Sermon: Last Sunday After Pentecost
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Nov. 23, 2025)
For the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So today is the last Sunday of Pentecost. We turn next week towards Advent, towards awaiting the festival, the Feast of Incarnation. And this last Sunday of Pentecost, as we've already said, is traditionally known as Christ the King Sunday. I say it's traditionally known, it's not actually that old a tradition.
A lot of our holidays, these feast days, go back into the earliest days of the church. This one's new. Pope Pius XI established this feast after World War I, in the 20s. Pius was worried over the rise of secular nationalism in the world, and he wanted to assert the sovereignty of Jesus, but it wasn't just in the world. It was actually specifically in Italy where he was. The unified Italy had recently come under the power of Benito Mussolini, and Mussolini wanted to subordinate all religion to the state. And so in 1925 when the Pope said, "Christ is king," he was making sort of a spiritual rejoinder to Mussolini's political claim, asserting some of his own temporal power.
Later in 1929, Mussolini granted Pope Pius authority, temporal authority over the Vatican states; this was a win for the Pope. He got some temporal power back; it was also a win for Mussolini because some of the religious folks in Italy who were suspicious of him became less suspicious, and he was able to consolidate more fascist power. I start with the story just because partly it's the history of this feast day, but also because of these worrisome ties to fascism. Who Christ is? What Christ's kingdom looks like? What we think about those things, what we think about what that kingdom looks like is related to a problem that we have in Christianity, which is our tendency towards nationalism.
And I want to talk about that this morning because if you can't talk about it on Christ the King Sunday, I'm not sure when you talk about it. On its face, this is a weird feast, Christ the King. Jesus is ambivalent about this title; just on the page of scripture in John 6, the people come and try to make him king, and he runs away from them because he does not want to be king. On the other hand, Jesus is always talking about the kingdom of God. He's always talking about the kingdom that he is bringing to us. And practically speaking, linguistically speaking, the word "Messiah" translated into Greek is "Christ." The word "Messiah" at Jesus's time meant "the king." The Messiah was the one who would restore proper kingship to Jesus's people. So when I said ambivalence, I meant ambivalence. There's a kind of kingship Jesus rejects and runs away from. There's another one that he's asserting and standing up for, and we see that in this passage as well.
The gospel passage from Luke. It's a bold move for the church to have this scene of Jesus's crucifixion as the lesson upon which we understand Jesus is king. But one of the lines where we can see that is in this figure of this person who's historically, traditionally known as the good thief who turns to Jesus and says, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." Talk about bold claims. What he means is when you restore our people, on the cross, he still believes this might happen. And Jesus responds. Interestingly, though, it's the thief who uses the word kingdom; it's not Jesus.
When Jesus responds, he says, "Paradise." Now, "paradise" is a tricky word, a sticky word. I think today, conventionally, traditionally, we tend to think about paradise as a heavenly realm, a spiritual realm, a realm free from all the pain and suffering of this world; that's what we mean by paradise. And I think that's what we hear when we see Jesus speak about paradise to this man who is dying alongside him. But the Greek word "paradise," which is what Jesus uses here, derives from a Persian word; it's a Persian loanword, and the Persian word for "paradise" means a walled garden, an enclosed garden. It is an earthly space, not a spiritual one. And the reason why the Greek author of this gospel uses that word "paradise" here is not because he's trying to connote some heavenly realm. It's because this is the word that was used to translate the Garden of Eden in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible—the Garden of Eden, which was also an enclosed space.
Traditionally, we've interpreted this scene; Christians have interpreted this scene as saying the good thief gets into paradise. He's inside the walls. The bad thief, who's not so nice, he's outside the walls. And this is what I worry about: that in our picture of paradise, there is a wall. Banishment, banishing the ones who do not deserve to be here, is part of the way we keep things in order. To keep things right, you have to keep some people out. And let's be honest, this is how Christian kingdoms and Christian kings have imagined their own kingships and kingdoms.
We need to banish those who will ruin our earthly paradise. We don't have to look far, and it's not hard to see once we start looking: the banishment of Jews from England in the 13th century, the banishment of Jews and Muslims from Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries. The people who established this university, this university which we love and are trying to protect and which does so much good for the world, when they came to this place, they meant to create a new Jerusalem, and part of that project was expelling and exterminating the people who already lived here. I think it would be naive for us to think that what is going on in our world today is not linked to these practices, the way today we're deporting people, assaults upon immigration, the purging of sexual or gender identities that some folks have decided are not legitimate.
All of this politics of exclusion, this preoccupation with banishment, these acts of cruelty--all of these are part of this long, regrettable tradition. This belief about paradise, that we might reclaim a lost Eden as soon as we purge it of that which does not belong, any contemporary political project that aims to restore some past thing and does it through punishment and banishment, I think, is a worrisome part of this history. It's also an ironic and tragic fact because it seems so contrary to who Jesus is and what Jesus does throughout the Gospels.
And since this is a scene from the Gospel of Luke, we can just narrow in just on the Gospel of Luke. I mean, the examples abound, but if you want to look just at the Gospel of Luke. Who doesn't Jesus serve in the Gospel of Luke? When the Roman oppressive centurion comes and asks for help, he helps him. When the enemies of his own people come, Gentiles or Samaritans come before him asking for support or healing, he supports and heals them. When folks who have communicable skin diseases who are rendered impure come to him asking for healing, he touches them. He lays his hands upon them. When criminals come, like in this moment, and ask him for forgiveness, he offers it. When tax collectors who betray his people so deeply, when they ask him to come to dinner, he goes and has dinner with them.
Whatever Jesus' ministry involves in the Gospel of Luke, no one is banished simply because of who they are. No one is excluded because of any identity they hold. And if we need a better example of it, look at this scene, this terrible, awful scene of Jesus's crucifixion. They nail him up, and he says, "Forgive them." And from that moment on, after he says, "Forgive them," we have a list, a narrative list of all the people whom Jesus is asking God not to turn away. First, the Romans who gamble for his clothes, and then the religious elites of his own people who scoff at him, and then the crowds who are indifferent to him or insult him, and then this unrepentant thief who mocks him, and then the penitent thief who pleads with them--all of them, each of them. Jesus says, "Don't banish them. My Eden does not require their expulsion," Jesus says.
We will figure this out a different way through forgiveness and mercy, through peace. This is the kingdom Jesus has promised. It is costly, it is risky. Indeed, the costs and risks of it are bearing down upon Jesus in this moment. But it's even more important that in this moment, he continues to proclaim it. To proclaim a paradise without walls, one that doesn't depend upon exclusion, one that upends the cruel logic of every nationalism. No one is walled out in Jesus's kingdom; no one is cast out in Jesus's kingdom because God loves them all. Even, and especially, the ones we think don't fit, the ones we believe don't belong, God loves them too.
The words of Jesus, which bookend this terrible, terrible scene, "Father, forgive them. And you will be with me; you will not be banished; you will not be excluded." These bookends--these are the features of the kingdom Jesus has promised to us. Whatever paradise is, whether it is earthly or ethereal, it is not some narrow-walled garden. It is not an enclave only big enough to hold the few, only big enough to hold the ones who happen to look most like me or think most like me, or the ones who share my politics or religion or identity or status. The kingdom of God is that place of welcome where all these walls are brought down and where all stand in reach of God's boundless love. In the climactic moment of this climactic passage, the good thief turns to Jesus and prays. He says, "Jesus, please remember. Remember, please remember." I hope Jesus does, because as purges and deportations and exclusions and expulsions continue in our name, I'm not worried over what Jesus has forgotten about his kingdom. I'm worried about what we have.