"Within You and Among You"

Luke 17:20-37. 

I.

            Apparently, the Pharisees are still talking to Jesus.  They haven’t been totally alienated by their last encounter where Jesus basically accused them of being hopelessly mercenary in thinking they could serve God and still be affluent and even wealthy.

            They ask him about “when” the Kingdom of God is coming.  The “when” question almost always betrays a lack of trust in God.  For when people want to know “when” they are often trying to justify their own procrastination or delay in responding.  Focusing on the “when” is what we do when we don’t want to take up the challenge of discipleship now.  The longer we can delay God’s judgment, the longer we have to continue in our ways of greed, fear, anger, and violence.  Wondering about “when” always distracts us from following Jesus in the present moment.

            Jesus replies that it’s not about “when.”  It’s not about observing the signs or being a spectator or analyst of current events.  And it’s not about “where” either, as if we could travel to some other part of the world where the Kingdom was starting to happen.  As if we could objectively identify and evaluate it and finally certify that this really is it.

            No.  Jesus insists that the Kingdom of God is within and among people already.  He even says it is within and among “you,” the Pharisees who are asking him about it.  So it is not something out there to be observed as much as it is a quality within a person or a community that governs the way they perceive everything.  It has to do with whether we have the “ears to hear,” as Jesus says elsewhere.  It is an inner ability, a new and different way of thinking, which is what repentance literally means: having a new mind. 

            The Kingdom of God is in some sense already here – and it is apparent in Jesus’ work of healing, liberating, empowering, and including people.  But we can’t perceive it from outside.  We can only perceive it from within it, when we access the trust God has placed in every heart, but which only a few appear to be aware of.  Jesus himself becomes the catalyst for people to get in touch with what is already within and among them; in trusting him they trust in this inner Kingdom, and so become transformed and healed.

            We don’t locate the Kingdom of God by empirical experiments or by going on a quest to some far-off place.  We don’t find it in the data or in our memories or even in the Bible… until we have found it within us.  We don’t find it objectively at all.  It is not in what we see; rather, it is in how we see.

            The Kingdom of God is not some other time, some other when; neither is it some other place, some other where.  It is always here and now.  It is something we find within ourselves and among the gathered community.  And when we do find it within ourselves, then we begin to see it out there in different times and places.

II.

            Then Jesus turns and starts talking to his disciples.  “The days are coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it.”  In other words, the disciples, Jesus predicts, will lose their contact with their inner ability to see God’s Presence within and among them.  This will happen because of their experience of his suffering and death.  They will have witnessed his gruesome execution and he will be gone.   That fact will shake their trust and faith so profoundly that they will be tempted to go back to looking for outward signs and evidence. 

            People will say, “Whoever heard of a crucified Messiah?”  People will say, “What difference did Jesus make anyway, isn’t the world just as corrupt and violent now as it was before he came?”  People will say, “Why did God allow this?” – and by “this” they mean any evil, terrible, atrocity, any act of cruelty or injustice, any disease or natural disaster. 

            And the temptation for the disciples will be to try and defend God by looking for the silver linings, thinking positively, and lifting up the good things in the world.  And it will turn into a trivial and ultimately vain exercise, because as long as we’re collecting facts and data and evidence we are looking in the wrong place with the wrong mind. 

            “Do not set off in pursuit!” Jesus urges them.  Don’t get distracted.  Don’t go back to looking for God’s Presence out there in the when and the where, the times and the places, the history and the memories and the circumstances of the world.  Because in the world we tend to find a lot of unadulterated evil.  In the world we find self-serving lies, we find the abuses of the powerful, we find oppression and inequality, and the reign of death.

            And the way to God’s Kingdom is not to escape from all that, but to go through it.  That is the message of the cross.  Disciples of Jesus Christ do not run away from suffering because he did not run away from suffering.  Rather he went through it, accepting and receiving the fullness of the world’s evil, thereby defusing it, rendering it powerless and inert.  Christ defeated death by death.

            His Kingdom is not of this world, Jesus will tell Pilate, and it cannot be found fully realized by collecting evidence in this world… unless we have first received the ears to hear and the eyes to see, that is, unless we have cultivated our own interior trust and vision and perception.  That is, unless we have found within ourselves the faith in Jesus Christ that God has put there.

            Jesus says the Son of Man is like a flash of lightning cutting through the darkness of the world illuminating everything suddenly so that the darkness is banished and what is true and real is revealed.  The encounter with the living Lord Jesus, the Word of God, has this effect on us.  It illuminates the world disclosing its true nature.

III.

            Then Jesus goes on to depict in rather graphic terms how this works.  And I do not believe his tone is angry or vindictive here.  I think Jesus is positively brokenhearted about what he has to say.  God takes no pleasure in the death of anyone, Ezekiel tells us.  And anyone who gloats self-righteously about events like these simply doesn’t get it.

