It may seem strange we have this Gospel today for the Festival of Christ the King. The Second Lesson seems to be more on target, that Christ is "the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation," that "in him all things hold together," that he is "the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent." But this story? From Good Friday - about a loser? The object of sport and scorn? Whose scepter had been a reed and whose crown had been of thorns?

If he is a king, the cross is a strange throne. Yet I hope to show you it’s exactly on his cross that he demonstrates his kingliness, for, as this text reveals, it’s the king on the cross who establishes justice, who dispenses mercy, and who makes paradise possible.

I

The king on the cross establishes justice.

There are people who say, "It’s great that Jesus pardoned the penitent thief. But I believe the other robber went to paradise too."

(What if the other robber didn’t want to go there? Would that be mercy, to force him to be with God forever? But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

On the subject of justice: could God just ignore the crimes these bandits had perpetrated? Could he pretend that armed robbery is as virtuous as feeding the hungry?

Then, too, where does this idea of justice come from? We have such a thirst for it. If we don’t find justice with God, then where else?

Umpires and referees make questionable calls in our sports. We call them biased or blind or both. They may be neither one. They just made an honest mistake. Or, from their point of view, it looked different than it did from ours. Whatever. It’s clear we long for justice on the playing field or the rink or the game floor and that we don’t always get it from human beings.

Not in our courts either. We have a great judicial system in our land but it’s not perfect. A judge in one county sends a man to Stillwater State Prison for ten years, and a judge from another county sends another man there for five years - for the same crime. What causes the most resentment among prisoners is knowing that they got caught while others didn’t. And of those who were arrested, that some who were also guilty were allowed to go free. Then there are those who don’t commit just ordinary crimes but monstrous barbarities. There was the man who ordered the murder of six million Jews. Yes, he didn’t get by with it. He lost the war and he killed himself. But was that enough to make up for the Holocaust? Our thirst for justice drives us to believe that some place in this universe, somewhere there’s justice. Perfect justice.

If that’s true, then how can God treat sin as though it didn’t matter? So how could he just let this other robber off? How could God, assuming he is fair? And assuming he’s almighty, how can he let us get by with anything? Because sin is treason. It’s defiance. It’s saying, "God, don’t think you can tell me what to do."

Truly if there is justice with God - and where else if not with him? - then paradise is lost.

II

But not out of the question. That’s the glorious good that comes from the horrible execution of this innocent man. Here was a sinner having a change of heart. A king grants pardons, and his cross was making it possible to grant a full pardon to this crook.

But wait a minute. If our just and almighty God couldn’t let the impenitent thief off, how could he just dismiss the crimes of the penitent one? Because the king’s cross satisfies justice and makes mercy possible. Our divine Judge, the source of perfect justice, does not ignore our sin. He made Christ, who knew no sin, to be sin and in him he punished it and conquered it. The hell we deserve - the aloneness that our selfishness creates - Jesus endured all of it for us. That’s why he could say to the penitent thief, "Today you will be with me in paradise." A preacher I used to hear in Columbus, Ohio, Dr. Golladay, said, "It was by the cross of Christ that justice and mercy kissed each other."

There could hardly be any greater demonstration of mercy than in this Second Word from the Cross. Here’s a man who’d used up years of oxygen and water and protein in exchange for acts of violence against fellow human beings. A totally worthless existence that society didn’t want anymore. A person who couldn’t even fold his hands anymore as he prayed. Someone who had no time left to prove he had a change of heart. To such a one came the word, "Today you will be with me in paradise." Pure grace. No way for him to pretend he’d ever done anything to deserve it. He spoke truly: "We are receiving the due reward of our deeds." Pure grace: "Today you will be with me in paradise."

III

A cross is a strange place for a king to be. But it’s from such a throne he was establishing justice and dispensing mercy, functions that belong to a ruler, especially to the sovereign of the universe, the one in whom all things hold together.

Let us focus on one more function of a king, improving the lot of his subjects. We’ve referred to it already under the heading of dispensing mercy. The king on his cross makes paradise possible. What I’m after in this third part of the sermon is to make sure we want what he offers.

Unless you’re hopelessly ill and suffering incredible pain, we may assume you don’t want paradise, at least not right now. That’s not necessarily wrong, because our Creator designed us to live; he gave us the urge to fight to stay alive. Our Lord has also commanded, "You shall not kill." That means he doesn’t want anyone to shorten our lives. He doesn’t want us to shorten our own lives either. Furthermore, we notice in the Gospel that Jesus fed the hungry and healed the sick and even raised the dead. So we conclude it’s all right to strive all we can to cheat death.

But perhaps we don’t want paradise for another reason, that is, that it means living forever. We get that feeling sometimes when we visit the upper floors of a nursing home where they warehouse the senile, trussing up the people in their wheelchairs, people who just sit and stare or else babble nonsense or who cry and sing at the top of their voices all hours of day and night. Seeing them we come away sighing, "Who wants to live forever?" Or going by other experiences, who wants to put up with arthritis or cancer or emphysema forever? Or who wants to endure scrapping and loneliness and anxiety forever?

It’s my pleasant duty to remind us that we really do want paradise. Let me get at it this way: what do you like to do best? Does it concern your hobby? Or perhaps your daily work? Is it something you do with your family and friends? Let me also ask: whatever it is you like to do best, have you ever done or had too much of it? If it happens to be eating maple nut ice cream, perhaps so.

Now that’s getting close to what I’m after. The pleasure of eating maple nut ice cream is limited by the capacity of your stomach. And so it is with everything else we like to do in this life. There’s always a boundary to the fun.

Let’s say your hobby is redoing furniture. You might be an expert, but there’ll be some frustration somewhere in the project. You won’t achieve all you want. It could even turn out pretty well so that you could take a lot of satisfaction from it. But perfection? When you reach for it, it pops. That’s the thirst for paradise. It’s like the thirst for justice. We feel it in our bones that it must exist someplace. Would that we could find it!

When I was a boy there was a series in the funny papers called "The Willetts." Just a cartoon with only one picture. From time to time the caption would read, "When you’d love to live forever." Maybe it would be a scene of boys in the summertime, skinny-dipping in the ol’ swimming hole. But it couldn’t last. The owner of the land might run them off, or a bunch of girls would come by, or some boy’s mom or dad would come and holler for some fool reason. A hint of paradise to taunt us. Almost in our grasp but not quite.

George Friedrich Handel, one of the great writers of church music, had such a glimpse of paradise when he was creating his oratorio, Messiah. He said that as he was composing it, "I did think I saw all heaven open and the great God himself." His music gives us goose bumps too. But the shivers don’t continue.

I learned something about this from C.S. Lewis, the British professor at Oxford University who’d been an atheist and became a Christian. He helped me see better that we really do want paradise. In his book, The Problem of Pain, he says:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.

Then he proceeds to describe some of those moments when he’d love to live forever, after which he observes:

It is from this point of view that we can understand hell in its aspect of privation, (hell as a condition in which we’re deprived.) All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.

We may ridicule it as "pie in the sky," but that doesn’t take away the reality that whether we acknowledge it openly or not, we really do want paradise.

The case of the penitent thief testifies there’s a chance for paradise for anybody. The cross has satisfied justice and makes mercy possible.

God, sometimes we act so sophisticated and pretend we don’t want anything so crude as what ancient people spoke of as paradise. We were kidding ourselves. We have moments of ecstasy when we’ve been on the brink of perfection - and the bubble pops. We keep reaching and hoping and dreaming. Were it not for the king on the cross, the cross on which justice and mercy kissed, it would be out of the question. Thank you, Lord, for assuring us again: the king on his cross makes paradise possible.