Judgement From The Rude Throne

Christ the King 2022

Those of you who are very familiar with the psalm we just sang, Psalm 122, may realize that the Church omits the last few verses of the prayer today. The last part of the psalm takes time to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. That makes a great deal of sense in the context of the history of Israel, because that area of the world was the land bridge between Egypt and the Near East part of Asia that was a battleground, and still is. So they prayed often for peace. But that doesn’t happen today.

Today the psalm celebrates the judgement seats of the house of David. Here’s why.

The kings of Israel, in later times called kings of the Jews, were generally jerks. Most of them were jerks most or all of the time. They prayed to other gods; some of them even offered their firstborns as a sacrifice to the false gods. They oppressed their people; they took bribes to affect judicial cases. Even the best of them, Hezekiah and Josiah, were guilty of terrible pride, and suffered from that sin. There were two big exceptions.

The two big exceptions bracket the history of Israel. At the beginning, God rejected the first king, Saul, and chose David as a “man after my own heart.” He became the ideal king, despite a few years in the middle of his reign when he was guilty of adultery, lying and the murder of one of his most loyal followers. But, unlike his successors who sinned, David repented and came back to right worship and right living. His death brought on many generations of trouble, and ultimately the total loss of the kingdom in the Babylonian conquest. But that was not God’s last word. God had promised that David’s dynasty would endure forever.

You all know the story. In the time of Caesar Augustus, the angel Gabriel served as prophet to the Virgin Mary, betrothed to a man of the house of David. His name was Joseph. She gave the world her first and only child, Yeshua, or Jesus as we call Him. He was the Son of David, but He was also the Son of God. He was the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, God Himself become human. The Father had predestined Him to be the firstborn of all creation, and the legitimate successor of His human father, David. So when He made His last journey to Jerusalem, as we know from St. Luke, He acknowledged His own kingship by healing the blind Bartimaeus who called Him “Son of David” and permitting His followers to hail Him as Messiah as He entered Jerusalem on a donkey. That was just a few days before this scene in our Gospel.

It all fits together if we realize that for the early Church, Jesus reigned as King from His throne on the Holy Cross. There, just outside the gates of Jerusalem, His new judgement seat, a seat for the Davidic King, was erected by the Romans. And His first words from the cross was the judgement of the people who had unjustly put Him on that rude throne: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Moreover, here in the midst of His tortuous dying, the Divine Judge receives an appeal from one of the criminals, who is echoing a sarcastic jibe from the soldiers down below, “Are you not the Christ, then save yourself and us.” The irony is that with a sign of repentance, the bad thief could have had remission of His sins and salvation, but rejected it.

The other thief did not appeal, but himself reminded his co-condemned of their own guilt and Jesus’s total innocence. He then asks to be remembered in Christ’s kingdom, and is promised redemption and eternal life in Paradise. He realized in some sense that Jesus was indeed reigning from His rude throne, and placed His appeal in the bleeding hands of Our Eternal King and Judge.

The reality is that Jesus, Firstborn from the dead, wants to judge all human beings, and judge them innocent and worthy of eternal life in Him. All He needs is a word of repentance, a word of faith in His saving power. We have to turn our backs on any addiction, any attachment to this world of chaos and pleasure and pain, and lift our faces to Christ’s compassionate vision. He will even give us the grace to do that, if we allow it. Our challenge is to do that daily ourselves and bring others to the Holy Cross, to the feet of the Savior, so they can have that gift, that new life, themselves.