Introduction
On this final Sunday of the lectionary year (and our final Sunday in the Gospel of Luke), we stand at the foot of the cross. It is a profoundly disorienting place to end the year. While the annual calendar is already urging us toward manger scenes and shepherds and nostalgic images of “baby Jesus,” the church instead directs our eyes toward the most gruesome scene in the gospel: Christ crucified, humiliated, mocked, and dying at the hands of an empire.
This is the day we declare Christ is King.
This is the text where he looks anything but.
If you have followed this commentary, you know that I love tension in the text. It’s in the tension that we get to say all the truths and really lean into the vision of the Kingdom of God. There is no Sunday with greater tension than Christ the King Sunday (and maybe especially in Luke’s year). And so, lean into the tension. Of the text. Of the calendar. Of the disorienting scene.
Narrative Context
Luke has been building toward this moment from the very first chapter. The crucifixion does not come out of nowhere; it is the culmination of a conflict that has been budding since Jesus’ conception, a conflict between the kingdom of God and the systems (economic, political, religious) that divide and control.
The first explicit note of this conflict comes not from Jesus, but from Mary. In the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), she sings of a God who brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, a God who fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary’s song is the thesis statement of Luke’s Gospel: God is turning the world upside down.
Her child, not born in Jerusalem (the center of religious power), nor in Rome (the center of imperial power), but in an overlooked town in an overlooked part of the empire, will embody this reversal. From the moment of his birth, the Messiah of Luke is located outside the centers of consequence. Shepherds, not priests or governors, are the first to hear the news. His earliest visitors are not elites but laborers working the night shift. Before Jesus ever speaks, Luke has placed him in opposition to the way power normally works.
John the Baptist then announces this coming reversal with urgency. In Luke 3, he proclaims a baptism of repentance and warns that the One coming after him will bring fire, judgment, and transformation: “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.” John’s message is not gentle spiritual advice. It is the promise of a social and moral regrading, a leveling of unjust structures. And when the crowds ask what repentance looks like, John’s answers are economic and communal: share your resources, refuse exploitation, be content with fair wages. The conflict is already taking shape.
When Jesus steps into public ministry, he declares openly what Mary sang and what John prepared. Unrolling the scroll of Isaiah in his hometown synagogue (Luke 4:16–21), Jesus announces good news to the poor, release to captives, freedom for the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor. Luke tells us Jesus begins his ministry by proclaiming a kingdom that liberates those most harmed by the world’s systems. And almost immediately, his own townspeople attempt to throw him off a cliff. The conflict is no longer theoretical.
Throughout Luke’s Gospel, this conflict only intensifies. Jesus’ sermon on the level place (Luke 6:20–26) blesses the poor, the hungry, the grieving, and the despised, while pronouncing woe on the rich, the comfortable, and the well-regarded. His parables continually expose and upend systems that reinforce status: the Good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the great banquet where the honored guests refuse the invitation, and the poor and disabled are gathered in instead. His table fellowship disregards purity codes and collapses social boundaries. He lifts up tax collectors and sinners while exposing the hypocrisy of the religious elite. He praises repentance rather than self-righteousness. His healings give agency and dignity to those society treats as expendable.
At every turn, Jesus reveals a kingdom that threatens the economic order (who is worthy of resources), the religious order (who is worthy of God), and the political order (what power is for). By the time Jesus enters Jerusalem in chapter 19, conflict is not just likely, it is guaranteed. He disrupts the Temple’s marketplace (an act with religious, political, and financial consequences) and then, day after day, he teaches in the Temple, challenging the authority of leaders who have long decided that his death is the only way to protect their system.
From the Magnificat to the cross, Luke has shown us that the crucifixion is not a tragic surprise. It is the predictable result of a world that cannot tolerate a King who comes to reorder everything by grace and equity. The empire crucifies Jesus not because he failed, but because he succeeded. Because he proclaimed and embodied a kingdom that makes every other kingdom tremble. A kingdom where everyone is welcome. A kingdom where everyone has enough. A kingdom where everyone has a voice. There is no greater threat to entrenched power.
And so, the confrontation reaches its climax not in a throne room but at a place called The Skull.
Unlike the other Gospels, Luke emphasizes Jesus’ innocence repeatedly. Pilate insists on it. Herod’s examination implies it. The centurion will declare it at Jesus’ death. And here, one of the crucified criminals proclaims it. Luke wants us to see that in Jesus we are witnessing the collision of divine mercy and human violence and that the one who suffers injustice refuses to return violence for violence.
