This Isn’t How the Story’s Supposed to End

Sermon — November 23, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

This isn’t how the story’s supposed to end.

At least, this isn’t how the story of a hero on the rise usually goes. At some point, in the long process that leads from his betrayal to his trial, from his arrest to his death, something is supposed to happen. Jesus is supposed to act. In the Marvel version of the Life of Christ, this should be the climax of the first issue: at the moment of greatest sorrow, when it looks like all hope is lost, that’s when the gamma radiation is supposed to kick in, and Jesus is supposed to swell into a big green Hulk and tear the Cross apart.

This kind of superhero story is a modern favorite, of course. But it’s not just a modern idea. Ancient people had their superheroes too, who miraculously snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Jesus and his friends had grown up hearing stories of the heroes of old; from the mighty warrior Samson, who was strong enough to kill a thousand Philistine warriors armed with nothing but the jawbone of a donkey, as long as you didn’t cut his hair; to the shepherd boy David, who overcame the great champion Goliath when he was just a kid.

They’d grown up hearing of prophets who’d predicted the arrival of a coming king. By Jesus’ day, there hadn’t been a king in five hundred years or so, and even then, they hadn’t been all that great. The prophet Jeremiah was active in the dying days of the old Kingdom of Judah, and he pretty much captured the tone when he wrote, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” (Jer. 23:1) He wasn’t talking about the kind of shepherds who keep watch over sheep. And he wasn’t talking about priests or rabbis, the spiritual “shepherds” of their people. He was talking about kings. From the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to the shepherd King David, “shepherd” had always been a favorite image for a king, whose job it was both to care for and to lead his people.

But not every shepherd is a good shepherd. Not every shepherd really cares for the sheep. And so Jeremiah prophesies against the kings of his day: “It is you who have scattered my flock!” The very people who were supposed to shepherd the flock have driven them away. But God has a solution: God “will raise up shepherds…who will shepherd them,” not exploit them. (Jer. 23:4) He will raise up for David a “righteous Branch,” who shall “reign as king.”

Now, it had been six hundred years since Jeremiah wrote these words, and there had never been another king. There had been years of exile in Babylon. Then rule by governors, and by high priests. King Herod was kind of a king, but he had been made a king by Rome, and he was a polarizing figure at best.

But word about Jesus has been spreading for months. They said that he could heal the sick, that he could cast out demons, that he could feed five thousand people with a couple of loaves of bread. They called him the beloved Son of God. Some even said that he was the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed king who would finally set his people free and bring about the kingdom of God on earth.

But here he is: betrayed, arrested, crucified. And some people in the crowd stand by, waiting for Jesus to act, hoping that he really is what his followers say; hoping that he really will go into Hulk mode and set his people free. And the skeptics in the crowd have fun mocking yet another would-be king.

You think you’re the savior of the world? How about you save yourself? You think you’re the King? Come down off the Cross and show us! Even one of the criminals who’s crucified next to him asks—with some mixture of sarcasm and hope: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!?” (23:39)

Everyone agrees that if he’s really the Messiah, it will mean a show of force. If he really is the anointed King, he’ll come down off the Cross, and smite the soldiers who mock him, and seize the throne for himself. Some people hope he can still pull it off, some say his crucifixion proves he isn’t the real deal. But everyone thinks they know what it looks like to be King, and it isn’t this.

Jesus isn’t clothed in royal robes; he’s stripped bare. He isn’t crowned with gold and jewels, but with thorns. He isn’t leading a mighty army to set his people free; he’s suffering at the hands of the only soldiers in sight, and his followers are nowhere to be found.

But as their final moments approach, one of the other men being crucified still holds out hope. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” he says. (23:42) And Jesus reassures him that his kingdom is coming soon; it’s coming now: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (23:43) And then, all three men die.

This Sunday, the Last Sunday after Pentecost, just before the season of Advent begins, is sometimes called “The Feast of Christ the King.” As far as the church calendar goes, this observance is new—it only dates back a hundred years or so, to the time between the First and Second World Wars. The greatest kings of Christendom had just ordered the deaths of several million men in a pointless war, the fascist dictators who would shape the 1920s and ’30s were just beginning to rise, and the Pope decided it was a good time to remind people who was really King.

On Christ the King, we declare that we owe our highest allegiance not to human kings or kingdoms, politicians or nations, but to the Messiah: we claim that Jesus is the King of kings and Lord of lords. We pray that the peoples of the earth, who have been divided from one another and enslaved by sin, may be set free and brought together under his most gracious rule. And sometimes all this talk of “Christ the King” rubs people the wrong way.

The hymns and the prayers and the name itself can sound like a kind of triumphant Christian nationalism. They can sound like they lend themselves to the idea that if Christ is King, then we should live in a Christian nation, with divine law established as the law of the land, and “Christian values” shaping our public life. (Of course, this idea always raises the question, “Whose understanding of Christian values?” Because we’ve never yet agreed on what that means.)

But Jesus is not that kind of king. When Christ is King, it doesn’t look like a theocracy: it looks like death on the Cross. Jesus never tries to pass a law to ensure that all people will live according to his teachings. He refuses to marshal his followers to throw the Romans out and establish the kingdom of God on earth. He doesn’t go looking for a donkey’s jawbone with which to smite his foes.

Instead, he prays for them: “Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.” (23:34) And then he dies to save them from the power of death. He gives his own life on behalf of those who have let him down. And these two acts—the act of gracious forgiveness and the act of self-sacrificing love—are what it looks like in this world when Christ is King. This is what it looks like when we are finally led by a good shepherd.

And every one of us has a chance to follow him where he leads. Some of us, have some power or influence in the world, and following Christ the King might mean following his form of servant leadership, using the power we have not to puff ourselves up, but to build other people up. Some of us have no power than Jesus did when he was in his last moments on the Cross, but even then, we have the same power he had at the last to forgive one another, as we have been forgiven. This may not seem like much power at all, in the face of all the evils of the world. But it’s an essential part of the work of healing the world’s divides, of bringing people together again who have been divided. If our efforts at healing the world don’t start from the same posture of grace, and mercy, and love that Jesus held even on the Cross, they will always fall short of the kingdom of God. But what a gift: every one of us, whoever we are and whatever other power or influence we have, has the chance to follow Christ as King, and to use our lives to participate in the reconciling work of Christ himself, “through [whom] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things.” (Col. 1:20) Amen.