CHRIST THE KING
Luke 23:27-43
Stephen H. Becker, M.Div.
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church—Elk Grove, CA
Christ the King Sunday, November 25, 2007
Grace and peace to you my friends, from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ! Today is Christ the King Sunday. Most of us Christians have often heard of Jesus Christ described as King, but why is that? Why is Jesus our King? And, what does it mean to have Jesus as your King? So tonight, let’s take a look at Christology. Now, if you’ve never heard that term before, Christology is not the study of crystals or stars—or both—but rather Christology is a theological word that describes the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ. In fact, some people pronounce it as CHRIST-ology in order to make the word more clear. So as I said, Christology IS the study of the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ. It asks, Who is Jesus? And what makes Jesus our King? What does it mean that He is our King? And finally, and most importantly, how is it that this Person Jesus Christ is the only One Who can save us sinners?
Jesus is our King. He is our redeemer and our Savior, and so let’s get to know Him even better. Let’s take a look at this Person Jesus Christ, our King. And as we do so, let’s invite the Holy Spirit here with us to help us to understand our Savior even more. Let’s open with prayer…
The one criminal hanging on the cross next to Jesus said to the other criminal, “Don’t you fear God?...since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man—Jesus—has done nothing wrong.” Friends, as sinners, we know that our sinful deeds have earned us death, just as they did for those criminals hanging on the cross next to Jesus. But just as the criminal noted, Jesus has done nothing wrong. Why did He have to go to the cross for our sins? Abraham was a faithful servant of God. Why couldn’t the LORD have punished Abraham instead of Jesus? It would have happened almost 2,000 years before Jesus, and so would have saved a lot of time. Or how about Moses, or Noah or Jonah? These were all faithful servants of God, some of whom had one-on-one discussions with the LORD. Yet none of these men took upon themselves the sin of the world. Only Jesus Christ, Only Christ our King, could do it. When we study Christology, not only do we have a better understanding of our Savior, Jesus, Who He is and how He saves us from our sins, but in understanding the Lord, our faith cannot help but to grow grow closer to Jesus. Understanding Who Jesus is, is critical to your faith. In fact, wrongly believing in a different Jesus, like the cults do is faith in nothing, and leads only to death. But understanding the true Son of God is so important, that the early Church immediately began to describe Christ. One of the earliest written descriptions of Christology is something that we Christians know as the Nicene Creed. Here at the contemporary service we typically use the Apostles’ Creed, which is also a wonderful statement of our faith, but tonight, I’d like to go through the Nicene Creed, line by line, in order to understand our Christology…to understand the Person of Jesus Christ. And then, understanding Who Jesus is, we will together have a wonderful, clear picture of our Savior, Christ the King. So in your bulletin, you’ll find an insert that has the Nicene Creed printed on it, if you’d like to follow along.
The first part of the Nicene Creed said, “We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” The hallmark of our Christian religion is our faith in ONE God. In describing our God, Moses explains, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!” As Christians, we don’t worship multiple Gods and in fact we know that there is only one God. God Himself, in the first commandment, reiterates this to us. God says, “You shall have no other gods…gods with a little “g,” before me. The Hebrew word translated into English as “one” here in Deuteronomy 6:4 is echad. Its meanings include the number one, but also such associated meanings as “one and the same,” “as one man, together [unified],” “each, every,” “one after another” and “first [in sequence or importance]. ” So as Christians, “we believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” O.K. great. No argument. We have One God and One God only. But then how does Jesus then fit into this single-God—this monotheistic—faith of ours? This is where it gets interesting and this is where many theological dividing points come up because of people mis-understanding Christology. Jews don’t accept Jesus as God, and some even claim that Christians worship multiple Gods, and that we are poly-theistic, meaning believing in multiple-Gods. The cults, like Jehovah’s witnesses and the Mormons, are most definitely polytheistic because they break apart Jesus from God; they make two gods where there is only One God. We Christians “believe in One God, the Father, the almighty…” Yes, the Father is God. But so is the son. How is that possible? After all, in basic math, certainly, one plus one equals two. But friends, we’re not talking about math or numbers here. We are talking about God.
One of the clearest places in Scripture where we see Jesus called God is when the Apostle Thomas, the guy who got the unfortunate name of “doubting Thomas,” first sees the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. Thomas, a devout monotheistic Jew, upon seeing Jesus, cried out, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus is God, just as Thomas says. As Christians, we believe this is as well. We recite this fact in the Nicene Creed, which we simply call the second part of the creed. We say, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.” Jesus is God from God, He is divine light from light, He is TRUE GOD from true God. He is ONE BEING WITH THE FATHER. Jesus is God.
