Matt 9:35-10:8
Lord God, take my words and speak through them,
take our minds and think through them,
take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN.
What was Jesus thinking about when he was teaching about and living ‘The Kingdom of God?’ We can only begin to get an idea of that by looking at the ways in which he speaks about it.
In Matthew’s Gospel, ‘The Kingdom of God’ and ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ seem to be pretty much interchangeable – ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a phrase exclusive to Matthew, not found anywhere else in the Old or New Testaments. It was probably the term which was preferred in the Church or Churches for whom Matthew was gathering all the stories of Jesus he could find. ‘The Kingdom of God’ is used five times in Matthew’s Gospel, but ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ is used over 30 times; and mentions of the ‘Kingdom’ are something like 70-80 times.
Whatever Jesus was thinking about when he was teaching about and living ‘The Kingdom of God’, or ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’, it was obviously so important to him, that he mentions it in almost all of his conversations.
You’ll probably all know that we use a three-year Lectionary for our Sunday Readings, and that each year we concentrate on a different Gospel in turn, with John’s Gospel being fitted in around the other three – and this is the year of Matthew. And it’s really useful to do this, as we can spend a bit of time with each Gospel, getting a feel for the differences as well as the similarities between them all.
The passage we’ve just heard from Matthew’s Gospel is absolutely action packed with different ways of looking at the Kingdom, and different layers of meaning.
Matthew 9 has already had the Healing of the Paralytic, the Calling of Matthew the Tax Collector, a conversation with the disciples of John, the Healing of the Leader of the Synagogue’s Daughter, with the Healing of the Woman with Haemorrhages on the way, the healing of two blind men, and the casting out of a demon.
And what a joyful beginning to our reading: ‘Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom’ [9:35]. ‘The Good News of the Kingdom’ – that’s a very striking phrase. It doesn’t sound as if he’s proclaiming something in the future, but rather he seems to be talking about something here and now – and this is emphasised as we’re told that Jesus [was] ‘Proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness’ [Ibid.]. From this passage, it looks as if what you might call ‘the content’ of the Kingdom of God is our actively working to change people’s lives.
And that’s emphasised when Jesus saw the crowds, and had compassion on them, and decides that he will send out the Twelve on what we might call ‘a mission’. He gives them authority over unclean spirits, to cure diseases and sicknesses.
And then, in a reading we don’t hear all that often, we are given the list of the Twelve Apostles – Simon Peter, his brother Andrew; James and John, sons of Zebedee; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot. What’s extraordinary to me is that we know so little about these twelve. A few of them, Peter, James and John, we hear a bit more about; Judas, we know what happens to him in the end; but what of the rest, the other eight who were so important in hearing Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God, and seeing all that he had done, and who then disappear into history, only popping up in legends from time to time?
I find it strangely comforting that those who were with Jesus at the beginning, and who were there in the early Church – look at the beginning of Acts – that these men – and they were all men – that there is so little known about them. These twelve are sent out to ‘proclaim the Good News’, just as Jesus was doing a few verses earlier.
And what is the Good News? ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near’ [10:7]. ‘The Kingdom has come near’.
I want to draw two things out of this for us today.
Firstly, that when we look at Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, it becomes apparent that it’s both now, and not now – both now, and not now. Both of these aspects are true.
The Kingdom of God is here among us. The seeds of the Kingdom are continually being sown in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Every kind act, every bit of caring, every sharing of the Good News, every sacrificial act of love, every injustice put right, every discrimination uncovered, every move towards a fairer and juster society – all of these are signs of the Kingdom.
Look at Luke 17:21, where Jesus says, ‘In fact, the Kingdom of God is among you’.
All of us are called to be ‘Kingdom Builders’, in all that we do, and all that we are. Individually, as a Cathedral, wherever we find ourselves, we are called to be ‘Kingdom Builders’. At the end of this Service, we’ll be sent out in peace, ‘To love and serve the Lord’. We come in to worship to be refreshed, renewed, hopefully re-energised, so that we can go out to live our Monday to Saturday lives as builders of the Kingdom of God, in the Power of the Holy Spirit.
In many places in our society, in our hospitals and care homes, in our school and colleges, in our neighbourhoods and work-places, and in our families, we see amazing love, and kindness, and service, from so many people, many of whom have come here from so many different parts of the world – something we’ve been reflecting on this week at the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Windrush Ship, bringing those people we needed at the end of the War to re-build the economy; a pattern which has been often repeated since then. It’s beautiful and humbling to see ‘love in action’ in this way. Long may it continue – all that love and caring is an expression of the Kingdom of God in the here and now.
That’s my first point – the Kingdom of Heaven is both now, and not now.
And my second point, is that the Kingdom Building is usually a hidden occupation. Not many Kingdom Builders, even those as significant as the Twelve Disciples, get very much time in the limelight. Look at how many times in Matthew’s Gospel that we are told to do things in secret: giving alms, praying, fasting, all of these ‘so that your Father who is in secret will reward you in secret’ [Matt 6:6].
That’s one of the reasons that there’s not a lot of good news on the TV or in the papers or on social media. Most of the loving, caring, sharing, giving, is done in secret; it’s done in the context of families, or neighbours, or at work, or by Pastoral Visitors, or in hospitals and hospices – and many other places, or course. The Kingdom of God is being built all around us, and most of the time we don’t see, or we don’t notice, or we don’t recognise it. Psalm 119 [:18] prays, ‘Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things’.
If we’re attentive, we can see signs of the Kingdom of God all around us, for ‘the Kingdom of God is among’ us.
Two simple points to reflect on in the coming week: the Kingdom of God is both now, and not now; and the Kingdom Building is usually a hidden occupation.
Albert Schweitzer very wisely wrote, ‘There can be no Kingdom of God in the world without the Kingdom of God in our hearts’.
And Walter Rauschenbusch put it like this: ‘The Kingdom of God is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven’.
And Richard Foster prays this prayer, which we might like to make our own:
‘May God give you – and me – the courage, the wisdom, the strength always to hold the Kingdom of God as the number one priority of our lives. To do so is to live in simplicity’. AMEN.
‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’; and let it begin with us. AMEN.
