If it’s a crisis of authority you are looking for, you have come to the right place… if, that is, the specific place you have come to is the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. St. Luke shows us that what happened, when Jesus was betrayed and arrested, was that a crisis of authority unfolded. Throughout this narrative, various people try to take control, or have the opportunity to try to do so, but none of them acts with real authority.
In the previous chapter, the evangelist reported that it was “the chief priests, the officers of the temple police, and the elders” who came to arrest Jesus on the Mount of Olives. But all they could do was to detain Jesus, and mock him, and beat him. They did not have the authority to do what they wanted to do with Jesus, which was to get rid of him.
So they took Jesus to Pontius Pilate, who was the local Roman governor. When the Jewish officials brought Jesus to him with their complaints, Pilate told them essentially that he had no dog in this fight. They were looking to him to use his authority to punish Jesus, but Pilate didn’t want to get involved.
So Pilate sent Jesus to Herod Antipas, who ruled in Galilee and other parts north of Jerusalem, with Roman permission. Herod happened to be in Jerusalem at the time, and he had been curious about Jesus. Some people had started the rumor that Herod was plotting to kill Jesus. But if that was the case, he didn’t follow through. Given a chance to take authority over Jesus’ fate, Herod, instead, sent him back to Pilate, who, as we already know, didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with him, either.
Pilate, like Herod, forfeited the opportunity to exercise authority on the second go-around, too. He could have intervened, but he didn’t, and instead, with the aid of his own soldiers, he let the conspirators take matters into their own hands.
As is often the case, those in authority didn’t see the crisis in authority taking place. And you would think that the crisis of authority would have come to an end once Jesus was nailed to the Cross. But on the Cross, new dimensions of the crisis of authority came into view. St. Luke tells us that once Jesus was nailed to the Cross by the soldiers, and hoisted up into place in between the crosses of two criminals, the first thing he did was to exercise authority: he pronounced forgiveness on those who were perpetrating the act. He was not yet dead, but he had already forgiven his killers.
The religious leaders who stood by rejected his authority. They “scoffed at him,” St. Luke tells us, and even the soldiers “mocked him… saying, ‘If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself!” And someone with a strong streak of sarcasm attached an inscription to his Cross saying, “This is the king of the Jews.” If there was going to be a crisis of authority, after all, someone was going to exploit it at the expense of the Jews. No wonder everyone acted with disdain. Here was an act of cruel injustice being carried out on no one’s authority but the power of the mob, with the assistance of the government, whose only judgment was to acquiesce to pressure. Because as far as the Romans were concerned there was not much at stake, and it was probably just as well to be done with a trouble-maker.
The rejection of Jesus seemed nearly complete when even one of the criminals being executed next to him cried out to him, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the church has always heard this cry as more of a sneer than a plea, and I think it’s correct to hear it that way.
Throughout the arrest, the so-called trial, and the crucifixion of Jesus, a crisis of authority allowed the jeering of a mob to result in a rejection of God’s love, and an act of injustice that was motivated by anger, jealousy, suspicion, and fear. People who might have exercised authority either failed to do so, or found that they possessed so very little actual authority that they were powerless without the support of the mob. Within this power vacuum, only Jesus spoke with real authority: the authority of one who has the power to forgive. But since almost no one was looking for forgiveness, his words fell on mostly deaf ears.
The repeated accusation that Jesus was the king of the Jews, might have given him an opportunity to try to claim some authority, as long as he was willing to accept the terms of his accusers. But Jesus would not accept those terms, which he knew to be a trap, in any case. And to the very end, Jesus allowed his ministry to rest on the authority of his power to forgive, and his readiness to love.
In our own day and age, we are surrounded by crises of authority. There is an urgent struggle for power taking place in this country that amounts to a question of where legitimate authority comes from. This nation was founded on the idea that real and legitimate authority could and should be derived from the will of the people. But these days, that ideal is actively being replaced by the very old-fashioned idea that authority rests with anyone who can grab power and hold onto it.
Vladimir Putin is also testing old modes of exercising power to try to claim authority. And it is unclear that he is prepared to learn the lesson that is becoming clear to the rest of us: that the capacity to inflict harm is not the same thing as authority.
The church’s authority has been in decline for hundreds of years, not least because her leaders have often grabbed for power where they ought not to have done, undermining her real authority, which should have rested on love. And we have too often failed to understand how essential is the paradox that Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness, wherein also lies a substantial claim of his authority.
The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution all signaled crises of authority, and new ways in which authority would be understood and accepted. Who knows what they’ll call our current age, or what the outcome of our crises will be?
Almost no one is looking to Jesus for authority these days, at least not in advanced economic societies like our own. So it’s helpful to me to reflect that at that dark hour on Calvary, no one was looking to Jesus for authority, either; even though he was the only one who had exercised real authority, by the power of forgiveness. There, on the Cross, the failure and rejection of Jesus was real and nearly complete.
But in the moments before Jesus died, just before noon, when darkness was about to come over the whole land, there was one soul who seemed to sense that all was not lost, and who seemed to be able to tell where real power, and real authority were to be found, even though he himself had come up against the powers and authorities of this world. That one soul has no name. He is only “the other.” He is the other criminal, crucified alongside Jesus, who, in his own weakness and dereliction, sees past the failure and humiliation all around him, sees past the injustice and the fear, sees past his own guilt, sees past the death that is inevitably coming for him soon. And he speaks to Jesus in one of only a very, very few instances in the Gospels in which someone addresses the Master by name. “Jesus,” he says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
If we claim that Christ is a king, almost everything we need to know about that claim is contained in this moment, shaped by a series of crises of human authority. Power has been abused. Religion has been corrupted. Authority is up for grabs. No one can be counted on to do what is right. The result is plain for everyone to see. The desire of the blood-thirsty will be satisfied - for there have always been those who are thirsty for blood. And from this morass, the promise of salvation comes to one who has not even had the opportunity to imagine resurrection yet. It comes to the one who sees past all the failures and crises of authority and simply, somehow knows who Jesus is. Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
The response is immediate: “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to him, “today you will be with me in paradise.”
Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
Once, years ago, I met a prince, an actual prince, at a reception, the purpose of which was to make such introductions. The meeting, such as it was, was nothing more than a formality. And although I cling to the memory of the occasion, I have no doubt that the prince in question possesses no memory of it, and, in fact, forgot the introduction as soon as he moved on to the next person at the reception. Such is the way of things.
If you want to know what it means to call Christ a king, what you need to know is this: that Jesus is the one who remembers you when he comes into his kingdom. In a world that is deeply confused about authority, even in crisis around authority - when weak leaders fail to exercise authority for the sake of justice, and when unprincipled people grab for power just because they want it and they think they can reach it - Jesus asserts his authority, mostly by forgiving. And Jesus remembers you. Yes, Jesus remembers you.
Jesus has already come into his kingdom, and Jesus remembers you and me. Forgiving us. Remembering us. Surrounded by a crisis of authority. Beaten, betrayed, and bloodied. Counted as lost, and on the verge of giving up the ghost. No wonder he remembers us. He knows us, and our sufferings at least as well as our joys.
And Jesus remembers us. He remembers us constantly, in every conceivable sense of the word. Jesus remembers us when he comes into his kingdom. And he forgives us.
Jesus remembers us - now and always. That’s what it means to say that Christ is a king. Jesus is the one who remembers us when he comes into his kingdom.
And to be remembered by the king of love - that is paradise!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
20 November 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
