Reign at The Skull (Luke 23:33-43)

Preaching Reign of Christ from Among the “Criminals”

At the edge of town, in a place with the cheery nickname “The Skull,” the empire went about its workday.

Not a special execution. Not a one-off horror. Just another shift on Rome’s factory floor of death. Three bodies, stripped and nailed up as a billboard about what happens to people who disrupt the peace of the powerful. Two of them are labeled “criminals,” one of them is mocked as “ruler of the Jews.” All of them are meant to be forgettable.

This week’s Prophetic Imagination sermon notes sit right there, under that skull-shaped hill, and ask a very inconvenient question:

What if God’s reign is revealed most clearly among the people our world calls disposable?