Thursday of the Second Week of Advent
In Matthew’s gospel for today, Jesus says this to the crowds: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force.” Jesus, of course, knows of what he speaks. He knows the violence that is coming for him.
But a question we ought to ask is why. Why does Jesus suffer violence? Why do the violent want to take the Kingdom of heaven by force? In other words, what, exactly, is the threat that Jesus and the Kingdom of heaven pose to the powers of this world?
I spent some time with the newspaper this morning. I read about an African American man who was executed by the state of Alabama because he was an accomplice to the murder of three police officers. He had no weapon on him at the time. He fired no shot. But the state killed him anyway. I read about a sharp increase in cocaine trafficking in Europe on the part of organized gangs that don’t hesitate to secure their profits by way of guns, grenades, and torture. I read about signs that indicate that Russian President Vladimir Putin means to invade Ukraine with some 175,000 troops early next year.
And that’s the news from just one random front page section of the newspaper. Ours is a world rife with violence. A world in which human life is destroyed on a daily basis for no good reason.
Jesus had another message. He said that his was the Kingdom of heaven. A kingdom in which the blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers. A kingdom in which true followers of Jesus Christ turn the other cheek, love their neighbor as themselves, love their enemy. And, if forced to walk a mile, walk two. In a nutshell, what rules the Kingdom of heaven is the Messiah who rode into Jerusalem not with an army trained to slay his opposition but on the back of a donkey. More than that, he rode in knowing that the violence of the world would be meted out on his body.
It is impossible to overestimate the otherworldliness that is the Kingdom of heaven. It’s a Kingdom ruled by compassion, grace, mercy, generosity, love. In other words, it’s a kingdom at complete odds with so much of our world.
The true gospel of Jesus Christ—the gospel that says that our Lord is gracious and merciful; slow to anger, and great of kindness—challenges the order of things today as much as it did in Jesus’s day. If we can dare to live into it, we are his disciples.
Amen.
-Sue Trollinger