What did Jesus' followers hear when He articulated those momentous words? "Thy Kingdom come." They were filled with awe .... and, no doubt, trembling. For these words call down upon them the most feared catastrophe: the day of the Lord? The Hebrew Prophets describe it:
From Jeremiah:
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For this is the day of the Lord God of hosts,
A day of vengeance, That He may avenge Himself on His adversaries. (Jer 46:10) |
From Ezekiel:
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"Wail, 'Woe to the day!'
For the day is near, Even the day of the Lord is near; It will be a day of clouds, .... (Ezek 30:2-4) |
From Isaiah:
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For the day of the Lord of hosts
Shall come upon everything proud and lofty, Upon everything lifted up — And it shall be brought low .... Behold, the day of the Lord comes, Cruel, with both wrath and fierce anger, To lay the land desolate; And He will destroy its sinners from it. (Isa 13:6,9) |
From Amos:
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Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
For what good is the day of the Lord to you? It will be darkness, and not light. (Amos 5:18,16) |
From Joel:
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Alas for the day!
For the day of the Lord is at hand; It shall come as destruction from the Almighty. The sun shall be turned into darkness, And the moon into blood, Before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord. Joel 3:14 (Joel 2:1-3:14) |
From Malachi:
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Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet
Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. (Malachi 4:5) |
(And we recall that day turned to night at the Crucifixion of Jesus with many hearing Him invoke Elijah.) Pardon me for going on at length. But the Day of Lord dominates the Prophets, but it seems to have fallen out of our consciousness.
What is "the Day of the Lord" all about? The world is out of joint, and those who have adopted its ways are likewise bent and crooked and do not square with the Kingdom of God. They are proud and lofty and lifted up, Isaiah says. And the Almighty will "lay the land desolate and .... destroy its sinners from it."
The Greek word (from the LXX) underlying sinners is ἁμαρτωλοὺς / `hamartoloùs (Isa 13:9) meaning "those who have missed the mark." As I say out-of-joint, out-of-square. And the only standard for all that is level, square, plumb, right, and good is the Kingdom of Heaven. Inevitably and at length the world must square with the Kingdom. The Incarnation of God must, therefore, mean one thing: as Simeon prophesied, Jesus is the "sign of contradiction" (Lu 2:34). His words are not those of consolation, but of catastrophe.
Let us think back to Joel, the same words Peter will invoke at the Pentecost:
| "For the Day of the Lord is at hand." |
This precisely what people heard when Jesus said,
| The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand! |
And what does He says next? "Repent!" Not joyful words, but words to be heard with awe and trembling. His words are not those of consolation but of catastrophe:
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"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword."
(Mt 10:24)
"I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" (Lu 5:24) |
St. John the Baptist clarifies;
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"His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather
the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." (Lu 3:17) |
Jesus sends His Seventy Disciples out into the world "among wolves," He says. And He tells them that if they enter a house and their peace be not received ....
| "I say to you that it will be more tolerable in that Day for Sodom than for that city." (Lu 10:12) |
Which Day? The disciples did not have to ask: "that Day." The Kingdom of God has drawn near.
The Church is announced to the world in a supernatural setting as a room in a house opens up to a public square in Jerusalem and thence to the world. The words Peter proclaims are those of Joel. The Church is inaugurated bearing in mind the Day of the Lord:
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"'I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved.'" (Acts 2:19-21) |
He chooses the Prophet Joel to articulate what the coming of Jesus signifies: the Day of Lord.
They will be saved from the cataclysm already in progress. All of us, moving inexorably toward the place where the out-of-joint must meet with the supernal and the perfect, will be saved, will be redeemed, but we must effect this redemption. Jesus will show us how.
When we say that Jesus is our Savior, that He has redeemed the world, we are not to picture a magic wand or pixie dust. We will not be all swept into Heaven. Instead, He say, "The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near! Repent!" And then He spends years telling us and showing us how.
