The Wonder of Christ’s Kingship
Proper 29
Christ the King Sunday, Year C
Jeremiah 23:1-6 | Psalm 46 | Colossians 1:11-20 | Luke 23:33-43
Alarmed by the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Rome and Germany in 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted a new feast to commemorate the Reign of Christ. The pope intended that the baptized would remember their primary allegiance to Christ and not to any nation-state, race, or ruler. But this new feast day did little to halt the descent into totalitarianism, war, and genocide in the following decades.
As we celebrate the centennial of Christ the King Sunday, we have reason to wonder if history is repeating itself with the resurgence of authoritarianism at home and abroad.
What can this final Sunday of the Christian year open up for us in our current moment of crisis?
We regularly employ language connecting Jesus with kingship whenever we refer to him as the “Christ” (anointed one or messiah). But our habitual use of this language masks a more complex history.
Human kingship was never God’s idea. In fact, we could easily identify Yahweh as the founder of the “no kings” movement.
When Israel grew impatient with the seemingly ad hoc structure of judges, the elders clamored for a king like other nations (1 Samuel 8:4-5). Yahweh’s response to Samuel reveals a deep resistance to their desire for a king:
“Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them…Now then, listen to their voice; only–you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”
– 1 Samuel 8:7-9
Yahweh alone was to be their King. So Samuel unpacks what having a human king will cost Israel. Employing the verb “take,” the old judge hammers home the rapaciousness of powerful men. The king will take Israel’s sons and take their daughters to be his soldiers and servants, take their fields and grain to fatten his cronies, take their slaves, take their flocks…Take, take, take.
Samuel’s warnings do nothing to quell the people’s clamoring. Israel’s lust for a king as the projection of national power is a flat rejection of Yahweh’s reign.
The choices facing God are seemingly few and equally bleak.
Yahweh can accept Israel’s demand and acquiesce to all the violent corruption that will follow.
Or God can block Israel’s demand and terminate their covenant relationship.
Knowing Yahweh’s repulsion over Israel’s rejection of divine kingship, we might expect God to choose the latter option. Instead, God tells Samuel to give what Israel demands.
Sometimes, as Romans 1 warns us, it is a terrible thing that God grants what our hearts desire. Centuries later, Jeremiah’s prophecies against Judah’s kings vindicate Yahweh’s admonition against human kingship. The prophet delivers a devastating indictment of the preceding royal administrations for the way that they fattened themselves at the expense of the people, the sheep God had entrusted to the kings to shepherd:
The kings’ conspicuous affluence and consumption including costly enhancements to the palace as their pet vanity project (22:14)
And their violent fraud and greed: “Your eyes and heart are set only on dishonest gain…and for practicing oppression and violence” (22:17)
British Old Testament scholar Christopher J. H. Wright writes,
This is a picture of the abuse of governmental power and privilege that is all too familiar…Western governments too have colluded in allowing (indeed rewarding) excessive greed and accumulation of phenomenal wealth by a tiny few, while the social economic cost…is disproportionately loaded onto the shoulders of the increasingly impoverished tax-paying population. Jeremiah’s charges would stick in some very glossy high places today (Jeremiah 239).
Wright’s assessment in 2014 following the Great Recession rings even louder in 2025. Human shepherds employ power for their own benefit instead of for the care of the flocks God has entrusted to them. The rule of human kings is invariably self-seeking and unjust.
But the witness of Scripture does not end with the reign of terror by human kings.
In Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, Samuel Wells identifies the powerful move that the Living God so often makes in responding to evil human choices. God employs an approach that constitutes neither blocking (a flat “no”) nor mere acceptance (a blank check for our choices and their premises). Instead, God “overaccepts” our choices by saying “yes AND…” God’s “yes AND…” weaves our morally malformed actions into a grander, more powerful story. God outnarrates what was violent, ugly, and broken into a story of truth and redemption.
Overaccepting imitates the manner of God’s reign. For God does not block his creation: he does not toss away his original material. Since Noah, he has refused to destroy what he has made. But neither does he accept creation on its own terms. Instead, he overaccepts his creation. One can see the whole sweep of the scriptural narrative as a long story of overaccepting. The prophet Jeremiah describes how he went down to the potter’s house, and saw him working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, yet rather than throwing it away or accepting it as broken, he reworked it into another vessel. The Lord says to Jeremiah that he, the Lord, can do with the house of Israel just as the potter has done. To take another familiar picture, the Lord, the great artist, sees that his painting has been torn and ruined; but rather than throw the painting away, he takes the opportunity to make the painting three-dimensional, the tear in the canvas becoming his broken heart, entered by his redeemed people (134).
Christ the King Sunday celebrates far more than the truth that Christ owns our allegiance because he is greater than kings, presidents, and billionaire princelings. Merely touting “our God is bigger” buys into the false narrative that all power is alike and the difference between Christ and all pretenders is merely one of magnitude.
The truth runs far deeper. Christ’s majesty is far more glorious.
In the cross, we celebrate God’s incomparable freedom to overaccept Jesus’ death and turn it into his victory over death. In the Resurrection, we revel in God’s sovereignty to unmask death as a false power.
The long line of human kings in Israel had been a blatant repudiation of divine kingship. But in the hands of the Living God, that Davidic lineage improbably comes to completion in Jesus, the son of David. At last, a human king fulfills the role of a shepherd who cares for the sheep (Jeremiah 23:5-6).
The crucified Jesus never responds to those who mock him. He neither accepts nor blocks their violence. But when the criminal crucified alongside him says, “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom,” Christ affirms this request. This criminal has recognized the truth: Christ is King because he overaccepts the cross as his enthronement. So free is our God that he uses what the powers meant for evil to demonstrate Christ’s kingly glory forever.
On this centennial of Christ the King Sunday, we are caught up in a terrible struggle. But our work need not be fueled by anger or thwarted by despair. We can bear witness out of amazement at the sovereignty of our God. Power that comes to serve and to forgive even from the cross is power that ultimately overcomes brutality and destruction.
Bow down and worship the true King, Christ our Savior and Shepherd.
