Christ the King sermon

Just remember. Jesus is not Superman.

Vicar David Fleener
Sermon: Christ the King Sunday, 11.25.2007
Luke 23:33-43

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you and peace from God our Father and from Jesus Christ, our true King and Sovereign. Amen.

Today's Gospel has special significance for me. About two years ago, not long after Lindsay and I were married, my Grandma Rosezella lay dying in Boone County Hospital in Columbia, MO. After suffering for years with a Parkinsons-type illness, she was finally about to die. Grandpa George had just transferred her to hospice care, and the whole family came to say their final goodbyes.

This was Labor Day weekend, so seminary classes were about to start. Lindsay and I rushed down to see her. She couldn't see or speak, but she did know I was there, and mouthed a greeting to me. At that point I reached for her King James Bible in the room, and Lindsay and I read several passages aloud. The last one we read was today's very Gospel. “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.”

I closed the Bible, and we visited with the rest of the family before going back home. She held on another week before she died.

When I look back on that time, I realize that I must have been trying to comfort myself more than Grandma. It's a common credo in hospitals and nursing homes that the family needs pastoral care and comfort more in such times than the dying. When we see a loved one die, we are confronted with the frightening specter of death itself.

But on the cross, facing that specter himself, Jesus assures the criminal, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.”

What is Jesus talking about? What is Paradise? And what does this text have to do with today, Christ the King Sunday?

As comforting as the Gospel is, there are some uncomfortable moments. It's paradoxical. You may remember this reading from earlier this year – it was read as part of the Palm Sunday Gospel. On Palm Sunday, the crowds wanted to crown Jesus king. But the royal procession does not last long. The procession into Jerusalem becomes the procession to the cross. We find the king himself on the cross, suffering and dying. No self-respecting king would be caught dead there if he could help it. But Jesus is there, and what's more, about to come into his kingdom. The cross is his throne.

Maybe we've been conditioned to dislike those who, like the religious leaders and criminal, call for Jesus to get down from the cross. But maybe in the back of our minds we're more like them than we thought. An obviously powerful messiah is an attractive messiah. What kind of messiah lets his mission come to the cross? At first glance – a weak one, that's who. A “Superman” Jesus, who destroys death by not having to suffer it himself, is a much more attractive Jesus.

About thirty years ago, Fr. Robert Capon, an Episcopal priest, wrote a few words about the Superman Jesus.

“. . . almost nobody resists the temptation to jazz up the humanity of Christ. The true paradigm of the ordinary American view of Jesus is Superman: "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It's Superman! Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way." If that isn't popular christology (what we believe the Messiah is), I'll eat my hat. Jesus -- gentle, meek and mild, but with secret, souped-up, more-than-human insides -- bumbles around for thirty-three years, nearly gets himself done in for good by the Kryptonite Kross, but at the last minute, struggles into the phone booth of the Empty Tomb, changes into his Easter suit and, with a single bound, leaps back up to the planet Heaven. It's got it all -- including, just so you shouldn't miss the lesson, kiddies: He never once touches Lois Lane.

You think that's funny? Don't laugh. The human race is, was and probably always will be deeply unwilling to accept a human messiah. We don't want to be saved in our humanity; we want to be fished out of it. We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It's not that we weren't looking for the Messiah; it's just that he wasn't what we were looking for. Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. He would carry a folding phone booth in his back pocket. He wouldn't do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying."

Fr. Capon hits it on the head. Jesus, of course, didn't have “secret, souped-up, more than human insides.” He is God, sure, but he is also fully and completely human, with all of the frailties it comes with. When Jesus conquers death and promises Paradise as King, he does it precisely through weakness. The royal power of God doesn't involve a blaze of glory. It doesn't get us out of our humanity. That is precisely how the power of God saves us – in our humanity, with all of our imperfections. The power of God we see on the cross is extraordinary in its power to forgive despite intense, inhumane suffering -- “Father, forgive them”. It is also extraordinary in the promise of Paradise.

The promise of Paradise isn't some far-off thing. It's an immediate thing. “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.” It might be more helpful to think of Paradise as representative of a restored relationship with God. In Revelation, the word is used to describe the Garden of Eden, a symbol for “pre-fall” humanity. When we are on our own crosses – when we face our own deaths, a family member's death, or are faced with some other weakness, we hear Jesus' promise, from the cross next to us, that “today” we will be with him in Paradise. Today we are restored to God. Today we are a part of Christ's reign.

We don't need a Superman Jesus. We need the fully human Jesus who shows his divine power as King by dying on the cross as one of us. When Grandma Rose was about to die in the hospital, she heard those words of promise from the One who has been there, who has seen and suffered it all, as we did. In that hospital room, the Reign of Christ burst from the pages of that old Bible, and for a few moments, Paradise itself was in that room.

Remember – Paradise is not some empty promise. It is a royal decree made from the throne of the cross. And praise and thanks be to God for not abandoning us in our humanity, but taking it head on in every way to make us citizens of his kingdom – of Paradise. That's royal power. Amen.