Kingdom

In this morning's brief lesson is brilliant light: Jesus walking along the shore of Galilee; calling Andrew and Peter, John and James; healing all kinds of sickness and disease. Yet in this Divine light, we discern one luminous act around which these others move and have their being: He preached the Good News of the Kingdom. The Kingdom. He reminded them of the Kingdom of Heaven, a subject forbidden under the Sadducees, who ruled the Zion Temple.

God's people had forgotten God. They had forgotten God's intimacy .... well-known to Noah, to Abraham, to Jacob, and to Moses. And they had forgotten a world in which angels were seen and God walked with man in the cool of the afternoon.

If there be one master sin, one human failing which stands out among all the others and from which all the others proceed, it is this: forgetfulness.

Think of this in the space of our own lives. People tell me, "Oh, that I might die in my sleep!" Well, if you are a saint, God bless you as you die in your sleep! But if you are not a saint, Heaven help you! For you have been cheated of that chance to remember your grave offenses against God and to offer sincere regret and contrition for them. The great art of our time is to silence the alarms of conscience. This was hard to do as children. Yet is is far too easy to do for adults: silencing the conscience and forgetting all those things which we must remember.

The Fathers wrote that man had forgotten who he was, had forgotten what he was about, had forgotten the purpose of human life. This would be the work of the God-man during His brief life among us: to reveal to us who we are: children of God; to show us what a child of God looks like; to model for us the purpose of life, which is union with the One from Whom we all descend, the God and Father of all (Eph 4:6).

God knows very well the outcome of forgetfulness. He has seen this world-of-the-lost many times. This was the express reason for sending His Son into the world: to gather the lost sheep. But while the Incarnation of His Son — touching the Creation with His Own Person — has flipped our destiny from death to life, we all must live into this hopeful blueprint for our future. He has cleared the way, but we must enter into it. We must embrace it (St. Athanasius wrote), or we shall slide back into a culture of death and a destiny of eternal death in the landscape of alienation we call "Hell." It is interesting the ancients believed that the one trait shared by all in Hades was forgetfulness.

The Book of Genesis discloses such a lost world in Chapter Six, when "every intent of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually" (Gen 6:5). The Book of Exodus discloses another such landscape in which the people of God, known as the Habiru (whom we call the Hebrews), sunk into spiritual slavery amongst the fleshpots of Egypt, no longer worshiping God, no longer knowing Him. Much of the Old Testament describes a third such lost period, following the Babylonian Exile, in which the people had forgotten God as their Father, had forgotten intimacy with God. A new god had been invented — distant and cruel, to whom the people offered living animals in sacrifice, after the pattern of other Middle Eastern cultures of the Iron Age and Antiquity.

What was to be God's remedy for the lost world in Genesis? It was to destroy His intractable masterpiece called "Creation" throwing it into the sea and to start again. Tragically, His human creatures proved to be incorrigible. Immediately, the thoughts of man fastened upon evil, sinking to father drunkenness and mother incest. And the imagination of man? Once again, it would fasthen upon evil continually.

What was to be His remedy for the lost world In Exodus? It was to raise up a leader, Moses, who revealing God's ways and mind and displaying a magnificence in this humble, stammering man: a Divine radiance shining with blinding beauty. But the people preferred bull idolatry symbolizing sexual compulsion and then acting upon it at the very foot of God's Holy Mountain. You will recall the orgy in progress at the foot of Mount Sinai and God saying to Moses, "What is this?!"

Over time, selfish and scheming kings would hi-jack God's religion of radiant transformation, accessible to everyone everywhere, and remold into a civil religion concentrating royal power in Jerusalem. This was Jesus' complaint: that Judah-ism, fashioned from Babylonian religion, shut the people out of the Kingdom:

And what is to be God's remedy for the profoundly lost world, a world that He Himself styles the Lost Sheep of Israel (Mt 15:24)? It is to send His Son, God becoming one of them — the Creator becoming a creature, the One Who Is Being accepting the humble estate of having being, the Infinite entering the narrows of human finitude. Small wonder people are healed of every kind of sickness and disease just being near to this God-man. For He is life itself and the Lord of life.

What His Incarnation had implied at His Nativity, He then declares explicitly: the Kingdom .... on earth as it is Heaven. He would use phrases no one had ever heard before: the "Kingdom of God" and the "Kingdom of Heaven." These, He said, were at hand, had drawn near. At His birth choirs of angels descend from Heaven. Three kings in dazzling array kneel at His crib. A display of splendor far beyond royal courts on earth appears among us.

Metanoeite! His royal herald cries in the wilderness. Metanoeite! His Apostles exhort. This was His signature word. And when this word was said, it was wedded to a marvelous announcement: "... for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand" (Mt 3:2).

The Kingdom, Jesus says, standing at the center of the greatest kingdom in history of the world, the Roman Empire. The Kingdom, He says, standing before a Temple to an aloof god fascinated by blood-letting. The Kingdom, He declares to a world forbidden to speak about God's Kingdom. The Kingdom, He says, is not here or there or in any earthly place. It is all around you. It is not a place as we understand the word place. It is not an historical era. No. It is always and everywhere, the source and summit and burning point of everything. And its King is in our midst. He is God-with-us.

God's remedy for the lost world is no longer to make a new start. He does not send an inspiring leader radiating Divine beauty. He does not preach a message of earthly liberation. His remedy now and forever is far more potent. It is, in fact, Divine: we are already in the Kingdom .... if we will but consent to it, if we live lives fit for the Kingdom. St. Paul tells the his followers on earth, "For our citizenship is in Heaven" (Phil 3:20).

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And why? What could possibly be the reason for this incomprehensible and self-destructive behavior? I believe it is this. Yes, God has revealed His Kingdom. Yes, He has invited us into it. But He does not change our world. How often I hear the complaint, "How could God permit this or that evil to continue?" "Why didn't God stop the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, the destruction of our planet home?" But such evils have nothing to do with God. God creates only good. The subversion of good is the work of human imagination and of human hands.

For evil to enter the world, man must first imagine evil and then consent to act on it. Yes, I understand that evil is not always recognized for what it is when first it begins. But, then, when it is seen for what it is, man famously will not refrain from it, whether it is sexual obsession or the destruction of the only life-giving planet in the universe. Man will not refrain.

God's good world, which humans love, is lovely because it is free. It is ours. Everything has been made possible for us. God's Creation is endlessly beautiful and fascinating, even intoxicating, because of its freedom. How, then, shall God respond when humans transmute His pristine goodness into a foul and polluted mess? As Creator His options are only two: either destroy it and set a new, perfectly free version in motion once again or to be with us. The third, unthinkable option — sending a tyrant to earth who controls all human actions and thoughts — would violate the very essence of His art, bringing about a strange sort of stone age, in which each of us turns to stone .... without motion, without feeling, without ideas, without life. Lifeless art.

Famously, He has chosen to be with us continuing to entrust to us with awesome power — a power like unto His: to imagine, to feel, to think, and to make. We are in charge. Our ideas and actions will avail. For that is the nature of freedom.

Forgive me if you have already heard Viktor Frankl's story witnessed as a young man in a Nazi death camp. The bored guards would amuse themselves by terrorizing the prisoners. One day they invented the robbery of a loaf of bread. They lined up the men and boys and demanded, "Who stole the bread?! If no one steps forward, then we will begin executing you one-by-one." They chose a young boy as their first victim, and before all assembled, they hung him by the neck. As the grieving prisoners stood watching this act of the depraved imagination, a man behind Frankl stepped forward and whispered, "Where is your God now?" Frankl replied, "He's up there. With the boy." And our God hangs on a Cross.

God is with us. And in His Divine radiance, the Risen Christ discloses the mysterious fact that He will be with us "always, even to the end of the age" (Mt 28:20). This the great and enduring fact of His Incarnation: with us.

As the Psalmist has written,

He is with us. And the sum and whole of all faith life is to be with Him. This is the Kingdom, where He always already is. He cannot make our choices for us. He cannot direct our imaginations. He will not compel our thoughts and deeds. His gift is to be with us.

Do we awaken in our private rooms each morning, where He already is, failing to acknowledge Him? Do we fall asleep in our beds each night failing even to speak with Him? Do we go about with His angels all day ignoring them? Do we even shun our own guardian angel?

Readers have written me asking that I offer spiritual advice. I can say nothing more helpful than this: live with Him in His Kingdom. Come to know His ways. Study His Fatherly letters in which He opens His wisdom to us. Know this: He watches with particular attention as we grow more and more into His Image. Above all, be with Him every moment, for He has chosen to be with you, explaining the ancient Christian salutation, "The Lord be with you!"

During the brief period of His wandering and teaching, God's Son counsels us to enter the Kingdom within ourselves, far from the sight of onlookers: