If you were to read aloud verses 9-17 in the first chapter of Colossians the way Paul wrote them, you would have to take a deep breath and speak fast. It’s all one long run-on sentence. Paul’s English teacher would have had a red-ink fit all over the page. But of course Paul wrote in Greek, and in Greek you didn’t get marked off for punctuation. Wouldn’t that be great, kids? So anyway, this is one rapid-fire affirmation after another of what God has done for the world through Jesus Christ and how we should all be filled with the fullness of Christ the way Christ was filled with the fullness of God.

Paul rattles off the exalted qualities of Christ: image of the invisible God; firstborn of all creation; everything made through him and for him–visible and invisible; all powers and rulers come from him and are subject to him; he was before all things and he’ll be around after all things pass away; if things hold together, it’s because he is the glue; he’s also the head of the church and the first to be born again from the dead, so that he’s number one in everything; all of God was in him, and he made the world one with God through his death on the cross. In so many words and with so much breath, Paul is saying that Jesus is the Christ, the King of the World.

On this crowning Sunday of the church’s worship year, just before we start all over again in Advent next week, we celebrate Christ the King. And if we look back from this one long sentence in Paul to the gospel of Luke, we find one short sentence that gets at the same idea in an ironic way. Jesus is hanging on the cross with a sign nailed on the wood over his head. It’s the only thing we know of that was written of him during his lifetime. Luke says it said: This is the King of the Jews. It was not intended to be a compliment, but like so many things in Jesus’ lifetime, it turns out that those who mock him actually tell the truth about him.

Jesus is crucified between two common thieves, Luke says. People stand by, scoffing. They expect that if Jesus is the Real McCoy Messiah, he will at least save himself. Seems logical. He saved others–healed them, restored them to life. How can he be God’s anointed one and not be able to defend himself? they wonder. The soldiers can’t get the kingship thing, either, if he is so weak as to end up on a cross. If a king is
God’s man, God would not allow such a thing to happen to him. Right?

Now, the whole idea of kingship seems hopelessly quaint to us, being the enlightened Americans we are, don’t you know?! We have a democratic republic, and we think of power and authority being distributed among all citizens. We don’t have a king and we don’t want one. Even in constitutional monarchies like Great Britain, the king or queen has become a figurehead position without the power to enforce laws or make them. The Queen of England can only appeal to the people and remind her subjects that just because they get to recreate their world a little every time they vote, that doesn’t mean the world is theirs to remake. The kingdom has existed long before they came along and may persist long after they are gone. The role of royalty is now to embody civilization by example of virtue rather than rule it.

Well, anyway, it takes only a little imagination to get in touch with the idea of Christ the King. After all, if you have enough imagination to walk though the gate at King’s Cross Station, Platform 9 _, to enter into the magical world of Harry Potter, surely you can imagine a time when kings were thought to represent God on earth. Kings had behind them not only the power of their earthly office but the power of heaven, too. To oppose the king was to oppose God. So to call Christ the King is nothing less than to say of him that he represents God on earth and rules the kingdom of God as God’s viceroy.

People couldn’t figure Jesus being the real king of the Jews if he ended up on a cross. If he was the Messiah, the King of the Jews, then God wouldn’t want him dead, right? Nothing the religious rulers or the Roman government or a riotous mob could do would defeat God’s will, right? But that presumes we know enough about God to anticipate God’s every move.

And isn’t that just the kind of thing happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan today? Their spiritual leader, Mullah Omar, told the BBC last week that their goal is nothing less than "the extinction of America." He believes it is Allah’s will, and that we will all see … shortly. Well, we will. But presuming to know God’s will will get you in trouble every time. God’s ways are not our ways. That Jesus had been sentenced to death undermined all of Jesus’ kingship possibilities. After all, what self-respecting king you know anything about would let himself be crucified?

I was reading this week about the King of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah. He was deposed 27 years ago and has been living in the lap of luxury in Italy ever since. Tough life. Now at 86, many Afghans and some in the international community think he alone holds the key to saving Afghanistan. He alone can make peace among the tribes and bring them together as one people.

