Luke 23:33–43 “Christ the King: The Reign of Love”
I recently came across a story told by the Italian physicist and inventor Federico Faggin. He is famous for creating the world’s first microprocessor, the foundational chip that launched the digital age. A hugely person in the world of computers and technology.
Faggin spent his life convinced that only matter was real, that consciousness was nothing more than electrical activity in the brain. A brilliant engineer, deeply logical, he had no time for spirituality.
But despite achieving everything the world says you need for happiness, he confessed that inside he felt stressed, disconnected, and empty. He said:
“I wasn’t happy… I realized that I was faking being happy because I needed to, because I was running a company. I had to be enthusiastic and everything else, but I was dying inside.”
It was in this inner suffering that his attention turned inward. For the first time, he focused his attention on trying to understand consciousness itself, not to monetise it, not to build a new technology, but simply to understand what was happening in the depths of his own being.
And then during the Christmas holidays of 1990, while staying at his home near Lake Tahoe, he had a transformative experience. He recalls the following:
“One night I woke up… and all of a sudden I felt an energy was coming out of my chest. But it was love. And it was love that I had never felt before. It was coming from me. How can love come from me?” he asked himself. “It was 10,000 times more powerful than any love I had felt before… unconditional love.”
Alongside the love, he perceived a brilliant, shimmering white light which seemed to explode and than expanded outward and seemed to fill everything around him. He realised:
“I am that… I am the observer and the observed simultaneously… everything comes from this stuff. My body was hot, vibrating, like the cells were resonating… and the emotion, the feeling, was love, joy, and peace. This is home.” he said, “This is me.”
He understood, in that moment, that consciousness is the very substance of everything. And this consciousness is fundamentally love. Not ego, not thought, but this radiant, selfless presence.
“I’m everything,” he said, “but also the observer of everything… a point of view with which one knows itself.”
For a person who had been a committed materialist, someone who only believed that physical matter was truly real, this was a revelation: consciousness was not produced by matter; consciousness itself, and love within it, is the foundation of reality.
Whether we understand his experience as mystical, psychological, or neurological, what strikes me about his story is how it resonates with something Christianity has been saying all along:
That beneath all our brokenness, beneath the anxious ego and the scattered mind, there is a deeper reality, a presence of love, a radiance that as Christians we describe with the word God, who St Paul in Ephesians speaks of as being over all in all and through all. What Jesus described as the Kingdom of God which dwells within us. The Apostle Paul also used the language of ‘the Christ within’ or the Holy Spirit. Buddhists would describe what Faggin experienced as Buddha Nature.
Now today is the last Sunday of the Christian Liturgical Year. (Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of the New Liturgical Year. And on the last Sunday of the Christian calender it has become customary to celebrate what some call the Feast of Christ the King. More low church Protestant traditions that follow the lectionary would speak of the theme of the day being “Christ the King” or “The Reign of Christ.” – which today I would like also to call “The Reign of Love,” not a kingdom or a reign imposed from above, but a kingdom arising from within.
And so we turn to the Gospel reading set for today, Luke 23:33-43. It is strange, unsettling, and utterly countercultural that on the last Sunday of the Christian year, when we celebrate Christ the King, the Church gives us not a triumphant king, but a crucified one.
There is no throne, only a cross. No crown, only thorns. No royal decree, only forgiveness offered to those who harm him. The leaders mock him. The soldiers sneer at him. One of the criminals reviles him. But the other criminal, seeing something deeper, says:
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
And Jesus responds with words of grace: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
Here is the paradox of the Christian faith: Christ reigns as King not through force, but through self-giving love.
His kingdom is the kingdom of the heart, what Paul calls in Romans, the kingdom of righteousness, joy and peace in the holy spirit, the kingdom of consciousness awakened to love.
This reign of Christ is not external. It is inner. As Jesus himself said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Purity of heart is not so much about moral perfection that somehow needs to be achieved with struggle and determination, rather it has everything to do with clarity of consciousness, with returning to our truest, deepest self, where the love of God dwells – The Kingdom of God within.
St Paul says the same thing in different language: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2). The “mind” that Paul speaks of is not mere thinking. It is the open spaciousness of consciousness itself, the inner orientation of the heart. To renew the mind is to awaken to the divine presence within us, to the “mind of Christ” that longs to express itself in our lives.
This is why Jesus’ kingship is not a political kingdom but a spiritual reality, a reign of love that begins within and yet which radiates outward touching every facet of life. And so it is not disconnected from the outer world.
And this is where the ancient Chinese wisdom of the Tao Te Ching speaks with surprising harmony. The Tao Te Ching often describes the ideal leader, not the domineering one, who leads with outward power, dominance and force, but the one who leads from the strength of a deep inner stillness, a stillness that sounds very much like the Mind, or the Consciousness of Christ.
Lao Tzu says in Chapter 17:
“The best rulers are those whose presence is barely known. When their work is done, the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
This is the reign of Christ. The divine presence is not noisy, forceful, or dramatic. It guides with strength from within, it empowers, it awakens, it heals in gentle ways.
And in Chapter 49, the Tao Te Ching again speaking of the true leader says:
“To the good, he is good.
To the not-good, he is also good
for his nature is goodness.”
And this is exactly what we see in Jesus on the cross. He embodies goodness towards all, towards the thief on the cross beside him, toward the soldiers who hurt him, toward the leaders who mock him. Because his nature is love. Even on the cross, Jesus is fully awake to the living experience of Frederico Faggin, to an unconditional love that flows from him and which is his true nature. Because the love of God is who he is, and, mysteriously, the love of God is who we truly are. Which is why, whenever we act in ways that are not loving, not in alighnment with our true nature, we suffer.
Today, on the last Sunday of the Christian year, we are invited to reflect on what it means to proclaim that “Christ is King.” Not king as the world understands kings, but king as the light at the centre of our consciousness, king as the truth of our being, king as the Loving-Goodness from which we came
and to which we return.
The Reign of Christ as we see in this passage is the reign of forgiveness, compassion, gentleness, courage, truthfulness, humility and spaciousness of heart. And it begins within us. It begins when the false self, the anxious, reactive, grasping ego, begins to dissolve in the presence of Divine love. It begins when we see others not with fear or judgment or even hatred, but when we see others with the eyes of Christ.
It begins when we allow the love that Christ embodied to rise from within us and flow outward into the world.
In closing Federico Faggins experience brought him to the conclude that love is the deepest reality of consciousness. The Gospel passage today reveals that this love is not an abstraction, but a life we see embodied in Jesus. The question for today is not ‘Is Christ the King?’ But rather, is the radiant, healing love, joy and peace of Christ allowed to reign in and through us?
Amen.
I recently came across a story told by the Italian physicist and inventor Federico Faggin. He is famous for creating the world’s first microprocessor, the foundational chip that launched the digital age. A hugely person in the world of computers and technology.
Faggin spent his life convinced that only matter was real, that consciousness was nothing more than electrical activity in the brain. A brilliant engineer, deeply logical, he had no time for spirituality.
But despite achieving everything the world says you need for happiness, he confessed that inside he felt stressed, disconnected, and empty. He said:
“I wasn’t happy… I realized that I was faking being happy because I needed to, because I was running a company. I had to be enthusiastic and everything else, but I was dying inside.”
It was in this inner suffering that his attention turned inward. For the first time, he focused his attention on trying to understand consciousness itself, not to monetise it, not to build a new technology, but simply to understand what was happening in the depths of his own being.
And then during the Christmas holidays of 1990, while staying at his home near Lake Tahoe, he had a transformative experience. He recalls the following:
“One night I woke up… and all of a sudden I felt an energy was coming out of my chest. But it was love. And it was love that I had never felt before. It was coming from me. How can love come from me?” he asked himself. “It was 10,000 times more powerful than any love I had felt before… unconditional love.”
Alongside the love, he perceived a brilliant, shimmering white light which seemed to explode and than expanded outward and seemed to fill everything around him. He realised:
“I am that… I am the observer and the observed simultaneously… everything comes from this stuff. My body was hot, vibrating, like the cells were resonating… and the emotion, the feeling, was love, joy, and peace. This is home.” he said, “This is me.”
He understood, in that moment, that consciousness is the very substance of everything. And this consciousness is fundamentally love. Not ego, not thought, but this radiant, selfless presence.
“I’m everything,” he said, “but also the observer of everything… a point of view with which one knows itself.”
For a person who had been a committed materialist, someone who only believed that physical matter was truly real, this was a revelation: consciousness was not produced by matter; consciousness itself, and love within it, is the foundation of reality.
