The Feast of Christ the King | a sermon and a song

A sermon by Jamie Howison on Colossians 1:15-20 and Luke 23:33-43

A note on this podcast: This sermon references Alana Levandoski's song "The Christ Hymn," from her 2015 album Behold, I Make all Things New. Information on that album and on all of Alana's work is available by clicking here.

We have now reached the last Sunday of the church year, with next Sunday marking the beginning of the new as we enter the season of Advent. The calendar marks tonight as the Feast of Christ the King or the Reign of Christ, and our gospel reading can put a bit of a crick in your neck, as we find ourselves confronted by a reading that you’d normally associate with Good Friday.

Why now, at this time of the year, would the designers of the lectionary give us a portion of the Passion story? Well, because as the liturgy for Palm Sunday phrases it,

Today we greet him as our King,
although we know his crown is thorns and his throne a cross.

This is part of the knowledge that Christians carry, of the crucified king, the crucified God. And here N.T. Wright comments,

His true royalty, though, shines out in his prayer (“Father forgive them”) and his promise (“today you will be with me in Paradise”). Unlike traditional martyrs, who died with a curse against their torturers, Jesus prays for their forgiveness. Like a king on his way to enthronement, Jesus promises a place of honour and bliss to one who requests it. (Luke for Everyone)

And then he adds a parenthetical note about that word, “Paradise,” writing “Paradise in Jewish thought wasn’t necessarily the final resting place, but the place of rest and refreshment before the gift of new life in the resurrection.”

And of course the “today” is at the end of a long, hard struggle on those crosses, for both Jesus and the man he is forgiving. One can’t avoid the story’s weight; that “his crown is thorns and his throne a cross.” There were gnostic gospels that arose in the 2nd and 3rd centuries that suggested that the divine “Christ” departed from that human body as soon as the crucifixion began, because gnostic thinkers simply couldn’t bear the idea that the divine would suffer and feel pain. The divine has to be above all of the pain and mess of embodied human life.

But no, Luke and the other three gospel writers would say. No. God has entered into the very worst of the human condition, precisely to redeem it.

Which brings us to this reading from the epistle to the Colossians. The lectionary actually starts the reading another four verses earlier in the epistle, but I’ve chosen to sharpen it right down to this extraordinary poem that we read tonight. And yes, it is poetry, no doubt. Paul typically writes in prose—sometimes somewhat rambling and even complicated prose—but a few times he leaps into poetry. It isn’t clear if he is the author of this text, or if he’s citing something that his readers will already know, but it doesn’t really matter. What he offers here is extraordinary.

The poem begins with those lines,

Christ is the image of the unseen God,
the first-born of all creation,
for in him were all things made,
in heaven and on earth.

Now we are accustomed to a fully fleshed out trinitarian theology in which Christ is affirmed as “of one being with the Father,” as the Nicene Creed phrases it, adding “Through him all things were made.” But that creed dates to the late 300s, whereas this epistle to the Colossians is from the late 50s, when Paul and others in the early church are still working their heads around the fullness of who Jesus was and is.

Through him and for him were all things made,
before all he exists, holds all things in one.

Christ holds all things in one, which is a staggering statement for those communities to affirm, just given that a good many people who had known Jesus—who had walked with him and heard him teach—were still very much alive and a part of this young church. That man we followed and learned from—that man who was executed and then returned somehow more alive than you can imagine—“holds all things in one”? Paul, are you sure? Yes, I’m more sure of this than of anything else I’ve ever taught. And he continues,

The Church is his body, and he is its head.
He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead;
in all things he alone is supreme.
God made all his fullness to dwell in him,
to reconcile through him all creation to himself,
everything on earth and everything in heaven,
all gathered into peace by his death on the cross.

Line after line after line in this poem are extraordinary and in fact world-changing. Here Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat really push us modern readers to see how revolutionary this all would have been in Paul’s world. They write,

In a world populated by images of Caesar, who is taken to be the son of God, a world in which the emperor’s pre-eminence over all things is bolstered by political structures and institutions, an empire that views Rome as the head of the body politic in which an imperial peace is imposed—sometimes through the capital punishment of crucifixion—this poem is nothing less than treasonous. In the space of a short, well-crafted, three-stanza poem, Paul subverts every major claim of the empire, turning them on their heads, and proclaims Christ to be the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord of all creation, including the empire. (Colossians Remixed)

And this is all brought about not by a military victory or an armed insurrection or a revolutionary march against the Roman empire, but instead the reconciliation of all of creation to Christ’s self comes because “all [is] gathered into peace by his death on the cross.” “Everything on earth and everything in heaven.” It is what Frederick Buechner called “the Magnificent Defeat,” which is the sort of phrase I think Paul himself might have been really struck by.

Back in 2014 when Alana Levadoski was working on her album Behold, I Make All Things New, I received a phone call from her, asking if I could go to Signpost Music to record a reading for one of the songs. That song was “The Christ Hymn”, which is a direct response to this text from Colossians. In typical Alana style, she had boldly reached out to four poets—Malcolm Guite, Scott Cairns, Joel McKerrow, and Luci Shaw—asking each to write a poem in response to a particular line from the Colossians passage. To Scott Cairns she’d given the line, “He is the firstborn from the dead,” and when it came time to finish the recording of the song Alana was asking me to read this poem for the album. It was a kind of rare privilege, partly because Scott Cairns is an extraordinary poet, and partly because it was coming out of this Colossians poem. I remember sitting in the recording booth, doing a practice run through the poem, and then getting the signal from the producer that they were now recording. I will leave you with that poem, a copy of which is included in your worship booklet this night.

And when we had invented death,
 had severed every soul from life
 we made of these our bodies sepulchers.
And as we wandered dying, dim
 among the dying multitudes,
He acquiesced to be interred in us.
And when He had descended thus
 into our persons and the grave
He broke the limits, opening the grip,
 He shaped of every sepulcher a womb.
(Scott Cairns)