Paul says Christ the King is the only hope for a warring world. He alone is the key to the world’s salvation. He is not waiting to come back to make peace; he had already done it. He has saved us by undergoing all of our suffering and death, by not leaving when he was rejected but by taking the rejection of God by the world upon himself. Christ the King united the world once and for all to God. We await his return now, not in order to save us at last but to bring what he promises to those who have faithfully hoped in him.

Still, you can hardly blame anyone standing near the cross that day for believing Jesus to be anything but the King of the Jews, let alone King of the world. He certainly did not make his identity as the Son of God or his power to save obvious to the world. Even Paul did not believe in him until after the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and his encounter with the living Christ on the road to Damascus. Paul’s breathless long sentence about Christ the King came years later, after Paul had felt the power of pardon in his own life and seen it in others who turned to King Jesus in faith. Even the scene on the cross, where the two thieves react differently to Jesus, is surprising only for what the one thief did in asking Jesus to remember him. The first thief says only what most everyone else was saying.

But look more closely at the other thief. He knows he is rightly condemned for what he has done. His death sentence is justified. He was getting what he deserved. But Jesus is not a king who is concerned with his subjects getting what they deserve. He wants to give them what he wants them to have–not a death sentence but a life sentence. A long sentence of life as it was always meant to be. A sentence of life throughout eternity.

The simple recognition in the penitent thief that Jesus was unjustly crucified opened him to another possibility for his own life. By acknowledging his own guilt and turning, he fell under the forgiveness Jesus was already winning for him before God. This man could not possibly have known who Jesus really was, but he was willing to take the title of derision they applied to Jesus and turn it into a confession of faith. Remember me when you come into your kingdom. He saw that God might vindicate an innocent victim, and he wished to be for one short moment, at least in his life, on the side of innocence.

Today you shall be with me in paradise, Jesus said. And any of us, in the moment we turn to Jesus and crown him king in our own hearts, in that moment we too have a share in Christ’s kingdom.

Some people don’t like the idea that Jesus would forgive the thief on the cross and grant him life in paradise right there on the spot. Death-bed confessions make a mockery of morals, they say. You’ll have people living like hell and still hoping for heaven. There has to be enough time for your life to be reformed before God will accept you. Well, here’s another variation: a well-known TV preacher was addressing a Baptist group in Florida this week. A student at his college had asked him if he thought Jesus would save Osama bin Laden if he repented. Yes, he said. That’s what the blood of Jesus does. Then what? the student asked. Then we execute him, the preacher said.

Sometimes I wonder what king we worship, the one who wore a golden crown and ruled with an iron fist or the one who wore a crown of thorns and rules with a bleeding open hand?

Bob Muzikowski is half-Irish American, half-Polish American. He is all Christian. Bob grew up in working-class New Jersey, made it to the Ivy League, and lives now in west Chicago, where he has founded three inner city Little Leagues. He understands that the problems of urban America require 5,000 solutions, but he intends to be one of them. Where did he get his passion for seemingly hopeless people?

His father not only took him to church as a boy but also to Washington, D. C. in August 1963. He was just seven, but he remembers sitting on his daddy’s shoulders in a sea of mostly black men with white short-sleeved shirts. They listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. I have a dream, he proclaimed that day. And it was a dream shared by his white father and other men of his ilk. They mourned the passing that fall of the first Irish Catholic president, but Bob remembers better the scene of his father and two other white men in the living room five years later, just hours after King was assassinated. The three men raised their glasses in somber tribute as Bob’s dad said, God save the King.

Bob Muzikowski’s father and his friends identified more with King’s vision than with the aristocratic Irish Catholic political family from Massachusetts. They understood that King spoke from a well deeper than politicians have to draw from. His dream was their dream because it was the dream of the underdog. They related to King because he related to the King, who related to the thief on the cross. Christ had not only saved them; he had shaped their vision of life. And that in turn shaped the life of Bob Muzikowski–a cross-shaped life. [Safe at Home, Zondervan, 2001, p. 94.]

This is what Christ sentences us to: a cross-shaped life of service. The penitent thief is the exception that proves the rule–the rule of Christ the King. A long sentence of life must lead to lifelong cross-bearing discipleship, because, as it was for our Lord, the saying is trustworthy and true–No cross, no crown.