Our Life in the Lord Part Six: The Kingdom Walking Among Us
The Forerunner’s Question
John was the hinge of the prophets, the last voice of the old pursuit, camel’s hair and locusts and a river, crying out to prepare the way of the Lord. Later, from Herod’s prison, John sent the question every believer eventually sends from some prison or other: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” (Mt 11:3). The answer Jesus sent back is the model for testing any claim made in his name. A liar or a lunatic could assert his own claims. Jesus points to what is happening in front of them: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them” (Mt 11:4-5). These are exactly the works Isaiah had attached to the promise centuries before. Prophecy is recognized when what it foretold happens. Wealth cannot command nature and deception cannot cure anyone, so when the works match the promise, point for point, prophecy is being fulfilled in the open.
The Jordan and the Water Made Holy
Jesus comes to the Jordan like any other penitent. John tries to prevent him: “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” (Mt 3:14). Jesus is sinless and needs no washing, so the washing works the other way: Jesus sanctifies the water, going down into the river to prepare water itself for the work it will do in every baptismal font to the end of the age. The heavens open, the Spirit descends as a dove, and the Father’s voice declares him the beloved Son. The Trinity is manifest over a muddy river, and Jesus’s mission begins. He steps out of thirty hidden years into a public life directed wholly outward, for the life of the world.
The Church still recalls what happened at the Jordan when she blesses baptismal water at the Easter Vigil, recounting everything God has made water do across salvation history: the Spirit breathed over the waters at the dawn of creation, the flood drowned a corrupt world and floated one family to safety, the sea opened for slaves walking out of Egypt, and now Jesus, who needed no washing, has sanctified the Jordan. Two more works of water were still to come, water from a pierced side and the command to baptize the nations, for God had been preparing water for all of it since the first morning. For, Jesus’ baptism isn’t our baptism; that comes from his Paschal Mystery at the end of his mortal life - dying to death and rising to new life.
The Desert Rematch
The Holy Spirit drives Jesus into the desert, and the adversary comes. The temptations are the garden’s, refitted for the wilderness: take the fruit, take the shortcut, take the throne; trust the hunger, test the Father, worship what can be seen. Where the first Adam stood in a sanctuary with every need met and gave up his trust in God, the new Adam stands famished in a wasteland and stays with his Father every moment, answering each offer with scripture and waiting for the Father’s timing instead of taking his own, until the devil departs to wait for a better hour. The three offers will return at the end, almost word for word, in the mouths of mockers at the foot of a cross, taunting him to save himself, to prove himself, to come down.
The Kingdom Announced
Jesus preaches it first in Galilee: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mk 1:15). God had prepared his people for every word of it across two thousand years of pursuit, but now the pursuer had a human face.
The First Sign at Cana
Jesus worked his first sign, John says, at a wedding. At Cana in Galilee the wine runs out, and Mary says to her son, “They have no wine” (Jn 2:3). To the servers she gives the one instruction the Church has from her: “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5). Six stone jars stood there for ceremonial washing, and at his word the servers fill them to the brim and carry the water to the headwaiter, who tastes the best wine of the feast, saved inexplicably for last. Everything in the scene is a preview: the mother intercedes, the servants obey without understanding, water for washing becomes wine for joy, the old order’s containers are filled past their purpose with something better, and all of it happens at a wedding, which the prophets had promised the covenant would be, a marriage feast with God as the bridegroom of his people.
The Twelve Deputed
The Kingdom arrives by a road that worldly power would never take. Jesus deputes twelve ordinary men, as God had once whittled Gideon’s army down to three hundred, so that no one could mistake whose the victory was: fishermen, a tax collector, nobody the world would have chosen, the twelve tribes reconstituted in faith as twelve apostles. The word “apostle” means one sent on mission, and being sent is why they were chosen. Jesus sends them out two by two with nothing extra and tells them to stay in whatever house receives them, because being present is the first gift: God himself was proceeding this way, dwelling with people before healing them.
The Church has continued that sending ever since, building it into the Mass. Every Mass repeats it: first the Church tells the very long story at the ambo, extolling salvation history in the Liturgy of the Word, preparing the way as the prophets and the Baptist prepared it; then the Word himself arrives in the flesh upon the altar, and the assembly receives him; and then, fed, the Church dismisses the assembly on purpose and sends it out the doors to the villages, for the words of dismissal are a sending. That is, the Mass is the mission’s weekly re-presentation and its fuel. We recognize the Latin of Mass, “missa” in a word we use in English: missile: something that is clearly sent on its way.
Signs Given Person by Person
Jesus teaches by the manner of his signs as much as by the fact of them: he speaks, and things come to be; he wills, and it is done. There is a difference in kind between the prophets’ borrowed wonders and the Word summoning the very creatures he wrought into creation. Yet he works person by person, almost hidden: he turns in a crushing crowd to find the one woman who touched his cloak, he puts the mourners out before raising Jairus’s daughter, he takes the deaf man aside privately, and he tells more than one healed leper to tell no one. God prefers to work by meeting his creatures one at a time, the visible face of the invisible God before one person, and then another. Jesus gives the signs so that people can recognize the Kingdom, signs which are the visible form of what the sacraments will do for the rest of history.
