Homily

The "Kingdom of God" is Not a Geographical Realm

Sunday, January 27, 2008, Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
Assumption Grotto Parish, Detroit

            One of the great perils of interpreting the message of the Gospel is to reduce it all to the so-called “social Gospel.” Yes, there is a message that the Lord reveals to us regarding the morality we must apply in our social, civil, economic and political lives, founded on the revelation which constitutes the Deposit of Faith, and this message is  important. But there is a distorted version of the living of the Gospel in society. This distorted vision puts aside what the Lord said, and substitutes God’s will for a secularist utopia: wherein the “Kingdom of God” is portrayed as a world where God is in fact irrelevant, a world “where peace, justice and respect for creation are the dominant values.” (1.) In this secularist utopia, we can’t have Catholicism as the center of Christ’s message, because it might be divisive; we can’t have Christianity as the center, for it too might be divisive, undermining the secularist utopia. Similarly, any particular religion, indeed, faith in God himself is seen as divisive, and thrown out.

            The agenda of the modern world is that: No Catholicism, no Christianity, no religion, no God. Just a worldly paradise, where we all hug one another and laugh all day, where everyone’s rights are respected and peace reigns.

            Yet under both intellectual analysis and concrete practice, the utopia cannot endure scrutiny, because how each person, how each religion defines peace or justice, or their implementation, how each society approaches the big questions, runs into endless differences of opinion and contradictory stances.

            What is this Kingdom of God? Is it the utopia on earth which the contemporary “left,” both in religion and in society, wishes to impose upon us? It cannot be, for it is a kingdom where there is no truth, no God, no morality, no doctrine, no revelation, only despair and death and slavery to the passions.

            Yet the Lord became man, and the Scripture says, “Jesus began to preach and say, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.’” He began to do so in an historic time and at a certain place. Zebulon was the last son of Jacob born of Leah, and Naphtali the last of his born of Bilhah (cf. 1 Kings 35:22-26), the tenth and sixth of his sons respectively. The geographical locations of these tribes were approximately Galilee, when the Lord began preaching. There and then he preached first of all two things: first, repentance; and second, the Kingdom.

            The word he uses in Greek is “basileia,” a word which in Greek points not to the inert thing which the word “Kingdom” represents, as the Pope correctly points out in his magnificent book, “Jesus of Nazareth” (which I hope you are all reading, discussing, and attending the Friday classes given by Fr. John Bustamante on this text!). The ending –eia in Greek makes a verb an abstract noun, stressing the action done. (2.) It’s not the thing of a kingdom, like a palace or an acreage with boundaries, but rather the specifically kingly way of acting of he who is a king. Let us call it not he “Kingdom” of God, but the “Lordship,” of God, or his “Dominion.” It’s not just the fact of his power, the location of his realm, but the governing of the world.

            The meaning then of all this is clear: when the first reading expresses such as (cf. Isaiah 9:1-3) “the people who walked in darkness… who dwelt in the land of gloom… the yoke burdened them,” the prophet is referring to the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve who were separated from God, the Light, by original sin; who were cast out of Eden; who were burdened with the Law of Moses, a preparatory law but powerless to offer hope in eternal life. He is referring to the slavery of sin.

            When the “Dominion of God is at hand” (Mt 4), that means the day of dominion to sin has come to an end. And for a free creature to pass from the kingdom of sin to the kingdom of God, the only logical possibility is that he must “repent.”

            Repentance is my first word to souls as a priest, but not my last. Yet there are very few souls who are really willing to lay down the yoke of sin. To repent, and to live in a way where God exercises his lordship in one’s life, means that the sinner will have to be obedient to God and mortify all his passions. Very many Catholics begin the spiritual life, but so few continue it. Many hope that God has not really noticed that they still love their pet sins. They think, “Perhaps if I just go to Mass on Sunday, well, that will be enough to become holy and get to heaven.” Yet they continue in habitual mortal sin, so common today, by skipping the occasional Mass on Sunday, by living together before marriage, by using contraception, by voting pro-abortion, by hiding their faith from their neighbor who needs it, by stealing a little here or there, or worst of all, by continually venting their anger or their pride of judgment. What exercises dominion over them is not the Holy Trinity, with the aid of the saints and angels. Rather, they are dominated by passions, by the devil, the flesh and the world. And so they fail to make those hard decisions which are absolutely necessary to make the first steps up the mountain of holiness.

            This is why the Lord says mysterious things about his Kingdom. “The kingdom of God is among you” (Mt 12:28), because it is sanctifying grace. He says “only men of violence take the kingdom by force” (Mt 11:12), because it requires the ascesis of virtue. The dominion of God is revealed in parables (cf. Mk 4:11) because of its interior nature. It belongs to the “poor” in spirit (Lk 6:20) because of detachment, and it is therefore hard, very hard, for the rich man to enter into it (cf. Mt 19:24), for the rich man governs himself and others with his treasure.

Yet God should govern us, so let us live our lives, public and private, in loving obedience to the redeemer, mortifying the works of the devil, the flesh and the world by repentance. Let us receive the sacraments with interior depth, let us practice the virtues, and let us be docile to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit particularly by detachment, recollected prayer and abundant self sacrifice. For which we ask the aid of the Queen of this Kingdom, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Amen.