11/23/2025
https://youtu.be/wknu5Umrb90
And, because the video glitches out on some lines, here's the text:
The King Who Is No King
Luke 23:33-43
Ian Reed Twiss
Today is the last Sunday of the Christian year, Christ the King Sunday, and what does our lectionary give us to read? Jesus riding triumphally into Jerusalem before crowds shouting Hosanna? A resurrection appearance perhaps? Maybe the transfiguration? Or at least some reference to the Kingdom of God that Jesus was always nattering on about? Oh, no. No. Nothing like that. No, here's the first sentence of today's gospel reading: "When 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." Yup, Christ the King Sunday gives us Jesus at his most vulnerable, his most human, nailed up next to two criminals with his title of "king" at its most ironic, inscribed on a sign above his head: King of the Jews. It's almost as if the reading were trying to create as much distance from the idea of a "king" as it possibly could. Which is interesting.
And I don't know about you, but I'm good with that. This whole notion of kingship--with its patriarchal associations, its above and below chain of status, its context of power systems that use violence to suck resources away from the many at the bottom to the few at the top--it's never been a winning image of the divine for me. Why would a God of justice, equity, and love want to recreate in any way the top-down structures that make life such hell on earth for so many people? And as for the verticality of this image of God above us, of course we know by now that there is no "up there" up there. From this tiny, fragile, sea-swept orb there is only out there...only distance, and darkness, and galaxies accelerating away from us and each other. Nobody lolling about on clouds or pulling the puppet strings of history. If God is anywhere, God is within and around and infused throughout this glorious world.
So it seems to me that this Christ the King Sunday gospel comes to us as a warning about having kings at all, any kings, kings as a category, with the paradoxical exception of Jesus who is about as unkingly a king as it is possible to be. Think of his crucifixion under that sign King of the Jews as a call back to the time when the Israelites first demanded a king, and the prophet Samuel warned them about what a disastrous idea that would be. A king, Samuel tells them, will "take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen," will "take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers....He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves" (1 Samuel 8:11-17). But they insist, so God is like, "They want a king? Give them a king. But don't say I didn't warn them!" So now here's Jesus, this living contradiction--he is king only in an ironic sense. He is king only in a way that upends the meaning of king. As he asserts just a chapter before this one, "The kings of the gentiles lord it over them....But I am among you as one who serves."
Speaking of kings and hierarchies and power, I've been reading Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem, about Israel's 1961 show trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been an upper-level functionary in the N***s' World War II program of murdering six million Jews plus others, the so-called "Final Solution." This is the book that gave our culture the phrase "the banality of evil" because of Arendt's perception that Eichmann was not some sociopathic monster. Rather he was an ordinary person, middle class, from a loving family, who harbored no special animosity to Jews, but whose conscience seemed to get switched off by the social context that N**iism created. Personally, he was motivated by a desire to perform his job well and advance his career. He recognized Hi**er as a strong leader and wished to please him. And when he cast around for moral cues, as most of us do in new circumstances, he saw leaders from both the German old guard and the new N**i party, people of "good society," actively working together to implement the Final Solution--as if the coordinating of cattle cars and the seizing of property and the operation of gas chambers were no different from any other ambitious civil service project. "As Eichmann told it," Arendt writes, "the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution" (116).
So he too did his part. He took up his role in the hierarchy. This is the problem with authoritarians, rulers, kings, and with the structures that make kingship possible in general. They enable such people to create an atmosphere of normality around what is in fact unconscionable. And Arendt, no fool she, applies her skepticism as well to the ways that Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion is manipulating Eichmann's trial to serve not justice but his own messaging needs.
It would be easy to distance ourselves from this reality--to say, oh, well, that was N**i Germany, this is democratic America, etc., etc. But what about the new culture that seems to have slid into the operations of ICE and our Border Patrol, ignoring due process, abusing and even torturing defenseless people? Do we really think all those officers are "bad people" who are somehow more susceptible to evil than the rest of us? Or are many of them ordinary people for whom losing a good paying job outweighs questions of conscience, and for whom it is therefore easier to simply believe in what they are doing?
Or I think of the many young people I know--beautiful, hopeful twentysomethings--who are pouring their energies into advancing their careers at Google or Amazon or CapitalOne or Morgan Stanley, even as these companies kowtow to our own would-be king, and fund his pet projects, and surveil us, and entrap the most vulnerable with gotcha fees and high interest credit. My point is not to criticize anyone. We all participate in the system to some degree. I'm no exception. The question is how do we know when we've crossed the line, and how easily can our sense of that line be manipulated by so-called strong leaders?
This is why I think the primary slogan of resistance in our era has it exactly right: No Kings. Or, we in the church might add, no kings but Jesus. For if today's Christ the King gospel teaches us anything, it's that Jesus comes to us as a kind of oxymoronic king: a king who gives us back our conscience rather than taking it from us. And he does so with such humility, such defenselessness, that he defies the category of kingship even while he occupies it. Why else would Luke tell the story of the two criminals crucified on either side of him? They have no reason to recognize the reign of this man who hangs defeated among them. All they have is their personal conscience. One refuses to abandon his buy-in to worldly status and power--even at the point of his death!--and joins the soldiers in mocking Jesus. But the other seems to discover, deep in his heart, the falseness of human hierarchy and the truth that Jesus is dying for the sake of the only power that matters in the end: love. "This man has done nothing wrong!" he tells the other criminal. It is a revelation, a lifting of the veil on what is true and good, a discovery of the Zen koan at the heart of the gospel: The only king is the one who is no king. "Jesus," the criminal cries out, "remember me when you come into your kingdom." And Jesus, leaving aside that word, "king," promises, "today you will be with me in Paradise."
Amen.
Glitchy video today, here's the main passage that gets frozen out: It would be easy to distance ourselves from this reality--to say, oh, well, that was N**i ...
