What Sort of King?--November 24, 2025

What Sort of King?--November 24, 2025

"May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, so that you may have all endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." (Colossians 1:11-14)

The right question to ask is, "What sort of king reigns in the kingdom where I belong?"  Different kinds of rulers have different ways of ruling, after all.  So, to what sort of king, and what sort of kingdom, do we give our allegiance?

There's this moment of levity in one of the Marvel Avengers movies where a group of the heroes seek the help of T'Challa, also known as the hero Black Panther, who is king of the fictional Afro-futurist nation of Wakanda.  And as the visiting Avengers get off of their jet to meet him, Bruce Banner (the Hulk) turns and asks a fellow hero (Rhodey), "Are we supposed to bow?" Rhodey implies the answer is yes, because, after all, T'Challa is a king.  So Banner bows, only to have the king himself stop him and say, simply, "We don't do that here." In other words, this isn't that sort of kingdom, and I am not that sort of king. And with that, off the heroes go to plan their defense of the world from a hostile alien threat.

It is a sort of throwaway moment as a joke, but the theology of it is poking at me. It's a moment that reminds me how often we import baggage from our assumptions about how rulers, kingdoms, and power works--and those may have very little to do with the way God actually reigns, or the kind of king Jesus actually turns out to be.  We are used to stories of self-absorbed kings surrounded in gaudy gold-plated opulence who boast about their own greatness, and we might assume that Jesus is just one more insecure narcissist with a crown like them.  But the New Testament says differently: Jesus is a different kind of king, and "We don't do that here" in Jesus' kingdom.  Jesus reigns with the basin and the towel for washing feet, with the bread and fish for feeding the hungry, and with the thorns and cross of self-giving love.  The kind of king we have means we belong to a different kind of kingdom.

That's important to remember as we reflect on these words from Colossians, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship for Christ the King Sunday.  The writer of Colossians says that God "has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins."  There is the sense that Jesus' kind of kingdom works differently from the ways of the world's kingdoms, powers, and empires.  There is the sense, in other words, that in response to a great many of the assumptions we bring, Jesus will say to us, graciously but firmly, "We don't do that here."

For one, the writer to the Colossians says that we have forgiveness of sins.  In the reign of Jesus, we don't endlessly keep track of who has wronged us and how we intend to get back at them; neither do we have to worry that God is still keeping tally of our mess-ups and failures until some future date when we'll get zapped.  We don't do that here.  For another thing, in the reign of Jesus, greatness isn't measured by putting yourself above other people or lording your position over them, but rather in serving.  In the reign of Jesus, we commit to showing love even to our enemies, because that is how God has loved us first--even while we were enemies of God.  In the reign of Jesus, we don't need to hoard our stuff, because we trust that God will provide for our needs, and so we can share so that others can have their daily bread as well.  We don't need to bully, belittle, or intimidate other people, because that's not how Jesus does things in his kingdom.  We have already been transferred from whatever other protocols and systems we had been stuck in, and we are now free to live under Jesus' gracious and gentle rule where justice and mercy are at home.

All of this puts an end the old insistence that we have to act the way everybody else does because "It's just how the world works." Others will insist that getting even is just the nature of things, or that you've got to step on other people in order to get ahead, because that's just "how things get done." But we can respond differently--we don't have to be obligated to do things the way "everybody else does it," because we have been transferred into a different kingdom.  And in Jesus' community, simply, "We don't do that here."  We don't have to go elsewhere, like up to heaven, or inside your local church sanctuary, or to go find a "Christian nation" (because that's not how Jesus operates).  Rather, right here, right where we are, we can begin already to live following Jesus' way, seeing the world from Jesus' perspective.  We can live right now, in this place and this time, from the vantage point of God--from the edge of eternity.

How might your day or your week change when you start to see things from the perspective of Jesus?  What old habits can we be done with?  What new possibilities might be opened up?   How will we interact with other people given the way Jesus treats them?  Let's see where those questions take us today.

Lord Jesus, free us from the baggage of the old powers and orders we have lived under, so that we can live fully and freely in your reign.