One night on the lake the disciples face, in a single scene, the question of who Jesus is. A storm falls on the boat, the seasoned fishermen despair, and Jesus is asleep on a cushion in the stern until they wake him with a reproach; then he rebukes the wind and says to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” (Mk 4:39), and there is great calm. The Church has always read the scene beside an older text, the Lord’s answer to Job, that he set limits for the sea and said, “Thus far shall you come but no farther” (Jb 38:11). In the scriptures the sea is chaos itself, the thing no creature tames, which only its maker bounds. The men in the boat catch the echo and ask, “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?” (Mk 4:41). They felt terror before the wind, as we feel terror before our own storms, a terror that comes from looking with the flesh instead of the spirit, as though the one asleep in our boat were someone other than the one who set the boundaries of the deep.
The healings show the same manner. A leper says to Jesus, “If you wish, you can make me clean” (Mk 1:40), and Jesus touches him and answers, “I do will it. Be made clean” (Mk 1:41). He takes the deaf man aside, away from the crowd, puts his fingers in the man’s ears, and says one Aramaic word, “Ephphatha”, be opened, which the Church still echoes over the ears and lips of the newly baptized. The Canaanite woman, an outsider with no claim on the covenant, keeps asking; her cry of three words, “Lord, help me” (Mt 15:25), draws from Jesus the praise of a great faith, for she did what faith does: she reverenced him and refused to stop asking. A woman touches only his cloak in a crush of bodies, and Jesus finds her, calls her daughter, and sends her in peace. The Lord worked at the scale he has always preferred for mercy and dwelling: one soul at a time.
Teaching as Fulfillment
Jesus’s teaching works the ground of the heart, as his healings do. He has not come to abolish the Law and the prophets but to fulfill them, in his own person: everything God had already taught, understood whole and present in the flesh. When he is asked for the greatest commandment he answers with two commandments, the second like the first: love of God with all the heart, being, and strength, and love of neighbor as oneself, on which, he says, the whole Law and the prophets depend. The world has made the word love into a sentiment, but love, in his mouth, is an act of the will: the willing of the good of the other, which is more than another’s happiness, taught in action, at the cost of sacrifice. That is, love is measured by what it gives. When he sets his own word against what was said to the ancestors, anger against murder and lust against adultery, he moves the examination inward, to the heart, where every offense begins, and he offers the food of grown men to a people still on milk: abiding with God radically and completely, without pretense.
The Beatitudes
The Beatitudes open the great Sermon on the Mount like a doorway. They are best heard as descriptions of a country, and not as entrance fees to it:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3): they know themselves supplicants, with open hands.
“Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Mt 5:4): they have loved something enough to lose it.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land” (Mt 5:5): they have declined the scramble.
“Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied” (Mt 5:6): they want the right thing badly.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” (Mt 5:7): they give away what they will need.
“Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God” (Mt 5:8): they see with a clear eye.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt 5:9): they are doing the family work.
“Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:10): they possess it already, in the teeth of the world.
Each blessing describes a way of already belonging to the Kingdom while living in the world. Together the blessings are a portrait, feature by feature, of Jesus, who preaches them. They are what he looks like, offered as what we may look like.
Friends at His Table
Somewhere in the years of the public life, the Lord changes the word for our relationship with God. Samuel had been taught to answer, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening” (1 Sm 3:9), and servant had been the accurate word for two thousand years. The Lord retires it: “I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father” (Jn 15:15). Friendship with God, the purpose the whole pursuit had been driving toward, is a stupendous thing to offer a creature, for a servant receives instructions while the Lord lets a friend inside the reasons. What God wants, and has wanted since the garden, is friends at his table for eternity.
The Laws of the Kingdom’s Growth
In the parables Jesus tells how the Kingdom grows, and its laws contradict instinct. A mustard seed shelters birds and a woman’s yeast leavens three measures of flour: a little goes a long way; the Kingdom’s strength is to shelter. God gives the growth: the sower sleeps and rises, and the seed sprouts he knows not how, so our part is to cultivate the soil of our hearts and to leave the harvest to God. The master leaves the weeds standing amidst the wheat until harvest, because uprooting them early would tear out wheat with them, and, as preachers have long added, because some weeds, given time, become wheat. His patience is mercy. The owner pays laborers hired at the eleventh hour a full day, since eternity is the same for every person. The father of the prodigal is watching the road while the boy is still rehearsing his apology, and he runs out to greet him.
