Thursday in the 32nd Week of Ordinary Time, November 16, 2023

Luke 17, 20-25

Asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, Jesus said in reply, “The coming of the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’ For behold, the Kingdom of God is among you.”  Then he said to his disciples, “The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. There will be those who will say to you, ‘Look, there he is,’ or ‘Look, here he is.’ Do not go off, do not run in pursuit. For just as lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer greatly and be rejected by this generation.”

“Asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, etc.”  The Pharisees here seem to treat the Lord Jesus as one of themselves and ask a question to which they had theories but no answers.  They would welcome his thoughts on the subject.  Today we see this as ironic because the Lord was bringing about the Kingdom of God even as he spoke to them.  Perhaps they sensed this through his miracles and his authoritative teaching but they were looking for something else: the liberation of .israel from foreign occupation and the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Israel.  It would be interesting to speculate as to their own theories as to when this would occur.  Some may have thought that a certain number of years would pass between a certain event in the past and the coming of the Kingdom, or a certain number of generations .  For this reason St. Matthew begins his Gospel, the earliest written of the four and produced for the Jews by a Jew, with the Lord’s genealogy.  He thus proves through the number of generations from Abraham to Jesus that the Lord did come at the proper time.  Or, the Pharisees may have expected some blasphemous action by the Romans to cause the Messiah to rise up.  The Lord may have hinted at that when he spoke of “the abomination of desolation” (Matthew 24, 15) being brought into the Temple.  Centuries before, the Prophet Daniel had foreseen this, and many Jews interpreted the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem to the Greek god Zeus and the bringing of his statue into the Temple in 167 B.C. as the fulfillment of this prophecy.  Soon afterwards, the ultimately successful Maccabean revolt began.  

“The coming of the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, etc.”  Here the Lord teaches that the nature of the Kingdom is rather different than what they expect and what they have led the Jews to expect.  It would not be inaugurated by a revolt, or possess physical borders.  It would not be a kingdom like any other kingdom.  The reason they had not seen it approach was that they were looking for the wrong thing.  In fact, they were looking for too little.  

“Behold, the Kingdom of God is among you.”  The Greek here is not easy to translate.  The verse could be translated as “within you”, or, “inside of you”, following the primary meaning of the word.  But “you” is in the plural.  Is the Lord saying that the Kingdom is within each person?  This makes the Kingdom seem composed of individual kingdoms.  Alternatively, the Lord could mean, “among you”, but this is not the primary meaning of the Greek word and also implies that the Kingdom of God could be seen as a physical thing.  To return to St. Albert, whose feast day we celebrated yesterday, the power of the Kingdom of God is known by its grace and glory: here and now by its grace and in the future, principally at the time of the final judgment, by its glory.  In physical terms, the Kingdom is known through its saints and its blessed things as well as in its punishment of the wicked.  To be near the Lord Jesus, as were these Pharisees, meant to be near the Kingdom of God.  Today, to be near a saint means to be near the Kingdom.  We can also say this about the Sacraments.  Of course, we can be near the Lord Jesus through prayer and in the imitation of his life and this brings us close to the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom, then, is both “among” us and “within” us.

“The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it.”  The Pharisees will yearn and pine for a kingdom that will never come and miss entirely the one that has come. “ ‘Look, there he is,’ or ‘Look, here he is.’ ”  The Lord now speaks of his future coming in glory.  They did not look for the Messiah whom the Father sent.  They ignored his miracles.  But they will not miss his second coming when he will judge the good and the wicked.  They will not need to look and go to it for it will come to them, in an instant: “For just as lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day.”  

“But first he must suffer greatly and be rejected by this generation.”  The Lord returns to the subject of his first coming.  He links what will happen to him with the fact that the Pharisees are looking in an erroneous way for the Kingdom, as if to say: I do not bring the kingdom you want and so you will kill me.  Now, the Pharisees miss their chance here.  They have heard the Lord speak of himself as the Son of Man, a messianic title.  But they do not ask him, If you are the Son of Man, how will you be rejected?  Why will you suffer?  But they do not.  We humans fail to learn the things we need to know by failing to ask questions, even the most obvious.  The Pharisees do not ask themselves if they could be wrong about their interpretation of the Scriptures even though Jesus challenges them to do so.  They would rather have the present comfort of ignorance than the future glory of eternal life.

But let the Kingdom of God shine through our faith in our words and deeds so that all whom we encounter may seek enrollment in the Kingdom of God.