How the Kingdom Came . . . and Comes . . . and Will Come

Matthew 27:27-31 & 35-38

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him and led him away to crucify him. . . .

And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.” Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

What for Pilate and the soldiers was Jesus’ “crime”—his claim to be Israel’s true king—was for Matthew the sober truth. And the crucifixion was the means by which his kingdom would be established. . . .

Why? Because the kingdom Jesus had spoken of, from the Sermon on the Mount onwards, was never a kingdom to be established and maintained by military force. If it was to be God’s kingdom, it would come about by God’s means; and the means that the true God chooses to use are the means of self-giving love. . . .

The point of it all is this: Jesus is leading the way he had spoken of from the beginning, the way of being God’s true Israel, the light of the world. He himself is set on a hill, unable now to remain hidden (5.14). This is how he is shinning the light of God’s love into the dark corners of the world: by taking the evil of the world, the hatred and cruelty and unthinking mockery of the world, the gratuitous violence, bullying and torture that still defaces the world, and letting it do its worst to him. Never let it be said that the Christian faith is an airy-fairy thing, all about having wonderful inner, spiritual experiences, and not about the real world. This story takes us to the very heart of what Christianity is all about; and here we meet, close up and raw, the anger and bitterness of the world, doing its worst against one who embodies and represents the love of the creator God himself (182-3).

Aaron Orendorff

What does it mean to serve a king enthroned on a cross? What does it mean to live as the citizen of a kingdom that comes not by taking power but by surrendering it, not by enacting violence but by suffering it?

The point certainly isn’t masochism—pain for the sake of pleasure. Knowing why we suffer doesn’t make suffering any less awful.

No, the point is found by recognizing that God’s pattern—the way His kingdom comes—is through the cross. God’s kingdom does not erase evil; it subverts and redeems it. As Dorothy Sayers wrote, “[On the cross] God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion: He rose from the dead.”

For Jesus’ followers then this means that the kingdom must advance not in victory and triumph—or at least not by what the world would call victory and triumph—but by reenacting and reembodying (much like celebrating communion) the death and resurrection of God’s Son. The kingdom came and comes and will come through paradoxical cycle of death and resurrection.