Eucharistic Readings for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 29, Year C: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:35-43
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” – Jeremiah 23:5
“Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” – Luke 23:39
May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.+
If you know a little something about horticulture, you know a little something about branches. While not the central trunk or stem of the plant, a branch is the woody structure that extends off of the central portion of the plant, often bearing fruit. Given its status as an auxiliary feature, it might seem counterintuitive for Jeremiah to describe a branch as kingly, but, if we meditate on today’s readings collectively, we might learn something new about just how powerful a branch can be and just how far a stem might reach.
Our readings offer us three disparate, but intimately related accounts of Christ’s kingship. The prophet Jeremiah uses an elaborate botanical metaphor to describe the coming of Jesus and St. Paul describes Jesus’s primacy as the firstborn of all creation, placing him squarely at the forefront of the church. These descriptions seem fit for a king, but St. Luke shows us Jesus in a very different position. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is not an integral piece of a flowering plant and not, as Paul says, given “first place in everything”; instead, we see Jesus elevated on the cross, the imperial instrument of humiliation and death, derided by one of the criminals beside him who has also been sentenced to die via public execution. A stark, visceral departure from the tone and content of the prophecy and epistle, Luke’s account of the crucifixion puts forth quite a different image of kingship than the other two passages. We call this feast the Feast of Christ the King, but before we can understand what it means to call Jesus our king, we must first understand who Jesus is, wrestling with these three intertwining depictions of his rule.
Jeremiah’s branch metaphor reminds us of Jesus’s genealogical descent from David and recalls the language that his fellow latter prophet Isaiah employs. As we read in Isaiah 11:1-2: “A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord”. Reading Jeremiah and Isaiah’s descriptions of the coming Christ together, we learn a little about who Jesus is, historically speaking, namely that he is emerging from a particular dynastic line that includes a king, David, and is emerging as a king in his own right, invested with the very spirit of God. As Paul notes, Jesus possesses and wields God’s spirit, but Jesus is much more than a spiritually-gifted human with a noble bloodline. Jesus is the very “image”, the character, of the likeness of God, and “is the head of the body, the church”. He is the branch that reflects the full power of the central plant, the Godhead, because He is the central plant that has taken on human nature. He is the firstborn of all creation, the stem that holds all things together, whose sacrifice and passion redeemed the whole world.
Redemption, in Luke’s Gospel, occurs in the unlikeliest of places. Luke alone records something that is equal parts painful and powerful during Christ’s Passion, couched within the crucifixion story that we might think we already know quite well from the other Gospels. At first, the crucifixion story Hanging underneath a sign with the mocking moniker “King of the Jews”, the community leaders who have lobbied for a way to get rid of Jesus now denigrate him for the work that he’s done: “He saved others, let him save himself if he is the Messiah, God’s chosen One!”. The Roman soldiers, the imperial muscle overseeing the execution join in, present Jesus with wine that has gone sour and vinegary, and they take up the refrain: “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”. One of the thieves crucified with Jesus even joins in: But, unique to Luke’s Gospel, the other thief, commonly called St. Dismas, reaches out to Jesus not with ridicule but with earnest repentance and humility, reproving his former partner in crime and acknowledging who Jesus is: “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong”. Dismas does not even ask for forgiveness; he only requests that Jesus not forget about him, his misdeeds, or his turn from the man he used to be: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom”. Jesus, the righteous branch, reaches across the wood of his own cross to Dismas’s, offering not just forgiveness but salvation: “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise”. In the midst of utter humiliation and deep bodily suffering, God’s love transcends the arms of the cross, enfolding Dismas and indeed all of creation in his arms, using his Passion to open for us the way to Paradise. This is who Jesus is: the blameless, endlessly loving, righteous branch who bears the blame of all in order that all might be redeemed and all might be forgiven.
Having understood who Jesus is, how then are we to live with him as our king? If, as members of the church universal and the Body of Christ, we are offshoots of a branch, how are we to bear fruit? Clarity here might lie in remembering that, as we recall who Jesus is, we also need to remember who we are and what we have been called to do as followers of Jesus. We have just seen Jesus, as he is dying on the cross, reach out to save in the midst of imperial death-dealing. We have just heard Paul remind us that Jesus is the image of God. My siblings in Christ, we need to apply what we have seen and heard to what we see and hear in the world around us. If you have been paying attention to the news cycle, you have no doubt heard of the lives lost and the many wounded at Club Q in Colorado. Combined with roiling war in Ukraine, continued state violence in Palestine, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Kashmir, impending famine in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and many other sufferings that are happening both domestically and abroad, it’s not difficult to see the continued influence of death-dealing, hatred, and harm in our world and, if we look a little more closely at the roots of violence, we see the systems that allow and perpetuate large-scale harm and the actions we can take to destroy evil before it blooms. Human suffering grieves our hearts and the heart of God. While you and I may not have salvific power, we do have immense personal and collective power when we actively pray with our hands, feet, and resources. We do have power to demand more of ourselves, our communities, our government, and the social systems that hurt us and our siblings, and deny that all of us are made in the image of Christ. Guided by Christ’s example, walking in the way of light and peace, we must do all in our power to bring about a world that executes justice and righteousness. We owe our king no less.
If we believe that Christ is king, we must live as though radical, divine love is our root, love that saves and heals in the face of death, love that challenges empires, principalities, and abuse of power, love that calls us into fullness of being through the forgiveness of sins and our redemption through the cross of Jesus. The power of the cross is the power of the branch; through the cross, the flower of Jesse’s stem has “reconciled himself to all things”, as Paul says, “making peace through the blood of his cross”. We might look for further guidance in John’s Gospel, where Jesus reminds us who He is, who his Father is, and who we are, saying, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:1-5). What must we do then, as followers of Christ? We must abide in Him. I submit to you that “abiding” takes on more than one form. In the first sense, abiding in Jesus means to dwell in God’s word and commandments, allowing the love and grace evident in Jesus’s acts to reside in our hearts. In the second sense, abiding in Jesus means to act in accordance with his rule, allowing Our Lord’s embodied execution of justice, mercy, and love to govern our lives. May we, branches guided by the abiding love of God and conscious of the fact that all power belongs to Christ our King, who is the True Vine, step forward into God’s flowering, emergent kingdom.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.+
Shrine of Our Lord, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Times Square, New York City (photo: Jae Kirkland Rice)
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