Living in the Kingdom, 32nd Thursday (II), November 15, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Albert the Great
November 15, 2018
Plhm 7-20, Ps 146, Lk 17:20-25

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The Pharisees in today’s Gospel asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come. They were doubtless asking this within messianic expectations, that the kingdom of God would erupt by building the type of momentum to fulfill Jewish hopes in evicting the Romans from Israel and reestablishing the Davidic throne. It was fundamentally a political reality, their notion of a theocracy. In the question, they were probably egging Jesus on to see whether he thought he was the Messiah and what his future plans might be. But Jesus, as he is wont to do, transcended the question. He said that the inauguration of the Kingdom wouldn’t be a spectacle to be observed. There wouldn’t be trumpets intoning “Hail to the King!” There wouldn’t be heralds indicating that the kingdom is “here” or “there.” Rather, Jesus says, “Behold, the Kingdom of God is among you.”
• This means two things. First, that the Kingdom had already come because the King was present; the Kingdom is where the King is and Jesus was already present. Second, the Kingdom had already come because people had already embraced it, entered it and were living in it because they were living with the King. There’s a couplet in the Our Father in which we pray first “Thy kingdom come!” and then repeat it in other words, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The Kingdom of God is wherever God’s will is done, whenever one begins to live in relationship with God and his kingdom.
• Jesus was saying by both of these applications that no one needed to wait to observe the kingdom because the kingdom had already come. Rather, they needed to know how to look for it. Throughout the Gospel Jesus was giving us indications about how to recognize the kingdom as well as the conditions for entering it and living in it. He says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who are “poor in spirit,” to those who treasure God more than all the treasures of the world.It belongs to those who convert and become like little children, who trust in God and accept it as a gift. It is like a wedding banquet full of joy and those who live in the kingdom are those who are profoundly and serenely joyful. It grows like a mustard seed or yeast, imperceptible to people on the outside but the growth is real. It’s like a buried treasure or a pearl of great price, a net cast into the sea or a field with wheat and weeds. By each of these realities Jesus was indicating qualities of the Kingdom so that we would be able to perceive it. Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, said very powerfully back in 2000 in a talk to catechists from around the world, “The kingdom of God … is ‘not a thing.’ The Kingdom of God is God. The Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our – in my life. God is not a faraway ‘ultimate cause,’ God is not the ‘great architect’ of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it – on the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of history.” The kingdom has come to a person when God is truly God of each and every act of one’s life. The Kingdom of God is living within the matrix of the incarnate King of Kings.
• When we enter into that kingdom, everything changes and all other kingdoms are relativized. We see that in today’s first reading. St. Paul writes to Philemon whom he had evangelized and brought into the Church in Colossae. He had a slave, Onesimus, who had escaped and come to Rome where he encountered St. Paul, whom doubtless he had at least seen in Colossae. He served St. Paul for a time, but Onesimus was a fugitive. St. Paul wanted to restore his standing in a way that would help both Onesimus and Philemon. So he sent him back but with what became the Letter to Philemon. In that letter, St. Paul described how things change when we’re really living in the kingdom. In the Roman empire, Onesimus was simply a slave and because he had escaped Philemon could have him cruelly punished and even executed. But the reality and rules of the kingdom needed to trump Roman law. St. Paul said, “I am sending him, my heart, back to you, … so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me but even more so to you, as a man and in the Lord. … Welcome him as you would me.” In the kingdom, we grasp that there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer free or slave, but we’re all beloved sons and daughters of God and therefore brothers and sisters of each other. St. Paul was confident that Philemon would live by the values of the kingdom and the fact that we have the letter today is clearly a sign that he did. In a similar way, living in the Kingdom needs to change the way we interact, needs to change all our human interactions. In the kingdom, we recognize that the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the ill, and the imprisoned need to be treated with the love with which we would treat Christ. We recognize that even notorious sinners are beloved by God who died for them and therefore must have the door of conversion opened to them. We recognize that those whom the world considers nobodies are often given special missions to reduce to humility those who think they’re somebodies. We look at everyone — Liberal or Conservative, Black or White or Brown, Yellow or Red, Male or Female — with love. Today’s Gospel is an occasion for us to ask whether we’re really living in that kingdom, whether God is the “most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life.” At a practical level, do we look at politics, sports, snow storms, meals, familial relations, friendships, setbacks — in short, life — differently than others who do not know about nor live in the kingdom?
• Someone who lived in the kingdom, who was in the world but not of it, is the saint we celebrate today. St. Albert the Great, the 13th century Dominican Doctor of the Church, was one who was able to find the kingdom, and live together with God, in almost every discipline of study. He ended up writing 38 huge volumes on theology, Biblical interpretation, physics, geography, astronomy, mineralogy, chemistry and biology. His writings on science all began with wonder and gratitude for the way God the Creator had ordered the gift of his creation. He was able to find in all of these matters evidence of the King and to pass on that wonder and gratitude for the kingdom in created reality to so many students. As we prayed in the Opening Prayer of the Mass,  God “made [him] great by his joining of human wisdom to divine faith.” His faith radiated through all of his human learning.
• The Kingdom of God, as Pope Benedict said, is God and one of the most important ways we seek to live in the Kingdom is to unite ourselves with the King. When we come to receive Holy Communion, we allow Christ the Kingdom to establish his throne within us, so that the Kingdom of God may truly be within us. The Kingdom, as Jesus says, is not something that will be announced by pointing here and there, but for us as Christians is something that we are called to bear within. Through the intercession of St. Albert the Great, we ask the Lord Jesus for the grace that as we receive him within we may not do so routinely, but in such a way that we may make him the “most present and decisive reality in our life,” as we seek to spread his kingdom and do his will just as St. Albert did both on earth as he continues to do in heaven.

The readings for today’s Mass were: