"In Heaven There Is a Kingdom"

"For I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me ...."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

An encounter with the Sacred Scriptures and especially the Gospels is an encounter with God. We open them and enter them and are plunged immediately into sacred mystery. Even Scripture scholars, many of whom reject the idea of divine mystery, admit that that the Gospels insist on mystery. The academic literature even has a label for it: the Messianic Secret. That is, we who enter this world are confronted with a question: "Who then is this?"

The scientific or technical mind might say of the Lord Jesus, "Just tell us who you are." But such a heart has already elevated itself above God, as fallen Eden had done, wanting things on its own terms ... and misunderstands authority. It is the way in which we approach God that matters most in our seeking. King Solomon stoops to counsel his subjects in a collection of 3,000 proverbs (most of them now lost). Among his opening sentences we find:

"Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 1:7)

In this he reveals reverence for his father, King David, who wrote,

Come, O sons, listen to me,
I will teach you the fear of the Lord. (Ps 34:11)

Unless we approach God with fear, we ought not approach Him at all. In both Proverbs and Psalms the word fear is the Greek φο'βος (phobos) found in the Greek Hebrew Scriptures, which Jesus and the Apostles used. It means dread, even terror. And we call to mind the Book of Exodus — that no man dare touch God's holy mountain lest he die.

That family warmth and gentle intimacy should also be found in the word phobos — say, the wife's reverence for her husband and the father of her children — will be hard for the modern mind to comprehend. This is especially difficult For 21st-century Americans whose culture emerged from an unprecedented experiment: a nation-state of revolutionaries and rebels overthrowing authority. After all, for the first time in human history common people dared to imagine an entire country governed by popular vote .... among male landowners, to be sure, but a revolutionary idea, nonetheless.

In the British Isles, authority was understood to be vested in God. Thus, the Scottish king, James VI (soon to be crowned James I who commissioned the King James Bible) wrote, "No bishop, no king." But in America these reverent words would become a raucous toast in pubs: "No bishop! No king!" for America had banished both.

In the U.S. today, half of all Christians remain Protestant, more than twice the number of Roman Catholics, continuing to banish a bishop .... much less a king. In this, we begin to understand what St. John of Kronstadt, the Russian Orthodox saint, was getting at when he wrote,

Hell is a democracy, but in Heaven there is Kingdom.

The pop Christianity we encounter on radio, television, and the web treats the Bible as if it were a self-help book and Jesus as if He were a personal friend who has our back. Perhaps we no longer grasp phobos, which signifies anything but comfortable companionship but rather its furthest opposite extreme: terror, the awe inspired by a consuming fire descending from Sinai's heights. And yet this awe mysteriously can mean at the same time the greatest love we can know on earth, which is the love among family.

But we who seek God must submit our post-modern minds and spirits to this sensibility: the sublime emotion of both terror and loving reverence, of heart-stopping dread and the warmth of secure intimacy. No question, American culture, forming us in a hothouse of individual rights and personal prerogatives, struggles to find this place in the mystery of emotion. Such a linkage is utterly alien to a mind formed in the self-esteem movement. We are taught to place ourselves first and to question authority. How then does that same mind submit itself to this divine command: When you pray, Jesus told His disciples, say this:

Our Father, Who art in Heaven .... Thy Kingdom come.

What?! So, God is our personal Father and the dread Sovereign of "Kingdom come," the "Day of the Lord," the tornado-and-cyclone-swept landscape we read of in the Prophets?! Our personal Father and the dread Sovereign of the Day of the Lord.

If we cannot locate this place within us — of fatherly devotion and terrifying power — then we will not find God .... or Heaven. As God's royal Son has said, the Kingdom of Heaven consists in this:

My Kingship is not of this world ...
I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.
Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice. (Jn 18:36-37)

And the Beloved Disciple tells us

but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He Is. (1 Jn 3:2)

We might say these words are mysterious. Certainly, they are subtle. But this much we can understand: Heaven's element is not so much that we merit citizenship (or at least a Green Card) in a beautiful country. Rather, it is that we attain to a certain state of being within ourselves. We must seek God's mind and ways if we are to become one with the Son Who is one with the Father (Jn 10:30), in the unity of the Holy Spirit. That is, we must see Him as He actually is and not a "feel good" version, what people have called "Easter egg Jesus," the soft man of pastel shades domesticated to our own sense of interior decoration.

