Let Us Go Rejoicing

Sunday Readings

Thirty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Christ the King (Year C)

The liturgical year culminates this week in the celebration of the joyous and triumphant solemnity of Christ the King. In the Entrance Antiphon, the Church echoes the cry of the numberless host of heaven, witnessed to in the Revelation to St John, acclaiming in loud voices the worthiness of the Lamb that was slain (Rev 5:12). In the Collect, She prays “that the whole creation, set free from slavery,” might ceaselessly praise God – thus joining in with that same heavenly host – and locating within the realm of God-given freedom, having been “delivered from the power of darkness and transferred…to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col 1:13), the universal acclamation expressed in the following verse from the Apocalypse: “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, everything in the universe, cry out: ‘To the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor, glory and might, forever and ever’.” (Rev 5:13). The Responsorial, too, repeatedly intones the joy of praising God: “Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord.”

In the first reading, situated in the immediate aftermath of the fiasco that was the end of the House of King Saul, all the tribes of Israel and their elders came to David, King of Judah, that David might consent to be king of a restored nation. They plea in language reminiscent of Adam’s delight upon first seeing Eve and realizing their fundamental unity: “Here we are, your bone and your flesh” they say, appealing to a shared familial bond in seeking peace and restoration. The place was Hebron, also known in the Bible as Kiriath-arba and as Mamre, where Abraham dwelt and built an altar to the Lord (Gen 13:18), where the Lord made a covenant with him (Gen 15), gave him the sign of the covenant: circumcision (Gen 17), appeared to him in the form of three men (Gen 18), and is where the patriarchs are buried (Gen 50:13).

Young David responds to the appeal by taking them all under his wing. In the liturgical reading, the NAB tells us that he “made an agreement with them there before the LORD”, but this is a pedestrian rendering: the Revised NAB, like the RSV and others, tells us that he made a covenant with them. It was an oath taken to bind them to each other. The Hebrew word is berith, which is cognate to a word for the provision or consuming of food. It describes a conjoining at the level of a fundamental unity: “your bone and your flesh”. And then, “they anointed [David] king of Israel”, where “anointed” translates the word from which in English we get “Messiah” from the Hebrew, and “Christ” from the Greek.

The Gospel passage paints a very different picture. As the anointed king is hanging on the cross, the rulers (i.e., elders) want nothing to do with him, and sneer at him. The Roman soldiers likewise jeer at him, and he is even reviled by one of those sentenced with him to die. Remarkably, the Jewish elders seem to know that he had “saved others” – presumably at least Lazarus (cf. Jn 12:9-11) – yet they appear to either doubt his ability to save himself, or suppose that he just might take himself off the cross, if he is indeed “the Christ [Anointed] of God”. It’s hard to believe they would be sneering at him if they thought there was any real possibility he was in fact the “chosen one”, so we can only conclude that, despite their empty words, they refused to believe the miracles that were witnessed by thousands of their own people, some of which they had previously taken as fact in order to accuse Jesus of violating the Sabbath laws. The level of cognitive dissonance displayed in this scene by the elders is astonishing.

The soldiers, too, seem to assume that Jesus could save himself if he were indeed the King of the Jews. How would they come to such an assumption? Had there ever been a king of any people that could save himself from such a predicament? Did they – or anybody else – actually expect that the King of the Jews, as the Chosen One and Anointed of God, would be divine, or possess divine power? Or did the soldiers just mindlessly join in on the mocking they were hearing as a kind of psychological defensive mechanism to take their attention off the horrific evils they were engaged in inflicting on a man whom everybody surely recognized as innocent?

One of the other condemned criminals likewise appears to mock Jesus’ claim to be the Christ, again seeming to assume that the real Christ of God could overcome the predicament of crucifixion, on behalf of both the innocent and the guilty. But this mockery is rebuked by the third condemned man as hypocritical: the guilty deserve their punishment, but the innocent do not. That honest penitent then makes one of the most amazing requests in Scripture: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” This brigand, himself in the throes of death upon a brutal instrument of torture, recognizes that Jesus, dying on the cross beside his own, is in fact the Chosen One of God, about to come into His kingdom. It is a remarkable confession of the Christian faith, which strictly speaking didn’t even exist yet.

Jesus’ reply rings down through the ages as the promise undergirding the hope of all penitents: “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Thanks be to God.