He had warned us,
| "Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect." (Mt 5:28) |
.... lest we arrive to the house with many mansions and stink up the place. We must prepare for this future!
And what is the instrument for gauging our progress? What tool will tell us whether we are level, square, and upright? It is the Cross. He admonished us,
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"And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy
of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it. (Lu 10:38-39) |
The cross is the instrument that will burn our former life away. He melds His injunction to take up crossees with this teaching. They are one.
Do you choose the world or the Kingdom? To be worthy of the Kingdom, we must burn the dross off our gold. The Day of the Lord did come, will come. Jesus is the One-Who-Is-coming-into-the-world. From the time of the Incarnation, the whole world has been about becoming. With our eyes always fixed upon Heaven, the purpose of our lives is becoming Him. Therefore we repeat the words He taught us with a sense of hope and anticipation, not dread:
| Thy Kingdom come. (Mt 6:10) |
But as we have noted many times, the purpose of the Incarnation was to show us an example of godly life so that we may reform. The early Fathers agreed that man had lost his identity: he did not know who he was was; he did not know where he was going. So Jesus sat for the portrait which had been lost revealing the right image of man (Athanasius). He re-stamped the worn-out coin renewing the Emperor's image (Origen). And He gathered His followers into the Church, which would be in the world but not of it. He said,
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"I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for those whom You have given Me,
for they are Yours. And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them." (Jn 17:9-10) |
And He taught His followers:
| "By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." (Jn 13:35) |
Here we have, as a gathered community, set apart, a community of love.
St. John wrote to his gathered community:
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Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the Day of Judgment;
because as He is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. (1 Jn 4:17-18) |
There it is again: the Day of the Lord (a day of judgment): the ground of being for the nascent Church and for all Christendom until "Kingdom come." (By the way, if we needed a Scriptural warrant for theosis, there it is.)
St. John says that this community must be kept apart from the toxic world:
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Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world,
the love of the Father is not in him. (1 Jn 2:15) |
You are not a part of this community if you desire the world. The Father's love is Heavenly. As we plainly see around us today, worldly love pollutes it.
It is to this becoming community that Jesus addresses the Sermon of the Mount (which is the setting for our lesson this morning). The Beatitudes set out a rule of life for the Kingdom, not for the world. For surely anyone who practices these precepts in the world will be crushed as Jesus and the Apostles were crushed.
Peter asks
| "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" (Mt 18:21) |
And Jesus answered,
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"I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.
Therefore the Kingdom of Heaven is like .... (Mt 18 22-23) |
"My brother," Peter says, "another adopted son of God." Jesus instantly affirms Peter's distinction by invoking the Kingdom immediately.
This is not a forgiveness that points out to a world that does not care, but toward the Kingdom of God.
Perhaps someone may object, "But didn't Jesus ask the Father's forgiveness for the world (Lu 23:34) when worldlings crucified Him?" And I would reply that His petition was asked for the followers Who have abandoned Him. Is not this the most egregious feature of the landscape from God's point of view? Had not Jesus just offered a paean of praise to the Father on the subject of His disciples' faithfulness:
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".... for they are Yours. And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine,
and I am glorified in them." (Jn 17:10) |
Jesus' trajectory through the world, by its nature, was bound to be one bruising collision after another. After all, He was the "sign of contradiction." He stated the case plainly: "the world .... hated Me before it hated you" (Jn 15:18). In any case, as a mortal He was by that fact slated to die. But the dissolution of His Community of Love, to be known for their mutual devotion, this was to be until the end of the age. With Jesus left to die alone, devoid of any sign of faithfulness or love or devotion — this was a calamity. And His petition of forgiveness from the Cross was surely directed on behalf of His followers. From God's point of view this treachery towered above Jesus' execution as far as Heaven towers above earth.
