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14

GOD AT WORK

  When the enemies of Jesus accused him of being in league with Satan and of using evil powers to cast out spirits, he replied,
                        ‘If it is through the finger of God that I cast out devils, then know that the Kingdom of God has over taken you’ (Luke 11:20).

  We find this expression, ‘kingdom of God’ constantly on the lips of Jesus. It is the very heart and centre of his teaching. Jesus did not preach so much about God or himself. He spoke mostly about the kingdom. What did he mean? We have a problem here because we are familiar with the ideas of king and kingdom. We think of a kingdom as a place ruled over by a king. If we are to understand the teaching of Jesus and be enriched and nourished by the fullness of his message, we will have to revise our idea of the reality suggested by the word ‘kingdom’.

  We can begin by saying we must move away from the idea of kingdom as a place, a land, a territory. When Jesus speaks about the kingdom of God, he is not thinking of a place of perfection where all the people obey God as king and no evil is present. Nor is Jesus primarily thinking of a place of perfection in the next world, populated by angels and saints, where we all hope to go after death. The kingdom of his teaching is not to be identified with a place either here or in the next world.

  What then is it? The kingdom of God among us is the presence of God among us, but not a God sitting on a throne awaiting our worship. It is a very hardworking, active God. The kingdom is not something static, it is a dynamic reality, something that is happening. It is the holiness we spoke of earlier, God’s kind of holiness, namely God present and close to us in compassion, blessing, healing, liberating and renewing us. It is the Good Samaritan God kneeling beside us and bandaging our wounds. It is the Good News in action.

  We remember how John the Baptist, when he was in prison, began doubting if Jesus was the expected Messiah. John was scandalised by the lifestyle of Jesus. He expected Jesus to stand apart from sinners to denounce sin and separate the good from the bad. John had a narrow idea of the salvation Jesus was bringing and of the richness of the Good News. In his distress and confusion he sent messengers to Jesus to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or have we got to wait for someone else?’ (Matthew 11:3). This is the reply Jesus gave: ‘Go back and tell John what you hear and see; the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor; and happy is the man who does not lose faith in me’ (Matthew 11:4-5). This is what Jesus meant by the kingdom. God among us. We do not have to wait any more, we do not have to wait for someone else. God is among us in Jesus. We live in anno domini.

  In his first homily in the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus chose a passage from Isaiah to describe what he had come to do. This is how he preached:

'The spirit of the Lord has been given to me
for he has anointed me.
He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor
to proclaim liberty to captives
and to the blind new sight,
to set the downtrodden free,
to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour'
Luke 4:18-19.

  And then Jesus added, ‘This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen.’ (Luke 4:22). This is what Jesus means by the kingdom. Notice he describes it as ‘news’, namely something that is happening now. It is not history, something that happened long ago. It is not prophecy, something that will happen in the future when people turn to God. No, it is something that is happening today among us. It is God present, healing, loving, re-creating. The kingdom is among us. It is not God outside at a distance urging us to moral improvement. One of God’s names is Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’. He is with us not only in the sense of being present, but with us in the sense of ‘for us’. He is saying, ‘I am with you all the way’. It is God in Jesus saying ‘Presente’ when we cry out in pain and confusion asking, ‘Lord, where are you?’

  The kingdom is not a place of perfect people obeying their king. It is people, all right, a great mixture of people, of every kind and type, good and bad, searching for meaning, for happiness, trying to cope with the evil in themselves and the evil from outside. And all the while their king is among them, on their side, encouraging them, nourishing them and strengthening them against the evil. One day, Jesus was challenged by the Scribes and Pharisees for healing a man on the Sabbath. They accused him of ‘working’ on the Sabbath. He gave them a simple but profound answer. He said, ‘My Father goes on working, and so do I’ (John 5:17). We have a working God who never rests from the work of healing and renewing his people. And even when we rest, the kingdom is still happening among us. The Psalmist had this insight. Yahweh ‘provides for his beloved as they sleep’ (Psalm 127:2). The kingdom is God at work, all the time.

  The kingdom is a big fishing-net with good and bad fish. It is a large field with wheat and weeds. It is a seed hidden but growing in a way we cannot understand. It is a spring of water that refreshes and slakes our deepest thirst. It is a mighty tree offering shade to good and bad. It is a chest of treasure buried in our own back garden. It is a piece of yeast, small to the eye but affecting a great mass of dough. It is a gracious king who cancels all debts and invites all from the highways and byways to his banquet table. It is a Father who understands the complex hearts of his children. It is a messenger who says yes to devils when they ask, ‘Are you come to destroy us?’ Yes, the kingdom has come to destroy all the evil that can threaten God’s people.

  The kingdom is present in Jesus. It is Jesus among us who, when he sees the suffering of people, does not question Abba, hiss Father, but does all he can in love to relieve that suffering. He sees sick people but does not say to them, ‘This is God’s will for you; this is to test you; this is punishment for your sins.’ He does not say, ‘That’s how life is here on earth but there is a better life coming.’ He says none of these things. He is, rather, moved to compassion and he heals and consoles and encourages us not to wait to heaven but to try to bring heaven down here to earth by loving and caring for each other in our sorrow and suffering.

  And this loving, helping, forgiving and healing each other is now possible precisely because the kingdom is already here among us. This is a very important insight. Our loving each other is not a precondition for the kingdom. Rather, it is a sign that the kingdom is here. God is not standing outside our world, saying ‘When you begin to love each other I will come among you.’ He is saying, ‘I am among you, offering you the power to love as I love.’ At the Last Supper, Jesus prays that we may be one in love, ‘so that the world may believe it was you who sent me’ (John 17:21). The world will know that the kingdom is here when it sees us going out to each other in love. Our love for one another is not a precondition of the kingdom but a sign that it is here. But while the kingdom is among us, it is always still coming because we are weak and we need God and his power daily. So Jesus tells us to pray to the Father that the kingdom will come in its fullness.

  The kingdom is present when you see people doing more than you would expect, when you see the courage and sincerity of someone battling with cancer or AIDS, when you hear or someone forgiving an enemy who treated them with great cruelty, when you see a wife’s heroic patience with an alcoholic husband, when you see parents’ tender love for a handicapped child, when someone breaks a drug habit, when a social worker battles against great odds to bring dignity to exploited people. This is the kingdom among us. Ordinary people can do more than we expect because they are no longer ordinary people when they open themselves to the power of the kingdom, when they realise they are not alone, not depending on mere human resources. They hear and trust the word of Jesus: ‘My Father goes on working and do so I.’

  Jesus invites us to seek the kingdom, to enter it now. He asks us to make it our priority, to put it before all else because it is precisely there that we shall find the hope and power and courage to cope with everything else. He said the Father knows all our needs and care. ‘Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you as well’ (Matthew 6:33). Jesus is really asking us not to try to cope along, since now we are never alone any more. To enter this kingdom and experience its power we must become as children. We must have the trust of children if we are to claim the promises of Jesus. At baptism, when we chose this Jesus, we rejected the ‘empty promises’ of Satan. The evil one is full of promises, but, coming from the father of lies, they are empty. He cannot deliver. The Lord we chose in faith also makes promises. If we trust him, we shall discover with the Psalmist that Yahweh is ‘always true to his promises’ (Psalm 145:13). The kingdom of God is God among us, hard at work fulfilling those promises.

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