Text: Luke 23:33-43
Other texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6
How is it that in this world today slavery still flourishes, with around twenty million people, mostly women, held as slaves?
How is it that in this world wars still rage, people live in terror, ethnic populations eliminated, people tortured? How is it in this world that people still are left to starve, lack clean water, are infested with parasites? How is it in this world that so few still hoard so much, control so much, while so many have so little and are powerless? How is it in this world that nations still falter in fragility, refugees march, justice is systemically denied?
Where is God’s kingdom?
God knows, people long for a king. A king powerful enough to discipline the nations, compassionate enough to heal the wounds of poverty, wise enough to bring justice to all, clever enough to bring abundance, humorous enough to value joy and pleasure and beauty, humble enough to be in awe of all creation.
Where is God’s kingdom?
People long for a king. The story of such longing is not new. The list of human ills is largely unchanged. Only the names and places vary. People suffer war, injustice, scarcity, and nastiness. This is not new. People wonder when it will all be made better. That’s not new either.
Some expected Jesus to be the king. The King, in capital letters. For a population under foreign control and oppression—torture, injustice, ethnic disdain, poverty amidst luxury—the coming of Jesus seemed to some to promise the restoration of another, better time, though a time maybe in fantasy more than in history. They were disappointed then, to say the least, when Jesus was crucified. They called him Messiah, which is the word for Christ. Jesus Messiah. Messiah means the one who is anointed. Anointing is how kings were installed, or ordained, a sign of and a means of God’s blessing. What kind of Messiah are you, they wanted to know, who is executed as a criminal?
Where is God’s kingdom? they wanted to know.
The Bible seems to say that there is something a little perverted in our longing for a king. Or at least the kind of king we usually long for. Before the days of great King David, the Israelites had no king. But they badly wanted one.
“Give us a king to govern us” it says in book of the prophet Samuel. But God said to them: I’m not so sure you want a king. A king is a pain in the neck.
“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He 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 grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take ... the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work.
“But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles’”
This model of king as commander in chief—what the Israelites hoped for and what people hoped to find in Jesus—is not the primary model in the Bible. The people who surrounded Jesus at the cross should not have been so surprised. The king’s job is to be a shepherd, not a ruler.
The king’s job is to watch over the sheep, not to boss them around. Not to be the king who takes your sons and daughters, but one who guides the flock. Not to use the people to fight his battles, but to give up his life for the people, his sheep. When God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah, God condemns the rulers as bad shepherds. You have scattered the sheep, God says, and have not attended to them. So God will anoint new shepherd kings to protect and gather the people.
Where is God’s kingdom?
Like the Israelites longing for a king to do battle, people make out God to be the same as their contemporary big, powerful leaders, but bigger and more powerful. And the kingdom of God becomes like a political state, only more imperial and victorious. We might make God out to be as a president, or a general, or a CEO. Just like a regular ruler, only more so.
But a shepherd is not a person of power. A shepherd was and is a low-paying low-prestige job, a humble job. A shepherd’s relationship with his or her flock is not one primarily of power. The sheep don’t appoint or validate the shepherd, they don’t elect their shepherd, they don’t hire and fire the shepherd, they don’t conduct yearly evaluations of the shepherd’s job.
An Episcopalian bishop recently resigned over a dispute with his congregation. His entitled attitude was revealing. He said, “I will neither compromise the faith once delivered to the saints, nor will I abandon the sheep who elected me to protect them.” But the sheep don’t elect the shepherd.
They don’t choose the shepherd. The sheep trust the shepherd. They follow the shepherd. They depend on the shepherd.
The kingdom of God is led by a shepherd.
We long for a king, mighty and victorious. What we get is a shepherd. What we think we need is a boss. What we need is a shepherd. We need someone, as Jesus spoke of, who will not be expedient or efficient, and will search for the one lost sheep in a hundred sheep bring that sheep back. [Like this Jesus in the mural here.] We need someone, as Jesus did, who will heal us, heal the world. We need someone who will feed us. We need someone who will teach us. We need someone who will keep us safe from our own clumsy wanderings and our good-natured ignorance. We are in deep mud right now. We need to be rescued.
We can call on God to lead us into battle, as Christians have for centuries. Onward Christian Soldiers. We can think of the kingdom of God as something wrested from the forces of evil. As in the video game where the evangelicals zap the sinners. We can ask God to be our king and we to be God’s army, carrying out holy destruction. But when we ask that of God, the answer we get is Jesus. We get Jesus as an answer. Jesus refuses to take on that job we put on him. At Golgotha Jesus does not bring fire down on his executioners. Forgive them, he says.
Christ is our shepherd. Our relationship with Christ begins with trust and hope. We are the sheep. We follow Jesus. We do not know the way. The shepherd offers us a way home.
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