed God, fallen short; that was his first
proclamation.
And then the second one: “Today,” he said to the thief,
“You will be with me in
Paradise
.”
Here we see the second part of the work that Jesus had come to do
as king of the universe. The
work he had come to do was to bring us into his company, with him.
To make us share his life, if you’re willing to accept that; to
work a transformation in us so that something of divinity comes alive in
our humanity. And we not
only bear the stamp of the divine image, but we begin to bear the
reality of the divine image. Not
only having our sins forgiven, so that we get into Heaven on a
technicality, but having our lives transformed so that we start
belonging in Heaven and living the life of Heaven and being fit to be
comfortable in a place, in a type of reality, that is so different from
all those failures and shortcomings that we are so aware of in our
earthly lives; not only forgiveness, but also transformation.
John Wesley insists on both of these in his version of the
Christian message; but all true Christians through the years, I think,
have insisted on both of these.
In one way or another, they had a version of talking about
salvation that includes not just being forgiven but also being made
better, being made whole, being healed, being glorified, being
transformed and brought into the divine life.
Christians for 2,000 years have been living, basking in these two
royal proclamations. They’re
different and yet ultimately they come together and are the same thing.
The thief on the cross received both.
And there’s something about his receiving both that tells us
something about what Christ the King was doing.
He said, “Today you
will be with me in Paradise.” He
didn’t necessarily say, “Today I’m going to transform you into a
totally different person; and then you’ll be with me in Paradise.”
But rather, “You”,
you, with all of your failures, with all of your sins, with all the
times you’ve hurt people. I
don’t know what this particular thief had done, but with all that he
was guilty of, he was going to
be joining Jesus in Paradise, joining the divine life after having
received that divine forgiveness; the accomplishment of the one who was
dying for our sins. You, I, each of us, in our own particular life stories, each of us
can be brought into that presence, into that new reality, into that
beautiful glory, with Jesus, in Paradise.
Think about the thief on the cross, think about how we know him
and remember him. We keep
using a word that probably his mother would not want us to use and that
word is thief. Even though
we think of him as being a part of God’s glory, if you want to put it
in very literalistic terms, (it is helpful to do this I think) think of
him as walking around in Heaven right now.
But everybody who knows him, everybody who meets him for the
first time, everybody who identifies him will do so by identifying him
as the thief on the cross who was forgiven and brought into the life of
Jesus. The name “thief”
remains because it is the concrete reality of the life he actually
lived. It is what gets
transformed, not so that it can just be thrown away, but so that with
all its human error it can still be brought into God’s ultimate story
for that thief’s life.
I’m confident that if Heaven is the kind of place where you do
get to meet people, and you get to meet people that saw Jesus being
hanged, that conversation will take place.
My first way of being able to identify him will be to ask people
where I can find this guy, where I can meet the thief who was on the
cross. “Thief” for him,
because that word thief means forgiveness and transformation, it has
been transformed to have a totally different meaning for him in the
ultimate and final work that Christ began.
Christ accepts our failures and transforms them into not just
stories of failure, but a part of the story of our redemption, a part of
the story that is not forgotten but that is kept in our identity forever
and ever.
Churches that want to grow, I think, want to do so partly as a
way of getting out of their own past in which there are things that they
are embarrassed about or ashamed about or things that don’t seem very
much like a thriving church. Churches
that long to grow, I think, dream
about the new building that they will build and the much larger size
their congregation will have, and they will think about how different it
will be then from what it is now. But
a wise church, I think, recognizes that although God moves us into
different levels of being according to his will in the course of the
life of the church, a wise church recognizes that we aren’t really
going to be doing what pleases God unless our future destiny preserves
the beauty that was there beforehand; that kind of rough and crude
beauty that belonged to us when we were a little church; the beauty that
involves the past; the beauty that recognizes the struggle you have; the
beauty that seems to make us humble right now; that beauty will not be
forgotten in our future beauty, in our future glory.
It will be a part of our story.
And the same is true in every life in this room.
Yours and mine and every one else that we love, we can pray for
the same kind of transformation to take place in them.
That Christ the King, by his two royal proclamations, will bring
us into his life in such a way that we will retain, in a transformed
sense, all the struggles that made us who we are; all the challenges
that have been so difficult for us to deal with; all those things will
somehow be made into a part of the beauty of God’s redemption of us.
All of that is the glory of Christ the King, all of that is the
reason we’re very quiet on this Sunday all of that underlies the
thankfulness that we feel this coming Thursday.
Amen.
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