All Saints, Dorval
November 23, 2025
May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.
As it sometimes happens, when I was reading over the scriptures for this Sunday, this sentence jumped out at me – a sentence I had read dozens if not hundreds of times before – and suddenly revealed new layers of meaning.
As I always do on Reign of Christ Sunday, I was already alert to the questions of where the power is in these passages, who has it, and how they are using it. And when the writer of the letter to the Colossians prays that they may “be made strong with all the strength that comes from his” (that is, God’s) “glorious power” it reminds us that power is not static: it is constantly flowing between people (and, of course, between people and God).
Or maybe sometimes power is static, and that’s when it goes wrong: when it gets stuck, when it’s hoarded rather than shared, when it’s hung onto rather than given away.
If Jesus is King, as we celebrate on this Reign of Christ Sunday, then Jesus is a King whose “glorious power” is found precisely in always pouring out that power on behalf of others. Jesus’ power flows to us and makes us strong, enabling us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. God’s power overflows in creating the world, in redeeming it by literally pouring out Jesus’ life on the cross, and in sustaining the cosmos by the action of the Holy Spirit.
Which is why, despite how shocking it seems on the surface, it makes perfect sense for today’s Gospel reading to depict Christ nailed and dying on the cross – and not just because the passage refers to the mocking inscription declaring the crucified prophet to be “King of the Jews”.
When I was in grade nine, I had to do a debate in current events class. The topic was capital punishment, and my opponent was in grade twelve and seemed formidable to my thirteen-year-old self. It was a fairly terrifying prospect – and I was assigned to argue for the death penalty. I prepared obsessively, and as I recall, the debate was pretty much a draw (official winners and losers were not assigned).
It was a bizarre experience and I’m not sure it was overall good for my moral health, but it certainly means I’ve been accustomed to thinking deeply about the topic from a very early age.
Christ’s kingship is inseparable from Christ’s death by judicial murder at the hands of a corrupt priesthood and an imperial state. As the great sixth-century hymn puts it: “Fulfilled is all that David told, in true prophetic song of old, that God the nations’ king should be – for God is reigning from the tree.”
What does it mean that when God pours out the strength of God’s glorious power to use, God’s frail, feeble, fallible children – that power is the power of someone who was executed by the empire?
In Tudor England, before someone was beheaded, part of the ritual of execution was for the executioner to ask the victim’s forgiveness. Thinking about this, I come to the conclusion that if one human being, or a group of human beings, consciously and deliberately decides to kill another human being, this places the victim and the killer(s) in a relation whereby the victim becomes the killers’ judge and savior. The Crucifixion is simply the fact of this relation writ large.
Let me repeat that: when one human being, or a group of human beings, consciously and deliberately decides to kill another human being, this places the victim and the killer(s) in a relation whereby the victim becomes the killers’ judge and savior.
This is an excellent reason not to execute ordinary people in the ordinary course of things. Do we want murderers to be our judges and saviors? Do we want to have to ask their forgiveness, like the man with the ax in the black mask before he cut off Anne Boleyn’s head?
We killed Jesus, and Jesus became our judge and savior, and that merely reflects the facts of the divine economy, because Jesus was and is God. I think perhaps that we should let Jesus be the only one who has that power over us.
Looked at one way, the execution of Jesus of Nazareth is the only execution in human history that was ever truly necessary. Looked at another way, of course, it was the most monstrous injustice ever committed in human history. Both these things are true.
That the death of the innocent should be redemptive is one of the great mysteries of the cosmos. As Aslan the Lion puts it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic [which hands traitors over to her for execution], there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
This mysterious, paradoxical transaction – this Deep Magic – releases a power unlike anything else in our experience. It gives us the strength that comes from God’s glorious power; it enables us to endure everything with patience and share in the inheritance of the saints in light, while joyfully giving thanks to God our Father.
God in Jesus Christ is our King, our judge and saviour: the only one we need, the source of all power and strength, and the one who has endured the unendurable on our behalf, shown us how to walk through the hardest of trials, and given us the vision of the glorious new life on the other side; and he welcomes all of us, along with the guilty and penitent criminal on the cross, into God’s Kingdom.
Amen.
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