The Bread of Life
Of all Jesus’s teaching, one discourse divided his followers prior to the cross scattering them. He had fed five thousand on a hillside from five loaves, a sign with a long pedigree, for Elisha had once fed a hundred men from twenty barley loaves; but where Elisha prayed and God provided, Jesus works first-hand. The crowd, fed, chases him around the lake, wanting more bread and asking what works God requires, and he narrows all the works to one: “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent” (Jn 6:29). Then he tells them what the manna in the desert had been pointing at all along: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst” (Jn 6:35).
They murmur, and he says it again without softening it. The bread he will give is his flesh for the life of the world, and without eating the flesh of the Son of Man and drinking his blood they do not have life within them. It is as plain as he ever speaks, and it costs him the crowd: many of his own disciples call the saying hard and return to their former way of life, and he lets them go, because he meant every word of it. He turns to the Twelve and asks whether they also want to leave, and Peter answers for every believer since who has stayed without fully understanding: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68). He would show what that bread would be, and where it would be broken, on a Thursday night still ahead.
Two Rich Men
Two rich men met him. Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector, short of stature and curious. Curiosity is more of a beginning than it sounds: wanting to see who Jesus was, Zacchaeus ran ahead and climbed a sycamore, undignified and public, and the Lord stopped under the branches, called him by name, and invited himself to dinner. Half a fortune went to the poor before the evening was out. The rich young man came more respectably, walking, with a good record and an honest question, and Jesus looked at him and loved him, and told him the one thing he lacked: sell, give, come, follow. He went away sad, for he had many possessions. The two men differed in what they wanted: Zacchaeus wished to see, badly enough to climb.
The End Shown in Advance
Once, before witnesses he chose, Jesus draws the veil back. On a mountain he is transfigured: his face shines like the sun, his clothes become white as light, and Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, converse with him as friends. The cloud overshadows them, the Father speaks, and for a moment three fishermen see the end of the story in advance, both who he is and what is promised, for the glory shown on Tabor is a preview of the glorified humanity that waits on the far side of everything now approaching. Jesus gives that sight deliberately as provision, just before the road turns toward the Cross.
Witnesses on the Road to Jerusalem
A Samaritan woman and a man born blind each show in miniature how God converses with a soul. At a well at noon, when no one comes to wells, the Samaritan woman with five husbands behind her meets a stranger who asks her for a drink; he asks first, needing nothing, so that she can discover her own thirst. The conversation climbs the way any conversion might climb: she misunderstands at the level of buckets and water, then he speaks of her five husbands, her hidden wound, without a word of coddling, then her own names for him rise, from a Jew, to a prophet, to the question of the Messiah, at which he answers, “I am he, the one who is speaking with you” (Jn 4:26), words in which the Church has always heard the echo of the burning bush. She leaves her water jar behind, her errand forgotten, and her report brings her town to him; the town ends by believing on the word of Jesus himself. All evangelization still works that way: one plain conversation, and then the person himself.
The man born blind walks the same climb with mud on his face. God made Adam from clay, and Jesus remakes this man with clay, as only Adam’s maker would think to do, and sends him to wash in a pool whose name means “Sent”. His sight arrives in a moment; his seeing takes the whole chapter, as his names for Jesus rise under interrogation from a man, to a prophet, to Lord, worshiped, and the sighted men around him argue themselves blind. The Church has always found her own baptism in him, so the baptismal summons Paul quotes belongs to him and to every catechumen since: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light” (Eph 5:14).
John gathers the last stretch of the public life into a chain of witnesses, each handing the light forward: the Baptist pointing him out, the Samaritan woman at the well running back to her town with her water jar forgotten, the man born blind seeing his accusers more clearly than they see anything. The chain ends at a tomb in Bethany, where Jesus calls out the name of Lazarus into the cave, and Lazarus, four days dead, comes out bound in burial bands, and the Lord says, “Untie him and let him go” (Jn 11:44). Biblical commentators have long imagined that the souls gathered in the bosom of Abraham stirred at that shout, hearing the first tremors of their savior’s voice through the ground of the underworld. The raising had a price: Jesus performs it very near to Jerusalem and before that many witnesses, which forces the authorities’ hand, so that the miracle that prefigures his own resurrection is the act that sets his death in motion. From that hour they plan to kill him, and he sets his face for Jerusalem.
Caesarea Philippi and the Turn
On the road Jesus asked the Twelve, “Who do people say that I am?” (Mk 8:27). Simon the fisherman gave the one sufficient answer at Caesarea Philippi, confessing him the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Jesus renamed him on the spot, in the tradition of Abram made Abraham and Jacob made Israel: Peter, rock, with keys promised and an office implied that would outlive him. The renaming mattered because of who spoke it, for when God renames a man, the man becomes what the name says. Jesus promised the keys at Caesarea Philippi, and he would hand them over on a beach after the Resurrection; before he gave them there would be a courtyard, a charcoal fire, and three denials the fisherman did not yet believe himself capable of.
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