Last Sunday after Pentecost | Christ the King: November 23, 2025 | The Rev. McKenzi Roberson

Readings: Jeremiah 23:1-6 | Canticle 16 | Colossians 1:11-20 | Luke 23:33-43

We’ve made it! It’s the last Sunday of ordinary time! The interminable green season has found its terminus. The liturgical new year, Advent 1, happens just next week! All of which means, in some corners of the Church, that today is the feast of Christ the King.

With a name like that, it sounds like something the Church has been observing basically forever, right? It seems so basic, so fundamental. But in fact, this feast has only been practiced for the last one hundred years. In 1925, Pope Pious XI instituted this feast as a way to combat rising secularism and fascism. The overlap with current political conversation is almost too on the nose. But there are important distinctions between saying “No Kings” and “No King but Christ.”

Monarchs in many cultures often are held in a divine-like status, if not fully claiming some sort of divinity like Caesar in the time of Jesus. There’s something about that kind of consolidation of power in one person that makes them seem a little more than human. It seems to make them inherently worthy of respect if not outright worship.

The ease with which people fall into the positions of ruler and ruled is part of why I am of the belief that people will always have a sovereign. I think humans, on the whole, want a king. Or at least a leader to follow. A major part of the history of the people of Israel is how God wants to directly rule them, but they want a king like the other nations and God acquiesces. This doesn’t work out the way they hoped. It’s hard to have a fully divine being as your leader because God is intangible and does not often speak in a way everybody can hear. In theory, a human king is somebody who can hear God’s will and enact it. Having somebody in that position also takes some of the burden off of people from interpreting what God wants.

Admittedly, some people truly do not want a sovereign. I suspect for many of these people, what they really mean is that they want to be their own monarch. And there is a measure of this I agree with. God has given all of us an intellect and a conscience, and we have a responsibility to use them to the best of our ability.

But at the end of the day, the reason I’m here, the reason I choose to be Christian, is because I know I’m not a reliable monarch. I can be capricious and selfish and small minded. I know I need something outside of myself to draw me into a better future and a better way of living than I can craft for myself, and I can only imagine the same is true to varying degrees of all humans.

Turning to Christ as my sovereign, submitting to the reign of Christ, is the very best way I see to foster a life worth living and a future worth anticipating. By way of being both human and God (did you hear that Colossians reading? Jesus’ existence is a complicated and nuanced thing) Jesus has all of the divine qualities we tend to look for in a ruler, but also is human and can relate that divinity to us in ways we can hold and see.

So what then, does the reign of Christ look like? The first thing we see in our gospel reading today is that this reign is full of forgiveness. Jesus pronounces no judgement on the people crucifying him; he holds no petty grudge against them. “Father forgive them for they know not what they are doing.”

The people nailing Jesus to the cross were just doing their job. They were just trying to get by, and yet they were still caught up in an act of great evil. How often do we get swept up into acts of evil as we are trying to get by these days? At some point we become aware of the evil in our lives and are convicted by the Holy Spirit to repent and step away from the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf, but God’s forgiveness surrounds us the whole time.

The reign of Christ also does not make sense by normal standards. We see this when the Romans placed the sign reading “This is the King of the Jews” over Jesus’ head. They did so in an act of mockery and a threat. On the one hand, this King is dying a painful and humiliating death, so you are a fool to align yourself with him. And on the other hand, the king of the Romans, Caesar has the divine power to demolish any other upstart who thinks themselves divine and a power to threaten the Roman Empire. The whole thing should be an embarrassment to anybody who has or is considering following Jesus.

But then Jesus subverts the system. He dies, but he doesn’t stay dead. In the resurrection, Jesus not only asserts his authority over Caesar but over death itself. It doesn’t get any more powerful than that. Except that we believe that it will. God has promised this same resurrection to everybody in the Kingdom of God.

It’s not just that Jesus won’t stay down, it’s that Jesus offers a way up to anybody who is willing to follow him. We have a future to hope for. Even the thief being crucified next to Jesus is welcomed into this new kingdom reality. He simply acknowledges who Jesus is and is still reassured that he will be with Jesus that very day in Paradise. In that interaction we see forgiveness and hope intertwined.

A third aspect of the reign of Christ is captured in the Jeremiah reading. There, we heard about the judgement God brings to bear against the leaders who have led the people astray, and God tells of the one that God will raise up who will “reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” A thing we must be careful of when we as Christians read the Old Testament is something called supersessionism. Supersessionism is the idea that Christianity supersedes Judaism, that Christians replace Jews as God’s chosen people. This stance has historically paved the way for antisemitism, so we must guard against it.

This king that is being prophesied might be Jesus, or it might be Zedekiah who ruled as the final king over Israel after their exile which is the context of Jeremiah’s work. What matters to my point is what this description highlights about God's values. In God’s kingdom, the leader will be the final authority and will act with wisdom. In God’s kingdom, justice and righteousness will be the rule of the land. I don’t know about you, but this certainly feels like a foreign kingdom to me. It certainly is one that is shaped by a different culture than the dominant culture in the US.

I don’t even know if I can fully imagine what Christ’s reign of justice and righteousness will look or feel like because it seems so foreign. There are moments when I catch a glimpse of it, though, and I hold those moments close both to shape my imagination and to help sustain me along the way.

So here we stand, at the cusp of the liturgical new year, about to begin again the story of who Jesus is and what his life, death, and resurrection mean for creation. In Jesus, God offers us a leader who knows our pain and our ongoing struggles with temptation and yet never himself succumbs to greed or the lust for power or acclaim. Jesus is a leader who offers us forgiveness to the very end. Jesus is a leader who makes sure that no one is hungry when there is food to spare and no one who wants a warm place to sleep is cold when there are warm safe places available.

 In our baptism we swear our loyalty to Jesus, and God admits us as members of this new kingdom with all of the privileges and responsibilities that entails. We get to enjoy the abiding presence of a loving God and the comfort of knowing that death is not the end of the story. We get the gift of a loving community to support and inspire us along the way. And we have a responsibility to live under the rules of God’s kingdom, choosing justice and mercy and love, stewarding our resources wisely and generously, even when there is cultural pressure to choose otherwise. We have a responsibility to act as representatives of the Kingdom of God, doing our best to embody God’s will on earth as it is in heaven, even as we anticipate God bringing this work to completion.