Whether we understand his experience as mystical, psychological, or neurological, what strikes me about his story is how it resonates with something Christianity has been saying all along:
That beneath all our brokenness, beneath the anxious ego and the scattered mind, there is a deeper reality, a presence of love, a radiance that as Christians we describe with the word God, who St Paul in Ephesians speaks of as being over all in all and through all. What Jesus described as the Kingdom of God which dwells within us. The Apostle Paul also used the language of ‘the Christ within’ or the Holy Spirit. Buddhists would describe what Faggin experienced as Buddha Nature.
Now today is the last Sunday of the Christian Liturgical Year. (Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of the New Liturgical Year. And on the last Sunday of the Christian calender it has become customary to celebrate what some call the Feast of Christ the King. More low church Protestant traditions that follow the lectionary would speak of the theme of the day being “Christ the King” or “The Reign of Christ.” – which today I would like also to call “The Reign of Love,” not a kingdom or a reign imposed from above, but a kingdom arising from within.
And so we turn to the Gospel reading set for today, Luke 23:33-43. It is strange, unsettling, and utterly countercultural that on the last Sunday of the Christian year, when we celebrate Christ the King, the Church gives us not a triumphant king, but a crucified one.
There is no throne, only a cross. No crown, only thorns. No royal decree, only forgiveness offered to those who harm him. The leaders mock him. The soldiers sneer at him. One of the criminals reviles him. But the other criminal, seeing something deeper, says:
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
And Jesus responds with words of grace: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
Here is the paradox of the Christian faith: Christ reigns as King not through force, but through self-giving love.
His kingdom is the kingdom of the heart, what Paul calls in Romans, the kingdom of righteousness, joy and peace in the holy spirit, the kingdom of consciousness awakened to love.
This reign of Christ is not external. It is inner. As Jesus himself said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Purity of heart is not so much about moral perfection that somehow needs to be achieved with struggle and determination, rather it has everything to do with clarity of consciousness, with returning to our truest, deepest self, where the love of God dwells – The Kingdom of God within.
St Paul says the same thing in different language: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2). The “mind” that Paul speaks of is not mere thinking. It is the open spaciousness of consciousness itself, the inner orientation of the heart. To renew the mind is to awaken to the divine presence within us, to the “mind of Christ” that longs to express itself in our lives.
This is why Jesus’ kingship is not a political kingdom but a spiritual reality, a reign of love that begins within and yet which radiates outward touching every facet of life. And so it is not disconnected from the outer world.
And this is where the ancient Chinese wisdom of the Tao Te Ching speaks with surprising harmony. The Tao Te Ching often describes the ideal leader, not the domineering one, who leads with outward power, dominance and force, but the one who leads from the strength of a deep inner stillness, a stillness that sounds very much like the Mind, or the Consciousness of Christ.
Lao Tzu says in Chapter 17:
“The best rulers are those whose presence is barely known. When their work is done, the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
This is the reign of Christ. The divine presence is not noisy, forceful, or dramatic. It guides with strength from within, it empowers, it awakens, it heals in gentle ways.
And in Chapter 49, the Tao Te Ching again speaking of the true leader says:
“To the good, he is good.
To the not-good, he is also good
for his nature is goodness.”
And this is exactly what we see in Jesus on the cross. He embodies goodness towards all, towards the thief on the cross beside him, toward the soldiers who hurt him, toward the leaders who mock him. Because his nature is love. Even on the cross, Jesus is fully awake to the living experience of Frederico Faggin, to an unconditional love that flows from him and which is his true nature. Because the love of God is who he is, and, mysteriously, the love of God is who we truly are. Which is why, whenever we act in ways that are not loving, not in alighnment with our true nature, we suffer.
Today, on the last Sunday of the Christian year, we are invited to reflect on what it means to proclaim that “Christ is King.” Not king as the world understands kings, but king as the light at the centre of our consciousness, king as the truth of our being, king as the Loving-Goodness from which we came
and to which we return.
The Reign of Christ as we see in this passage is the reign of forgiveness, compassion, gentleness, courage, truthfulness, humility and spaciousness of heart. And it begins within us. It begins when the false self, the anxious, reactive, grasping ego, begins to dissolve in the presence of Divine love. It begins when we see others not with fear or judgment or even hatred, but when we see others with the eyes of Christ.
It begins when we allow the love that Christ embodied to rise from within us and flow outward into the world.
In closing Federico Faggins experience brought him to the conclude that love is the deepest reality of consciousness. The Gospel passage today reveals that this love is not an abstraction, but a life we see embodied in Jesus. The question for today is not ‘Is Christ the King?’ But rather, is the radiant, healing love, joy and peace of Christ allowed to reign in and through us?
Amen.
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