The Lord Has Become King
Advent 2025 • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 23:35
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· 28 viewsThis sermon explores the significance of Advent as a season of joyful expectation and preparation for the coming of Christ, emphasizing the belief that God has already become King through Jesus' death and resurrection. It encourages listeners to actively participate in spreading the message of the Kingdom by making disciples and calling for repentance, following the model of John the Baptist and affirming Christ's ongoing reign in the world.
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Introduction
Introduction
I must confess this morning that I find the first Sunday of Advent to be a difficult Sunday for me to preach even though, in theory, it should be one of the easiest Sundays to preach. Today marks the beginning of the new church year. We turn the page from Year B, which focuses on Mark’s Gospel, to Year C, which focuses on John’s Gospel. By the way, in the back we have the new 2025 church calendars available for you, so please take one for your use at home.
Back to the topic at hand, not only does this Sunday mark the change from the previous church year to the new church year, but it also marks the beginning of a new church season. Today we begin the season of Advent. Advent, historically, is a time of preparation that precedes the season of Christmas much the same way that Lent precedes the season of Easter. The difference is that Lent is heavily penitential, while Advent, which certainly includes some penitential themes, is primarily focused on joyful expectation. And that might be easy enough to preach except the readings for the First Sunday of Advent are always from Jesus’ so-called Eschatological Discourse, which, I am convinced, most people read incorrectly. If it is read as a discourse about the future, even from our perspective, then it fits appropriately on the First Sunday of Advent, but if it is a discourse about events that Jesus expects to occur in his immediate audience’s lifetime, then it doesn’t fit here quite so well.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m familiar with that discourse, why would father think it occurred in the lifetime of Jesus’ audience,” I’ll remind you of what Jesus said toward the end of our reading:
Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.
If you want to try and convince me that “this generation” means the church age and not the generation of people standing in front of Jesus, I will tell you that you are engaged in an extreme example of exegetical gymnastics, but I am happy to talk about if anyone would like to. I could explain in a sermon why I don’t think this passage says what most people think it says, but honestly we’d be here for hours, and nobody wants that. So, instead of the Gospel passage, I want to focus on a particularly interesting passage from Zechariah 14, our Old Testament reading, and then I’ll tie it back to the Gospel.
Zechariah is describing the coming day of the Lord, in which, after the exile, the Lord would meet out judgment upon all nations and establish Jerusalem over the whole world. Towards the end of this description of the Day of the Lord, the prophet says:
And the Lord will be king over all the earth. On that day the Lord will be one and his name one.
N. T. Wright has a book entitled, “How God Became King,” and many people get confused about the title because they assume that God is and always has been King, but Zechariah says that there will be a day in the future (from his perspective) on which the Lord will become king over all the earth.
And the Lord will be king over all the earth. On that day the Lord will be one and his name one.
You see, there is an inherent problem in the Jewish conception of God. While the rest of the world, generally speaking, was content to believe in tribal gods or a pantheon of gods, the Jewish people made the remarkable God that their God wasn’t merely stronger than other gods, but was in fact the only God, even though he was not recognized as such by the other nations. This tension within the Jewish understanding of God is resolved when all the nations stream to Jerusalem to worship Israel’s God as the one true Lord. On that day, “the Lord will be king over all the earth. On that day the Lord will be one and his name one.” It’s the resolution of that tension that Zechariah is hinting at in the second half of the verse.
What Wright claims, and I strenuously agree, is that the Gospels, each in their own way, is telling the story of how God in and through Jesus Christ became King over all the earth. The major clue that Wright is on the right track here is that last week we just celebrated Christ the King. Christ is King now over all the earth, and he is in the process of bringing all things into submission under him. To put that another way, Paul says in 1 Cor 15:25
For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.
Further evidence that Wright is on the right track comes from the fact that Zech 9-14 is the section of the Old Testament most frequently quoted or alluded to in the Passion narratives of the four Gospels. In order words, they believe that the long, awaited day of the Lord was happening in the death of Jesus Christ who became King over all the earth when he was enthroned upon a Roman cross for the sins of the whole world.
Fast forward then to our Gospel reading. Jesus said:
And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
The mention of the Son of Man coming in a cloud is obviously an allusion to Daniel 7, in which, in comparison to the wild beasts, which are the nations that crush the true people of God, the one like a Son of Man is lifted up and vindicated. The coming of the Son of Man is not from heaven to earth, but rather from earth to heaven, where he has been crushed but is now vindicated by God who lifts him up after having been crushed by the four beasts. This is what Daniel says of the Son of Man.
And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
In other words, when the Son of Man rides on the clouds and becomes king over all the earth, on that day, through him, the Lord will be king over all the earth. For the Gospel writers and the Apostles, I believe, all this occured when Jesus Christ died, rose again, and ascended to the right hand of God.
So, this is where we are in the story. God has come in the person of Christ. That is what we’ll celebrate at Christmas, which is part of what makes Advent strange. It is both past and future at once. But from our historical perspective, God has come in the person of Christ and has claimed his throne. He is now King over all the earth through his Messiah who sit at his right hand and who is in the process of putting all his enemies under his feet.
For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.
How is he doing this? Well, in many ways, but one of the primary ways is through me and you. This is why he gives his church the great commission, and notice how that commission is based in his authority.
Matthew 28:18–20 (ESV)
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
So, in this season of Advent, as we joyfully wait for day when all things, even death, will be put under Christ’s feet, we are called to participate in that process by making disciples of all nations. That’s the first thing we can do. The other thing we can do, which is not all the different from the first, is invest our time, treasure, and talents into that kingdom that Jesus has established and will continue to grow until he comes again.
The point is that our joyful expectation in Advent isn’t passive, and this is really what the whole sermon has been driving at. We aren’t called to wait for the fulfillment of the kingdom. We are called to go. We are called to make disciples. We are called to invest in kingdom work at home and abroad while we wait for the Second Coming of our King. John the Baptist didn’t stay at home. He went down to the Jordan River and started telling people:
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
The season of Advent is not about passively waiting for God to do something. It’s about going out, making disciples, calling people to repent (including ourselves), and investing our lives into the kingdom of God rather than the kingdoms of this world. The prophet said that one day the Lord would be King over all the earth. Today we say that God IS king over all the earth, and he is through us calling all peoples of all nations to be his disciples and join him in the spread of his kingdom by investing their time, treasure, and talents into that work he is doing. Christ is now sitting at the right hand of God, and he is putting all things in subjection under his feet. We are not to sit by passively and wait. In the spirit of John the Baptist and the season of Advent, we are to go and make disciples and call the whole world to repent before it’s true Lord and King.
Amen.