The centurion of our Gospel lesson this morning does not have difficulty seeing the Son of God for Who and What He is. This leader, this soldier, has seen the sublime — the terror of a battlefield soaked in blood and in that same element the intimacy of trust and comradeship. Most important for our purposes this morning, the centurion knows a Supreme Commander when he sees one. He does not have to see this Man Who inspires awe in the thick of war (Jesus blood-soaked hill still lies ahead). His character, His bearing, His manner of speech and movement clearly say as much .... to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. And the centurion's phobos for the Lord Jesus brings scandal at the thought that this great Lord must do what He need only command. And he cries out in worshipful deference, "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou should'st come under my roof!"

Our question this morning is

Why cannot the Disciples see this?

We know why members of the Sanhedrin do not see it: each is preoccupied solely with his own power and bearing. To view Jesus of Nazareth through the eyes of respect?! Absurd! they would think. They wait for the Son of God to bow down before them! But why do not the Disciples see it? After all, they have seen Him in His element of command. Near the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel we read,

.... they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying,
"What is this? A new teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean
spirits, and they obey him." (Mk 1:27)

In St. Luke's Gospel

And they were all amazed and said to one another, "What is this word?
For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they
come out." (Lu 4:36)

And in St. Matthew's Gospel we read,

.... the men marveled, saying, "What sort of Man is this, that even winds and sea obey Him?" (Mt 8:27)

And near the conclusion of that same Gospel, Christ the King declares what everyone around Him should already have seen:

And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in Heaven and on earth has been given to Me." (Mt 28:18)

A master theme of the Sacred Scriptures from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 is authority. Its opposite, of course, is chaos. In the opening words of that great Mystery we call "the Bible," we encounter the embodiment of Authority hovering over the void. He is Authority itself, for He is the Author of all things. The increate void, His adversary, is the embodiment of Chaos. This is why the Red Sea should be so important, for it recalls the primordial battle between Authority and Chaos, and we pause to remember that our word for chaos, Pandemonium, means literally, "all demons." During the Bronze Age, the symbol for chaos was Leviathan, the great sea creature who represented chaos and the indomitable, unrulable sea.

Celebrating God's ancient power, Isaiah writes,

In that day [the Day of the Lord] the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish
Levi'athan the fleeing serpent, Levi'athan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon
that is in the sea. (Isa 27:1)

.... recalling Psalm 74:

Thou didst crush the heads of Leviathan, thou didst give him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. (Psalm 74:4)

Reducing the unconquerable adversary of chaos incarnate to little servings of food for any little creature who cares to dine upon it .... Here is power! Here is all authority in Heaven and on earth.

Jesus' command of the winds and sea is a signature act evincing His supreme power and divinity. St. Luke reports that at His birth ranks of angels hovered above this weak and vulnerable child. Yet, demons everywhere quaked begging for His mercy:

And whenever the unclean spirits beheld Him, they fell down before Him and cried out,
"You are the Son of God." (Mk 3:11)

Weak and vulnerable child or colossus? Which do we see in the figure of the Lord Jesus? In the end, humans were fashioned by their author to live within a mysterious paradox:

We can only find what we already are looking for.

Jesus says in divine splendor,

"Go! Be it unto you as you have believed!"

Here is the Author pointing to His own design of the human mind and spirit. We know this principle from our everyday lives. Those determined to find fault will order their facts to confirm their predetermined bias, seeing a contemptible world. But others, seeing good in the world, will become aware of the many admirable lives around them. At a more rigorous level, the great philosopher Ludwig Wittenstein famously pointed out that the scientific method is fundamentally flawed. For the design of any experiment predetermines which data will be collected to test it. Other important data will be passed over because they do not fall within the bounds of the experiment's design. In our most formal method of seeking, we only find what we are looking for.

Higher and more consequential than any of these examples is the mind and attitude we inhabit as we approach God. Do we revere Him? Do we come into His Presence with a heart filled with love and thanksgiving? Do we see the wisdom of His ways and His saving presence at key moments in our lives? Do we understand that

The heavens are the Lord's heavens,
but the earth he has given to the sons of men. (Ps 115:16)

Or do we blame Him for the human failings that have blighted the world or our lives?

We pray that all people look for and seek our dread Sovereign and loving Father sooner than later, that we might see Him as He is, that we might be like His Son Who bears His Divine Image. The alternative is to look on from a self-imposed distance, quaking from afar, after it is too late:

When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus,
saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe [phobos],
and said, "Truly this was the Son of God!" (Mt 27:54)

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.