The coming of the Kingdom - Luke 17:20-25
I once asked an American student what she most liked about London, and received the surprising reply, “those words painted on the kerb that say Look Right”. Although disappointed that she had not mentioned the Tower of London, Big Ben, or, being an American teenager, at least the London Dungeon, I did at once know what she meant. Having myself lived abroad for several years in a country where traffic inexplicably drives on the right-hand side of the road, there is a constant danger of stepping off the pavement while looking the wrong way. Simply acting on habit, you can be facing in the wrong direction, oblivious of the cyclist or the juggernaut that is bearing down upon you. You can miss even the biggest things if you are not expecting them.
Where is God to be found in our world? How do we know when we have found him? In what ways should that change our lives? These are questions that are as important to us as they were to the Pharisees and disciples of Jesus’ time. To know where God was, was a matter of professional interest to the Pharisees, whose livelihood consisted in pointing people in the right direction to serve him. It was a matter of personal interest to the disciples, who had left everything to follow someone who claimed to be nothing less than the Way to the Father. Nobody in either of these groups was expecting Jesus. The Pharisees wanted God to come with an orchestra, they wanted an epic production, they expected him to bring a resounding vindication of their teaching. They did not recognise God in the charismatic young man who cured the sick and dined with outcasts. But our Lord makes clear to the Pharisees that if they are looking for obvious previews of some grandly defined divinely sanctioned kingdom, they are looking in the wrong direction. For God’s kingdom does not admit of observation, our Father’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven wherever the blind see, the crippled walk, the oppressed are set free. This is heaven breaking through into our world.
Perhaps, if we think of such things at all, we are minded to dismiss the Pharisees as unimaginative traditionalists intent on preserving their own authority. But their fault is one we are quite capable of sharing. We all tend to have expectations of how, and when, and by whom, God is found. And indeed when, and by whom, he isn’t. We each have our gloss on the qualities of the kingdom. What do you mean by holiness? How do you define purity of heart? How far should mercy stretch? In what ways do you hunger and thirst after righteousness? We all have our own versions of the Kingdom of heaven, and we don’t like it if someone challenges them. But our Lord does just that. He runs down our mental list of what is right and wrong, who is acceptable and who is to be avoided, what is holy and what is unholy, and he challenges me - am I looking in the right place? Might I need to look in another direction? Do I think I am generous because I have dropped a pound coin in a beggar’s tin, because I have listened to someone I find dull, because I have let my flatmate take a yoghurt from the fridge? Go to the poor, says Pope Francis, and see how generous they are with what little they have, and learn generosity from them. Get out of your sacristies, says Pope Francis to priests, and get out to the margins. That is where you will find Christ. That is where the Kingdom is alive.
And then we have the disciples, wondering where the kingdom is for them. One of the extraordinary things I have discovered about Fisher House is that it is invisible. I was talking to a don this week, an architectural expert, who swore blind that Fisher House did not exist. He knew the centre of Cambridge intimately, and he had never seen it. This is true of many people: they are certain that they have never seen Fisher House, and yet, when you show it to them, in its hidden but not so hidden corner, they cry, “Oh, yes, of course! That’s Fisher House.” It has been there all along, but they have not noticed it. Perhaps they were looking for something with a belfry, or a dome, or a large baroque statue of a belligerent Pope. An crumbly old town house is not what they were expecting, so they never – in the deepest sense - imagined it.
So it was with the disciples, on the anxious lookout for the kingdom, for the signs that Jesus was worth doing all this for, for some signal to confirm that he was the one. But, says our Lord, the reality is there all along. The kingdom is already breaking through into your lives. The kingdom is not somewhere else; you do not have to set off in pursuit of it. The kingdom is not a place, or a condition, or (least of all) a set of rules. The kingdom is nothing other than the encounter with Christ himself. It is the meeting with our Lord, and our allowing him to change us, that is the inauguration of the new heaven and the new earth. So what we need is not so much binoculars, as imagination, an interior vigilance, that allows us to see our world, our lives, in a new way - with Christ’s eyes. Like a flash of lightening, this inward vision illuminates what was there all along, with a clarity we never thought possible. We presume our lives are humdrum, our world two-dimensional, our careers mundane, but seen in the right way, we find that (as the first reading has it) God’s wisdom is here among us, pervading and permeating all things. Be attentive to Christ, look for him in the right way, and you will see a world shot through with his glory, like gold thread through a garment. Our daily lives are tinted with heaven, from the encounter with Christ.
God turns up like a bolt from the b
lue; he is a lightening flash; he is, as was popular to call him a few years ago, the God of surprises. Against all our attempts and tendencies to create the kingdom in our own image, according to our own standards, and to populate it with people who think like us, he sends his Son to turn our heads. So let us not be too intent on gazing according to our own instincts, lest we find we are facing in the wrong direction, and miss him when he comes.
Preached by Fr Mark at Queens' College November 2013