And what’s interesting is that nowhere in Scripture does Jesus say, “I am God.” What He explains is that He and the Father are One being, of one substance. The Jews confronted Jesus with a direct challenge: to tell them plainly if he were the Messiah. To them, Jesus says, “I and the Father are One.” So where you and I might say to the Jews, “what part of ‘one’ don’t you understand,” the Jews’ charge against Jesus is blasphemy; they said to Jesus, “You, a mere man, claim to be God” (John 10:33). Now, Jesus does not deny it, but again nowhere does he say outright “I am God.” Instead, Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” See, I think Jesus purposefully wants us to accept Him as God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, in light of Who He is and what He has done. And key to understanding how Jesus and God are One God in our Trinity is to look at the Greek grammar used by the New Testament writers. For example, when Jesus says in John 10:30, “I and the Father are one,” the word “one” is the neuter grammatical tense, not the masculine. Now this can be hard for English-speakers because we only have the neuter case in our language, but what this means to us in English, then is that here we have Two Persons - Father and Son – Who are one “substance.”
So we’ve established that Jesus and God are One God, now and forever. So as we continue to look at Christology, at Christ, our King, how is it then that Jesus, who is God Himself, saves us? The Nicene Creed continues, “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”
I asked earlier in the Sermon why Abraham or Moses or Noah or even Jonah couldn’t save us from our sins. See, they all have the same problem you and I have. We are born with sin; we inherit the sin of our first parents. And then we keep sinning. Even King David, that same King, who as a boy, slayed the giant, can’t save us from our sins because of the sin in him. Paul explains that, “for the wages of sin is death.” Paul also explains “Just as sin entered the world through one man,”—meaning Adam— “and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned…so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” Jesus is that One man Paul is talking about. God assumed human flesh and was born without sin, unlike any other man other than Adam. That’s what it means when in the Nicene creed we say “he became ‘incarnate’ of the virgin Mary.” God assumed human flesh. The apostle John puts it this way: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
Before Jesus Christ, every year the High Priest would sacrifice the most perfect lamb he could find. He would go into the temple and offer this lamb’s blood to God as an atonement for sin. God meant this to be a temporary means of atoning for our sins. Jesus, my friends, Jesus was God’s plan for a permanent solution to our sin. That why, when John the Baptist saw Jesus approaching, he said, “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Who else, my friends, but God Himself, God in the flesh, can take away the sins of the world? No one else can take away the sin of the world because they themselves already have sin…they aren’t sacrificial lamb, like Jesus. But Jesus, Who is God in the flesh, could do it. Jesus was born without sin. He lived His life among us without sin, yet He was tempted just as any other man was…in fact, I’m sure, even more than we. Then, “for our sake, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,” suffering death and being buried. As a man, Jesus paid for our sins on the cross, permanently. But see friends, Jesus is both man and God. Jesus is true God and true man. And His humanity and His divinity never gets mixed up; it’s not like a scrambled egg, per se. Jesus is always man and always God, simultaneously…now and forever. As a man, Jesus died as a sinless man on the cross for us. And, as God, He raised Himself from the death on the third day, completing our salvation.
As Luke explained in our reading, as Jesus hung on the cross, they hung a sign above Him saying “THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.” What’s ironic is that this sign was meant to be a mockery. But in fact, it is the truth. Jesus—the God-man—is our King. The prophet Zechariah, about 600 years before Jesus came into the world, prophesied of a coming Messiah, a King of the Jews who would once and for ever bring salvation from sin. Six hundred years before Jesus’ crucifixion, Zechariah said, “See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey.” And as Jesus came into the world, God’s Kingdom was at hand. Matthew tells us that as the Magi came to visit the baby Jesus, they asked, “where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.” See, even at His birth, Jesus was recognized as that promised King. Later, John the Baptist proclaimed the coming Kingdom, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2). Jesus began His ministry saying the same thing, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matt. 4:17; Mk. 1:15; Lk 4:1). Over and over again, the Kingdom of God is a central theme of Jesus’ preaching.
So as our Lord Jesus hung on the cross under that sign, the irony is that Jesus really is the King of the Jews. Friends, that means He is our King. Now, I don’t think that there are any of us here tonight that were actually born Jewish, but as believers, we are as much a part of God’s Israel as every Jew. Paul explains to us that through our faith, Jesus chose us; “in love, he predestined us to be adopted” as God’s sons, “through Jesus Christ.” He is our king because through our faith, we are part of the New Israel.
We’ve taken a long walk through the theology of Christology, and in this short time, we’ve just scratched the surface. We’ve seen how we, as Christians, believe on One God, in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Son, Jesus Christ, became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and was made man. Born without sin and being fully God and fully man, He took our sins upon Himself and then paid for those sins once and for all. He fulfilled Scripture. Apostles witnessed these events and then wrote a New Testament. And finally the Holy Spirit comes to you and to me and convinces us that it is true, gives us the gift of faith, and through our faith we receive Jesus Christ as Lord of our life, as our Savior, and as our King. Jesus, our Savior, is prophet, priest and King. We worship Jesus, our God. Together, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are One God; they are our Triune God of Israel. As we close, let’s let look at part three of the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge One Baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.” Friends, the Holy Spirit is God just as much as the Father and the Son. Without the Holy Spirit, we cannot have the faith to believe in the Trinity, nor could we have faith in Christ, our King. The role of the Holy Spirit is to bring us to faith and then keep us there. And there, in this faith, we find Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, our redeemer, our King. And in our faith, we find forgiveness and salvation. Christ the King! Our King. Amen.
Let’s pray…
Now may the true faith…
