Photo by Praveen Thirumurugan on Unsplash
Special to United Methodist Insight | Nov. 18, 2025
Christ the King Sunday has a queasy irony built into it, and the irony grows more pronounced every year. We gather in sanctuaries and lift our voices to announce that Christ is king. His Galilean head must not only be crowned with one crown, but with “many crowns”, as the hymn says. We summon the language of dominions, diadems, reigns, and thrones. Yet the Gospel reading takes us to Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. It walks us toward a battered man nailed to a Roman instrument of humiliation. This is our king, or so we claim.
Luke 23:33–43 is not a coronation scene. It is a portrait of a debasement. The only crown is the one made of thorns. The only throne is a crossbeam. The only royal proclamation is a mockery hammered above his head. This is the joke at the heart of the passage. The soldiers and religious authorities jeer at him as if to say, If you are a king, then do something kinglike. Pull rank. Summon armies. Break the nails. Impress us. Kick ass. Take names.
Our expectations of royalty have never evolved much beyond that. Kings are supposed to wield power. They are supposed to win. They are supposed to be helpful to the people who salute them. The soldiers in Luke are not unique. They are us. They stand in for every believer who wants Jesus to operate like a conventional monarch, someone who resolves our crises and conquers our enemies while we applaud from the safety of the stands.
Christ the King Sunday reveals the embarrassing truth of how easily we impose our own royal fantasies on Jesus. We want a Savior who endorses our worldview and punishes our rivals. We demand a Christ who is king in a way that spares us from any real moral upheaval.
This is why the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” may be closer to the truth than the pageantry of Christ the King. Friends do not impose. Friends listen. Friends walk beside you in weakness. Kings, as history shows, do none of that. Kings demand, decree, tax, punish, and defend their own prerogatives. Christ, on the cross, fails on all of those accounts. The whole point of Luke’s scene is that he refuses to play the part offered to him. He resists every chance to play king in the way that the world recognizes kingship.
The question that looms over Christ the King Sunday is whether we have, once again, fallen into our yearly routine of missing the point. The scene in Luke mocks our pomp and eviscerates our circumstance. Christ is enthroned only in the sense that he is lifted up on something meant to kill him. His crown is a makeshift device from the barracks. His royal court is made up of criminals. One mocks him. The other only asks to be remembered, and Jesus offers him paradise as a reminder that this king rules by emptying himself rather than asserting himself.
The soldiers challenge him to prove his kingship. We challenge him in more subtle and dictatorial ways. We challenge him whenever we ask him to act like a ruler, when his only consistent response is to act like a servant. The Gospel reveals this impulse as a kind of spiritual reflex. We want Jesus to conform to our idea of authority because we do not want his concept of power to challenge ours.
Luke 23 refuses us that comfort. The passage redefines rulership. The king does not dominate. The king absorbs. The king does not preserve himself. The king gives himself away. The king does not punish the outsider. The king welcomes the thief. The king’s victory arrives not through force but through vulnerability. No monarch of any age has ever governed like this because no human monarch ever could or will.
The real question is not why Jesus does not act like a king. The real question is why we continue to expect him to do so. Christ challenges us precisely because we prefer kings who resemble us. We want rulers who promise security and order. Jesus refuses every one of those expectations. His throne is built from the world’s discarded wood, and his kingdom opens its gates to men dying on crosses.
Christ the King Sunday should unsettle us. It should not reassure us. It should force us to confront the possibility that our entire notion of kingship is the real problem. It should remind us that the Gospel is not asking Jesus to be more like an Emperor or Tsar. The Gospel is asking us to stop acting like subjects who expect a ruler to solve everything for them. We are the ones whose ideas of power need dismantling. Jesus is the king we cannot understand unless we stop telling him how a king should behave.
Luke leaves us with this: the true king hangs between two criminals and hears their contrasting voices. One demands proof. The other asks for mercy. We know which voice sounds like ours. Christ, however, answers only the voice that understands that kingship, at least as far as the Gospel is concerned, has nothing to do with power and everything to do with compassion.
Richard Bryant
Richard Bryant writes from North Carolina, where he teaches English to adult immigrants and incarcerated learners who have survived more than most people care to imagine. His work often wrestles with the fault lines between belief and doubt, power and vulnerability, and the uneasy places where Scripture collides with lived experience. He shares reflections on faith, literature, and the absurdities of modern life, shaped by years in the pulpit.