Memorial of Saint Martin of Tours, Bishop
In Luke’s Gospel for today, Jesus offers three very important insights.
First, he insists that the Kingdom is not a thing. It’s not an object to be observed—as if we could know it with certainty or even confidence. This insight stands in sharp contrast to a discussion I heard years ago at a family reunion I attended with my first husband. The family members that gathered were all conservative Mennonites, and they had very specific ideas about the Kingdom.
Following a meal with a familiar menu—broasted chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, dressing, chicken noodles, bread, homemade pies, and graham cracker pudding—the family arranged their chairs in a circle, and grandpa started talking what heaven is like.
As he described heaven in vivid detail—there were streets paved with gold, and lovely, well-kept houses running along those gold streets, and so forth—I couldn’t help but imagine a “perfect” suburban subdivision. The houses all new, streets swept clean, lawns well groomed, blooming flower gardens, and beautiful shade trees. In other words, the sort of place that most people on this Earth do not live in or, perhaps, have even seen.
In the passage from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is strong on the point that the Kingdom is not a place, not a thing, not a destination. Instead, it is among us, even now. It is Jesus Christ dwelling with and in us.
Second, Jesus warns of a day when, longing to find Jesus, people will chase after phantasms of him proffered by those who claim to know all about who he is. They too want to nail him down. Jesus entreats his disciples to resist the temptation to chase after such phantasms.
And that is because, thirdly, Jesus is not a thing. Like lightning, he says, any attempt to pursue him, catch him, nail him down will be a failure. As with the Kingdom of God, if you want to find Jesus, look for where he is among you—suffering, sacrificing, reconciling. Like the Kingdom, he is saying, he is not a thing. He is a doing.
In this reading from Luke’s Gospel, we learn that Jesus knew very well what was to come. People would turn the Kingdom of God—a being with God, a seeing of God in all things—into a thing. For some, that would be a vision of a perfect suburban subdivision. For others, something else.
He also knew that even he, who had walked among them, would be transformed into a thing—a caricature of himself. He would made into a manly man or a super hero who performed miracles, chased out demons, and triumphed in the end. In other words, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is telling us that he knows that there were people in his time and that there would be people in all times who would try to nail him down so as to make him a thing that they could claim, know, own, monetize.
Jesus refuses. In the end, neither his Kingdom nor himself will be turned into an object made in our image. And that is because he is not the man who is a god. Rather, he is the God made man. And that makes all the difference.
Rather than chase after a Jesus made in our image, may we worship and follow the Jesus whose suffering brings an abundance of grace, mercy, love, and compassion.
Amen.
Sue Trollinger