Jesus’s relationship with the words king and kingdom caused nothing but trouble during his whole life. Up on the cross we are told there was a sign, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. You’ve all seen the letters INRI at the top of the cross in images of the crucifixion — that’s what the letters stand for. In a way, he was crucified over a misunderstanding of what kind of king Jesus said he was. On the one hand, once when people came looking for Jesus and they wanted to make him a king, Jesus ran away, because whatever kind of king they were thinking of, that wasn’t it. But later when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus if he was a king, Jesus didn’t deny it, although in fact, he said nothing. Maybe he realized he was talking with someone who would never understand what kingdom he meant. People didn’t understand, and even for those of us who want to follow him, it’s still something we don’t.
People make two mistakes, primarily. First, like those people Jesus ran away from, some people thought Jesus’s kingdom would be a country, with laws and soldiers and borders, freedom from the Romans, a new religious empire. They thought it was a kingdom like the kingdom Israel used to have. They found out that it wasn’t. The Romans weren’t about to permit another country to get started, and that wasn’t Jesus’s goal anyway.
Today we’re more likely to make a different mistake about this kingdom. We think it’s a kingdom that you only enter after death. We think the job is to endure this world in hope of a better one later, because down here, we think, it’s clear that other kingdoms seem to have the upper hand. But if we listen, Jesus said he was offering the kingdom now, that with him the kingdom was at hand, that you could reach out for it and begin to live there. It’s not a kingdom of this world, but it’s not in some other world either. You become a citizen of this kingdom at any moment. You just begin, and you live as if the kingdom surrounds you already. There are other people living in it, and we can join them.
That idea of the kingdom might have been even harder for people to grasp, just the way it is for us. And yet when we look at the way this kingdom operates, it’s what we all want. What did Jesus preach, really, why was he up there on that cross? He was preaching a kingdom based on nothing but love and mercy where everyone is an equal beneficiary. You get to give and receive, if you fail you’re taken care of by people who are sinners like you are, and you find offering forgiveness and welcome easy because you have experienced how much you need it yourself. All the people this world rejects are citizens alongside you in this kingdom but you don’t resent them, because in this kingdom there is enough for everyone, enough love, enough possessions. So we stand up for each other, that’s how it all works. Everyone is the thief on the cross, forgiven in a moment, and everyone is also the forgiver.
And the sign of this kingdom, the thing we look at to remember how things work there, the only constitution in a way, is this picture up here of the cross. It’s the world’s most unlikely flag for a kingdom, something that looks like failure. Except it’s how this kingdom operates. Because this isn’t an imaginary kingdom at all, where everything comes easily, there’s real sacrifice and pain and love and loyalty that make this kingdom work. It’s real life lived the way Christ hoped it would be lived. In this kingdom we see the face of this king in the faces of everyone, criminals and strangers, friends and enemies. The king is literally everywhere, and we do for everyone what we would do for him, and what he would do for us.
There are other kingdoms available, as there always have been. Most kingdoms are different, they’re defined by the fact that there are people who are in and people who are out, and the people who are in are able to feel positive about how it all works. If you’re in a church like that it’s easy to take satisfaction in fulfilling all of its obligations, because there are so many people who can’t make the grade. And if you’re in a country that sees outsiders primarily as enemies or invaders, those who don’t deserve what we have, people who are out to harm us somehow, that takes the heat off those of us on the inside, since most kingdoms think they can only survive if we draw lines somewhere. What kind of a kingdom or a country or a church could possibly include everyone, we think, how would that work? It can’t happen. And yet thinking that way is really the opposite of that kingdom of Jesus, where when there is a problem the loaves and the fish get multiplied so that no one goes without. We have a king who even on the cross couldn’t find a way to exclude a sinner who deserved nothing.
That’s why it’s hard to carry two passports in this world, one for the kingdom of Jesus and one for whatever other kingdoms our lives are a part of. There’s tension here, all the time. But the feast of Christ the King is meant to remind us that not only do we have a king, but that his kingdom is alive and well and available. The sign on the cross calling him a king was meant to be ironic, yeah right, this is what your king looks like, take a look. But it is the king we want, the one who wants freedom for all of us. The king we have is a king of hearts, and a change of heart is the only gift he is looking for.