In Luke, the cross is not the moment when Jesus’ kingship is negated. It is the moment when his kingship is revealed. Everything Luke has shown us (Mary’s Magnificat, John’s proclamation, Jesus’ Isaian mission, the Sermon on the Plain, the table fellowship, the healings, the parables, the temple confrontation) has been preparing us for the kind of King Jesus is. A King whose authority is exercised through forgiveness. A King whose power is shown in vulnerability. A King whose glory is found not in saving himself but in giving himself away for the sake of the world.
Preaching Possibilities
Get Uncomfortable
A common preaching path for Christ the King Sunday is to contrast the king we expect with the King we receive. We expect a strong, triumphant, throne-sitting ruler. Instead, we receive a crucified Messiah whose crown is made of mockery and whose throne is a cross. That’s a valid and fruitful direction. But it often lets us off the hook.
In that sermon arc, we imagine ourselves as the oppressed looking for a liberator, or as the enlightened few who recognize the “real Jesus” when others don’t. And if we’re honest, many of us (especially in comfortable Western Christianity) end up preferring a hybrid Jesus:
the revolutionary King who challenges them,
and the gentle Savior who reassures us.
But Luke never gives us a revolutionary Jesus in the modern, violent, or even symbolic sense. The thunder is always elsewhere:
John the Baptist speaks of axes and fire.
Zealots and insurrectionists are mentioned but never affirmed.
Even Jesus’ disciples want swords at the wrong moments.
But Jesus?
In Luke, he does not plot an uprising. He does not call for arms. He refuses coercion. He grieves. He heals. He tells stories. He overturns dominance not through violence but through vulnerability, generosity, and divine hospitality. His is a revolution of mercy. Not metaphorical mercy, but mercy with economic, social, and religious teeth.
Because of this, Luke’s Gospel demands that we stop imagining ourselves as the powerless ones yearning for a better kingdom. Luke positions us, far more often, among the entrenched power structures Jesus has come to unsettle.
And that is the sharper preaching possibility for Christ the King Sunday:
We are not the oppressed hoping for a king so much as the comfortable being confronted by one.
We are not waiting for someone to overthrow their power.
We are invited to let Jesus upend ours.
That means preaching this text not only as a comfort (“Jesus remembers me”) but as a confrontation (“Jesus’ kingdom changes me”). The cross exposes how deeply we cling to forms of power that protect us, benefit us, or insulate us. It reveals how invested we are in the systems Jesus spends the entire Gospel disrupting. Systems that decide who belongs and who doesn’t, who is valuable and who is expendable, who gets a voice and who is ignored.
Christ the King Sunday, then, is not merely about proclaiming Jesus’ kingship. It is about asking:
If Jesus is King, where does his reign need to unsettle my life? My church? My expectations? My comfort? My assumptions about who deserves what?
Luke’s crucified King does not overthrow the empire by matching its force. He overthrows it by refusing its scripts. Refusing to save himself, refusing to retaliate, refusing to decide who is beyond his mercy.
That is not a revolution we can simply admire. It is a kingdom we are called to enter. And, if we do, it will rearrange us. Level us.
For preaching, the invitation is to let the congregation locate themselves honestly in Luke’s story. Not at the margins longing for a new king, but closer to the centers of power Jesus challenges. Not as victims of an unjust world, but as participants in systems Jesus exposes. Not as spectators at the cross, but as those who benefit from the world that crucified him.
But even in this unsettling place, hope is not absent. In fact, hope in Luke is never something that appears after the upheaval, it is woven into the upheaval itself. The same Jesus who exposes our power also refuses to abandon us to it. The same King who unsettles us is the King who, in his very next breath, turns to a man with nothing to offer and promises, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
This means the mercy that confronts us will not crush us. It will remake us. It will free us from the very powers we cling to. It will invite us into a kingdom where our worth is not measured by status or success, and where our failures (personal or communal) do not get the last word.
And so, as we end the church year at the cross, we do not soften the scene or sidestep its claims. Christ the King comes to rule us not by force but by forgiveness, not by seizing power but by giving himself away. His reign strips away the illusions we cling to, yet it does so with a mercy that holds us while we are being undone.
This is Luke’s final word before Advent begins: the kingdom Jesus brings is already breaking in, even here, even now, even among people who do not fully understand it, who do not yet live it, who do not always want it. And yet he comes anyway. He reigns anyway. He remembers us anyway.
We end the year at the cross so that next week, when the church dares to whisper that a child is coming, we know what kind of child he is. A King whose power is mercy. A King whose glory is compassion. A King whose throne is a cross and whose promise, today, and always, is paradise and the restoration of community.
That is the kingdom we proclaim.
That is the King we follow.
And that is the hope that meets us at the end, so we can begin again.
Micah Krey 
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