Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered November 25, 2007
Luke 23:
33When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 34Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. 35And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” 36The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, 37and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” 38There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.” 39One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 40But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
The Power in Your Hands
Can you remember the first time you ever took the steering wheel of a car? Can you remember the feeling of power in your hands and feet when you turned the key and the engine started, and you put it into gear and the car lurched forward a bit. When you took your foot off of the brake and pushed on the accelerator, do you remember the feeling of power beneath you, a bit of fear, perhaps? Exhilaration? Maybe not everyone felt this way, but for some of us, it wasn’t long before we felt temptation in the face of so much power, the temptation to get out on a straight road and press that pedal all the way down and see how fast it would go.
After all, what’s the use of holding so much power in your hands if you’re not going to use it?
It is almost a law of the universe: Put an unsupervised teenage boy behind the wheel of a car and within a short time that car will be traveling as fast as it can go. It is a law of the universe that is reflected in insurance premiums. I think they have named it “the law of the speeding teenager.”
While some of that temptation to power may be inherent in the Y chromosome, there is some of it that is part of the human condition: If we have power, we are tempted to try it out in the interest of our own desires.
And that is the last temptation of Jesus: The religious leaders scoff: “Save yourself!” The soldiers mock him, “Save yourself!” One of the criminals crucified beside him derides him, “Save yourself and us!”
It is done now. Jesus followed his plan of obedience and died on the cross, so it may seem to us that it never crossed his mind to do anything else. But, the gospel is clear. Jesus is, in addition to being God in human flesh, fully human, like us in every way except for sin. As Messiah, King of All, he was as tempted to power for his own benefit as any of us. The difference is that Jesus followed through on his plan to use his power for our benefit rather than his own. Instead of saving himself as the religious leaders, the soldiers, and one of the criminals dared him to do, he saved others. He prayed, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do,” and he promised the criminal who asked to be remembered, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”
Because of our national history, we citizens of the U.S. have a particular antipathy toward the monarchy. Any time that I hear the word “King,” I tend to think, at least subconsciously, “King George: bad. President George Washington: good.” It is woven into our identity as descendants of the American revolution that the monarchy is a fatally flawed system. From King David who had his lover’s husband killed to get him out of the way and cover up his sin to the line of biblical kings cited in the refrain, “King so-and-so did what was evil in the sight of the Lord,” we see, through the lens of our own nation’s birth, the inevitability of humans using power to fulfill their own corrupt desires.
The flaw of monarchy is evident to those in the Reformed Protestant tradition – power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Those of us schooled in the teaching that human sin is both total and universal understand that when you put the power of the monarchy in the hands of a human being, sooner or later that power will be abused. It is a law of the universe as dependable as the law of the speeding teenager.
From the movie, “Schindler’s List,” a horrifying scene has stuck with me over the years. Schindler, a businessman who tries to rescue Jews from the Nazi concentration camp by pretending to be a Nazi himself who is buying Jews for slave labor, stands in the second floor of a building in the concentration camp with the warden. This warden gets some sadistic pleasure by shooting Jews for any error, or perceived error. Schindler suggests to the warden that there is more power in forgiving someone who has offended than there is in punishing them. “Try it,” he says. “There is great strength in the words, ‘I forgive you.’” He models the words with an air of condescension that might appeal to this Nazi warden. “You can be such a big man," he coaxed, "by forgiving these foolish Jews for their mistakes. Instead of shooting them, say ‘I forgive you.' You are the great Amon Goeth! What Aryan nobility you could show!" And for the next few days, this Nazi walked around the camp, saying haphazardly to one inmate after the other: "I forgive you. Ah, yes, I forgive you."
But then, when a young Jewish boy fails to wax his floor perfectly, the warden says, “I forgive you,” and the boy runs out of the building. But, we see it on his face. Goeth has not forgiven him. He still finds more power in killing than in his pretense of forgiveness. He suddenly gives up on the power of condescension and picks up his high powered rifle, takes aim out the window, and shoots the boy in the back.
That scene is so horrifying because it reveals that dark underbelly of human power. We would like to believe that the slaughter of six million in the Holocaust was an anomaly, some strange departure from the path of ever-improving human morality. But then, we remember: There were another 21 million slaughtered in the Stalinist purges, millions in the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, hundreds of thousands in the ethnic violence between Serbs and Croats, between Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda and Burundi. In all, about 150 million people were killed in the twentieth century because someone had the power to do it.
On Christ the King Sunday, the gospel calls us to ask what power we hold, and how we shall use it.
Our temptation is to deny that we have any power at all. “I’m just an ordinary person who can’t change anything.”
The gospel, however, tells us otherwise. We have held power so long that we have become desensitized to its strength. Rarely do we think about the power we hold in our hands when we slip behind the wheel of a car – we take it for granted after so many years of driving.
And too rarely, perhaps, do we think of the power we have been given in God’s forgiveness, “One who is in Christ is a new creation. The past is finished and gone. Everything has become fresh and new.”
We have tremendous power in every breath. We have power in our relationships, in our talents and gifts, in our education, both formal and informal, in every dollar in our bank accounts and pockets.
We have the power to hold a grudge, the power to forgive; the power to reach out, the power to cut off; the power to give up on someone, the power to hold one another accountable out of love.
Jesus gave up the power he had to save himself. He revealed the intention of God in giving power when he used it with his dying breath the same way he used it in his life, to give himself for others.
As disciples of Jesus Christ, we live with one foot in the kingdom of this world and the other foot in the kingdom of God. All around us, the kingdom of this world tells us we will find happiness in using power to fulfill our own desires. The kingdom of this world will deny the existence of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. “The real world,” we call it. “All that bit about loving your enemy and giving and forgiving and laying down one’s life for your friends, it’s all fine for that imaginary world where Jesus is King, but we live in the real world. We live in the world of terrorism and violence, of drugs and the criminals who sell them, a world in which loving your enemy could get you killed.”
But that, of course, is exactly what it got Jesus.
The call of Jesus to live in the kingdom of God is a call to live without fear of dying, without fear of losing, without fear of giving up the power we have.
The request of the repentant criminal crucified next to Jesus is, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your Kingdom.”
From the kingdom of this world, being remembered may be the closest idea to life after death. Even if our consciousness is gone, perhaps we will live on in the consciousness of others, if only they remember us. In this way the Kingdom of this world vaguely imitates the Kingdom of God in that we will be remembered here not for how we leveraged power for ourselves, but for how we gave it away. It is the gifts to others that remain in the consciousness of later generations, whether it be gifts of material goods like libraries or churches or schools, or the gifts of our time and talent from how we raise our children to how we treated our neighbors. Even this world remembers what we give.
But, even our gifts will pass away from the kingdom of this world. Buildings and monuments will crumble over time, the generation that remembers us will die out, civilizations will rise and pass away as the grass withers and the flower fades. The remembrance of this world is temporal.
The good news is that we live with one foot in the kingdom of God. We live, not only in the memory of this world, but in the memory of the eternal King, in the world promised to the criminal who hung next to Jesus: “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”
As we begin the journey toward Bethlehem next week, we celebrate the entrance of God into the world in the human flesh of a helpless baby, a vulnerable child born to poor parents in an obscure corner of the world. The gospel reminds us that the power of God comes to us not because Jesus amassed power throughout his lifetime, but because he gave it up on the cross, he poured himself out for the sake of others.
Thanks be to God. Amen.