            For to be caught in the darkness, not to have discovered the light that God has placed within us, but to be caught in the rat-race so profoundly that we reject the light, that is the soul of tragedy.

            In the time of Noah, Jesus says, almost everyone was so consumed with the outward daily life, so obsessed with the where and the when, so dedicated to the pursuit of whatever pathetic goals their egos dictated, that they cut themselves off from their own possible future.  They rejected Noah as a crazy person building a pointless giant boat, and so rejected their own salvation.

            Jesus talks about the things we think are so important and to which we devote all our energy: eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, buying and selling, planting and building.  These are the items of busy-ness that distract us and drown out the truth in our hearts.  Our accomplishments, our careers, our families, our economic life… these are not unimportant.  In fact they are very important.  But we can become so consumed by them that we lose sight of what is of primary and ultimate importance. 

            For it may be that all this activity is only building a world so out of synch with the truth that eventually it collapses because it has no substance.  Eventually the creation snaps back into balance, and when that happens all the superstructure of human regimes of violence and injustice get swept away.  And that is what happened quite comprehensively in Noah’s flood.  And that’s what happened more locally in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

            And that is what has happened to every empire in history.  We can only sustain living and building and working in the illusion of our economic and political regimes for so long.  God’s truth always wins in the end.  Reality always triumphs.

            The coming of the Son of Man is always bad news for those who are benefiting and thriving and profiting from the current empire.  The book of Revelation describes all this in compelling detail.  Nature itself just shrugs off the products of human sinfulness, leaving it all in a smoking ruin.

IV.

            Jesus then continues, insisting that “those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.”  And he gives images of different people responding to this challenge, where some frantically grasp at the world dissolving around them, trying vainly to keep and hold some trinket or memento, and others willingly let it all go.  One person is taken into the whirlwind of death and destruction, and as the empire crumbles into dust they are consumed with it.  While another person is left behind to inherit the purified and restored earth.

            The disciples can’t contain themselves any longer, and they ask, “Where, Lord?”  That sounds to me like an expression of a lack of trust on their part.  They are admitting that they can’t see what Jesus is talking about.  I mean, he has just told them that the answer lies within, yet once again they are looking outside of themselves, asking “where?”  They want some kind of proof or verification.  The “where?” question is a challenge, even.    

            And Jesus responds to them somewhat enigmatically, “Where the corpse is, there the eagles will gather.”  (I know that some modern translations say “vultures,” because they are trying to make Jesus make sense to them; but the Greek says “eagles.”) 

            The corpse to which Jesus refers is his own.  He has just talked about his suffering and death; now he places before them  his own dead body, after his crucifixion.  That is the only answer to their, or our, “where?” questions.  It is the mystery of Jesus death, his giving up of his life for us, his willingly taking on this final, greatest power in human existence.  He is saying, “When you see my dead body, maybe that will shake you out of your blindness.” 

            Because, gathered around his dead body, are eagles.  One early church commentator identifies the eagles as the women who came to Jesus’ tomb.  Finding it empty, they began proclaiming the good news of his resurrection.  They have this realization that in Jesus’ death the possibility of transcendence and eternal life is opened up.  That is what eagles symbolize in the Scriptures.  Eagles and eagles’ wings have to do with the ascent, the rising up of the soul.  “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.  They shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

            The sign will be that where we expect to find corruption, death, odor, and decay, what we actually discover is life, renewal, transcendence, and resurrection.

V.

            The disciples probably didn’t get it at the time.  Maybe they thought, like Modern translators, that he must have meant vultures, even though that is a fairly nihilistic reading.  But they don’t ask him for a clarification.  They might not even have remembered this at all were it not for the fact that they later experience directly what Jesus is talking about.  His death at first shakes them.  But after three days they begin to realize his renewed, transformed, powerful Presence among them, and eventually, by the Spirit, within them.

            And it is that vision, that awakening to resurrection, when it occurs to them that Psalm 68 is being fulfilled, God is rising up, and God’s enemies are scattered, that opens them up to seeing and knowing their world in a new way.  This gives them clarity to perceive the truth all around them.  And it inspires them to go to all the world with the good news of God’s love… like eagles.

            The resurrection unlocks the Kingdom of God within them.  Now, instead of seeing all around them the kingdom of death, ruled by violence and cruelty, governed by injustice and theft, they see through all that.  They see that this is just the disturbances on the surface of the world.  The true world lies beneath, where God’s love is creating, and redeeming, and sustaining a world of peace, healing, and justice. 

            Because the Kingdom of God is within and among them, they start to see the Kingdom of God all around them too.

            Gandhi encouraged people to be the change they want to see in the world.  Jesus empowers those who trust in him to be the Kingdom he has placed in their hearts.  While the sin and death of this broken world is being swept away, Jesus would have us remain, holding tight to the truth of his Kingdom, his true, good, and beautiful order, which is the actual foundation of all that is.  He would have us live, by the power of his Spirit, in the reality of love expressed in everything God has made.

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