I say, this is not a forgiveness that points out to a world that does not care, but toward the gathered Community was to be the Kingdom of God on earth. We are to forgive seventy times seven times here in the Kingdom of Heaven. Do you ask for my money? I will give you every penny I have. Do you ask to carry your burden? I will carry it twice as far. Do you wrong me, do you withhold your love? I say that I love you with all my heart anyway. It is so easy to live the precepts of Heaven within the Kingdom and so hard to live them apart from the Kingdom.
We began this morning with an essence of the Sermon on the Mount, which is the "Lord's Prayer." Those who live into this prayer are sincerely and earnestly about the work of their transformation, which they carry out in a community of trust. They bare their souls. The impossible becomes easy to do in a community of love. They have picked up their crosses. They are finding their lives. They are conforming themselves to the Kingdom's precepts. So let us take up another part of the prayer:
| Forgive us our debts as forgive our debtors. (Lu 6:12) |
Forgiveness. It means "to release" from an obligation. Our modern term "to forgive a debt" captures the concept exactly. When I said last week that sin as a form of debt would not be invented for a thousand years, I had in mind "indebtedness to a wrathful Father." I cited Jesus' example of the creditor who had two debtors: the sinful woman and Simon the Leper, Jesus's host.
The Lord is our creditor. He gave us the world afresh, and when the Flood waters receded, they revealed a pristine and magnificent gift of mercy. St. John's baptism was like a second Noah's Flood sweeping over the Levant (1 Peter 3:20-21). And when those waters abated, they revealed the Incarnation of God, which set the scene for the world's redemption. He emptied Himself of Heavenly glory that we might have a share in His Divinity (Phil 2:6). He laid down His life as a ransom for His friends. He invited us to empty ourselves in order to be filled with Divine life, with His nobility, and He challenged us to love with His kind of self-sacrificing love (Jn 21:15ff).
The Gospel countenances only two realms: the Kingdom of God and the world. We deceive ourselves, to our great hazard, if we believe there can be other places cobbled together through compromise. If we believe "We're mostly good" or "we kinda believe." We deceive ourselves. Jesus said,
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"No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other,
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St. Paul asks,
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Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unrighteous,
and not before the saints? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? (1 Cor 6:1-2) |
Forgiveness is the law which the juridical world does not know. Its essence is a turning away from the world's kind of justice and a turning toward the Kingdom of Heaven. For when we release someone from an obligation, we find that we have been released to live a new kind of life. We open a new way ahead as God has given us a fresh start.
This forgetting of sins, this unremembering, comes down to us from Isaiah. All nations have been assembled before the Almighty God, and He says to them in an outpouring of compassion:
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"I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake;
And I will not remember your sins." (Isaiah 42:25) |
A deep mutuality is seen here. Yes, God blots out our transgressions for our sakes, but He also does this for His own sake, clearing a new and open space where we may meet with Him. We shall breathe the air of Heaven, and Heaven's ways will be the thoughts of our minds and the intimations of hearts. Isn't this always the way when we empty ourselves of unworthy things and thoughts? The natural state of our minds and hearts are the ways of Heaven.
The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near: it is a place of cataclysm, and it is the everlasting desire of the hills. We must let go of the tawdry world. It will not save us. And many a rich man has discovered: the high walls around his estate are brought low when God fixes His visage upon our lives.
And when will that be? When will He come again? To God-in-eternity all points of time are present. The Creation of the world is fresh to Him. The End has already taken place. And when we close our eyes, we shall meet with Him. He knows us better than we know ourselves. In His gaze we shall see ourselves as we really are. It is a consuming fire which will burn off all self-flatteries, all justifications, and all excuses. It will confront us with our most grievous wrongs and humble us unto aching regret.
Yes, the Day of the Lord did already happen. The Gospels clearly record when God lived among us. And His Second Coming is a most urgent, living record — ever alive and ever new to each life passing out of the world. Each of us shall meet with Him: unerring justice which misses nothing and the greatest love we shall ever know. And His mercy shall be meted out to us .... in the same measure that we have been merciful (Mt 7:2).
Forgive me. I forgive you. God forgives.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.