Living in the Kingdom

Jesus said to the crowd: “They will seize and persecute you, they will hand you over to the synagogues and to prisons, and they will have you led before kings and governors because of my name.  It will lead to your giving testimony. Remember, you are not to prepare your defense beforehand, for I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.  You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death.  You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed.  By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” (Lk 21:12-19)

Clearly, this is not one of those warm, fuzzy, God-is-love gospel passages.  And the timing of the message adds fuel to the fire.  Here we are about to join with family and friends to give thanks for all of God’s blessings, and we hear that we will be seized and persecuted, turned against by those closest to us, even put to death in some cases. 

Uncomfortable though the message may be, we hear it more than once from Jesus.  For example, the final beatitude is “blessed are the persecuted.”  How can this be?  An easy out is to assume that Jesus is simply telling us a basic fact of life.  In a world of sin, meeting up with evil is inevitable, and everyone who lives in the world must endure at least some pain, suffering, and, yes, even death.  Our lesson, then, is to simply live in the hope of our final union with God, when all pain and suffering will vanish.  In the meantime, offer up our own suffering, help those who we see suffering, and all will eventually be well.

However, when I accept this interpretation, I have, in a very important way, missed Jesus’ point.  The key words in the passage – as they are in that final beatitude – are “because of my name.”  This persecution is not inevitable simply because we live in a world of sin and death; it is heaped upon us because while we live in this world, we are not of this world.  We are not simply to live in the hope that all will be well, but, in that very hope, we are also to live as if the kingdom has already come.  We are to live on earth as we will in heaven.

This is a very tall order!  Jesus tells us not to live as if the world around us is all we have. We are not to live as if our lives are bound by time and space.  We are not to live as if all resources are finite and all love is conditional.  We are not to live as if our happiness depends on our ability to live longer and healthier, our ability to possess more things, our ability to make more friends, or our ability to create more powerful weapons.

Rather, we are live in a world of infinite goodness, treating our limited time here on earth as a mere prelude to an eternity of life with our all-provident God.  We are live in a world of unconditional love, as God loved us by giving us his only Son, and as God continues to shower this unconditional love down on us and on all of his creation to this very day.   We are to live, as we were reminded this past Sunday, not bound by mere earthly government and authority – no matter how just and fair that authority may seem – but with Jesus as our King.

In very concrete terms, Jesus describes what this life looks like.  Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, forego violence, fight evil with good, be meek, merciful, mournful, be a slave to all, place complete trust in God for protection and sustenance, forgive seventy-seven times, and give without counting the cost.

The cost will be great, for living in the kingdom defies all common sense.  It contradicts the very obvious physical and temporal constraints of this world.  As a result, it makes many people – those who only think in terms of the world – very, very uncomfortable.  So uncomfortable, that it seems to threaten their very being. 

We see this dissonance quite clearly in the reactions to the Syrian refugee crisis.  While the Pope and the bishops insist that charity should drive us to assist in any way we can, many others insist that our primary duty is not love, but self-preservation.  And since it is almost impossible for us to sort out with certainty the dangerous from the benign, it makes sense – in a world in which God is not to be trusted – to simply keep the problem at arm’s length, or even better, at ocean’s length.  Those who would follow the Pope’s "ludicrous" thinking are, at best, idealistic fools; at worst, they are as dangerous as the terrorists themselves.

For me, the choice is clear – I either embrace the persecution that comes from living in Jesus’ name, living in Jesus’ kingdom, or I bind myself to a world of finite resources, limited time, and transitory pleasure – a world that doesn’t need God, a world of hell.

Choose the Kingdom, reject Hell.