Looking into the lectionary
Revised Common Lectionary
Reign of Christ
November 23, 2025
Luke 23:33–43
This summer, I wrote a piece for the Outlook, “‘No Kings’ should include Jesus,” challenging the way progressive Christians oppose Trump by invoking Jesus as king. Such imperial language, I argued, undermines the very anti-authoritarian spirit driving the “No Kings” movement. My piece highlighted the work of feminist, mujerista, and womanist theologians who have long worked to remove the person of Jesus from the language of empire, from being seen as a singular, heroic, “king.”
This Sunday’s gospel passage – designated for “Reign of Christ” or “Christ the King” Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary – reinforces the entanglement of Christianity with imperial power structures that these scholars have worked to dismantle.
Luke 23:34 is one of the most well-known and frequently quoted sayings of Jesus. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they’re doing.” It’s also one of the most debated: did Luke’s Jesus actually say this? If you read this week’s gospel text from either the NRSV or the NRSVue, this verse appears in double brackets with a footnote explaining that “other ancient authorities” lack this sentence. The double brackets indicate how a slim majority of scholars have concluded that this verse was added to Luke’s original gospel by later copyists.
That said, scholar Shelly Matthews argues the verse is original to Luke in Perfect Martyr. According to Matthews, early copyists removed it because it represented a difficult reading in a landscape where “radical” forgiveness had not yet become a Christian norm.
Matthews calls attention to how Luke uses a radical-seeming forgiveness that presents Jesus and his followers as merciful towards those responsible for their prosecution — a blame that Luke shifts away from Rome and onto Jews. “Thus, in a veiled and paradoxical manner,” Matthews writes, “the edifice of Christianity as a religion of extreme mercy is constructed upon a scaffolding of Jew vilification.”
Luke’s forgiveness aligns him with the strategies of Roman imperialism: forgiveness becomes a political weapon. Roman emperors wielded clemency to “forgive” a few folks from the various “dissident” nations they colonized. While many from these criminalized populations remained oppressed and incarcerated, Roman emperors performed forgiveness to emphasize Roman mercy in a way that confirmed respect for Roman power while further vilifying the “barbaric” nature of Rome’s enemies, which needed to be forgiven and controlled. We can draw a comparison to the use of pardoning in contemporary U.S. politics, where crimes are forgiven to make political statements about those who hold the power to forgive. Likewise, Luke portrays Jesus as radically forgiving as a way of affirming Jesus’s power in the terms of Roman imperialism. Jesus forgives like an emperor; Luke’s Christianity aligns with the goals of empire.
Dismantling Christian nationalism and its authoritarian tendencies demands that preachers notice how we can find some of the roots of Christian imperialism (which resulted in a global colonization that remains in effect today) in some of our most sacred texts. This means reading Luke 23:33–43 in ways that decenter the emperor-like Jesus whose clemency fortifies troublesome aspects of Luke’s agenda. Instead of focusing on the “radical” power of Jesus’s forgiveness across this passage, we might start with the two “criminals” being crucified alongside him.
Luke 23:33 tells us, “…they crucified him there and the criminals, one by the right and other other by the left” (my translation). The text criminalizes the other two humans. By naming them but not Jesus as people who have done bad things, Luke exonerates Jesus and Rome’s carceral system. Crucifixion is not itself unjust: according to Luke, it is Jewish leaders who corrupted Roman justice. When Luke’s Jesus rewards the second criminalized human, he takes the power of an emperor bestowing clemency, rewarding one while refusing to save another. Furthermore, his action confirms the human’s statement, “He did nothing out of place” (Luke 23:41) — a statement that requires affirming these other two must have done something out of place.
As Christians, we proclaim Jesus crucified unjustly. Many of us, correctly, indict Rome for crucifying Jesus because his life was deemed threatening to imperial rule. We understand crucifixion as a tool of imperial domination, used to make public examples of the sorts of people the Roman elite named the “worst criminals.” These crucified “criminals” were always poor, enslaved foreigners. That includes the two humans crucified alongside Jesus.
What happens when we take a resistant approach to the first criminalized human’s call to Jesus: “Save yourself and us” (23:39)? While Luke means this to echo the cruel sarcasm of the leaders’ derision in 23:35–38, we might instead hear a summons to solidarity against empire in this cry: save us all, who have done nothing that demands crucifixion or forgiveness. It is arguably this “criminal” who cries out for justice against a system that criminalized all three humans hung at a place called “The Skull.”
We don’t have to look back to Rome to find a time when people are criminalized for existing in their own bodies: U.S. imperialism persistently criminalizes Black and brown people, immigrants, and trans folks. Resisting Luke’s depiction of Jesus’s king-like forgiveness embraces a God who abolishes injustice and a savior who shares power, starting with those at the edges.
Questions for reflection on Luke 23:33–43
- What happens to our understanding of salvation when we shift from viewing Jesus as an emperor dispensing mercy to a companion sharing suffering?
- In what ways might our worship – especially on “Christ the King” Sunday – unintentionally echo the hierarchies and power structures of empire rather than resist them?
- How can the church practice forgiveness that liberates rather than forgivesin order to control — forgiveness that dismantles systems of criminalization and lifts up those at the edges?
View the corresponding Order of Worship for Reign of Christ
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