A sermon preached by The Reverend Sarah Grondin at St. Jude’s Church, Oakville. Wednesday, September 4, 2024.
I speak to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
September is here, and school has started back up for another year. Teachers will spend the next couple of weeks sweeping away all the cobwebs that’ve built up in their student’s minds during summer vacation, while parents everywhere cringe at the thought of having to pack lunches again for the next 10 months.
So, in honour of the first day of school today, I’ve got a riddle for you… what’s simultaneously past, present, and future… but needs no conjugating and keeps no hours?
The answer is contained within today’s Gospel reading from Luke, but I admit it’s not really spelled out there. We’ll come back to that in a moment… so if you want to know the answer, you’ll just have to keep listening.
The passage that we heard today is broken into two parts—
The first is Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law on the Sabbath from a high fever, and once sundown arrived and the Sabbath was over, the crowds brought all kinds of people who were suffering from diseases and demons to be healed by Jesus. He healed Simon’s Mother-in-law by word alone, but we’re told that he “laid hands” on all of the other people that were brought to him, and they were cured.
Hands-on-healing was not a common practice at this point… there’s no mention of it in rabbinical literature or in the Old Testament. This method of healing that Jesus used was radically new, and it was symbolic both of the out pouring of divine power, as well as a demonstration of the tenderness of Jesus.
Every single person that was brought before Jesus that evening felt the loving touch of the Master’s hand.
The second part of our passage sees Jesus sneaking out of the house very early in the morning, to try and find some quiet time for prayer away from the others. After a very busy day and night of healing people and meeting the crowd’s demands, Jesus needed to spend some time with his Father in prayer.
We see this pattern occur over and over in the Gospels. Jesus is active in healing and teaching, he retreats for some solitude, and his quiet time is interrupted by the next pressing thing on the agenda.
Jesus is surrounded by throngs of people everywhere he goes, and all of them want his time, attention, and energy. But we never see Jesus tell anyone, “I’m sorry, I’m too tired today, please come back tomorrow.”
I think the reason that Jesus is able to do this is twofold: the first is that he is intentional in seeking out quiet and rest to recharge. He knows that the people need him, but he also knows that in order to meet the demands of the crowds, he first must spend time with God.
The second reason is that Jesus doesn’t rely on others to give him space, because he knows that the people don’t understand his need to be alone with God, so he sets those boundaries himself. He doesn’t wait for the people to go away in order to have a rest, he purposefully seeks it out… even when that means sneaking out at daybreak while everyone else is still asleep like in today’s reading.
But the crowds were relentless and they searched until they found him, and they didn’t want him to leave. And in response Jesus tells them: ‘I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose.”
The crowds don’t really understand who Jesus is, or why he’s there… they just know that he can perform miracles, and that he has some radical things to say which they don’t quite comprehend… but they can tell there’s something different about him, and they don’t want him to go.
The thing that I really want to draw your attention to in today’s reading though, is the answer to the riddle I asked you at the beginning: “what’s simultaneously past, present, and future… but needs no conjugating and keeps no hours?”
The answer is the Kingdom of God. Today’s passage marks the first time in Luke’s gospel that Jesus mentions the Kingdom of God. But what did he mean by that? He doesn’t offer any explanation in this passage, and his audience was surely confused when he said it.
It seems like that would be an important thing to define for those listening, lest they confuse what that means as much as they had misunderstand what the role of the Messiah was. As Luke’s gospel unfolds we learn that for Jesus the Kingdom of God is three things at once… it’s past, present, and future. So let’s unpack that a little bit.
The kingdom is past: In Luke chapter 13, Jesus tells a crowd of people that they must enter through the narrow door, and that when they see the Kingdom of God, they will find Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as the prophets already there. They lived centuries ago, but they’re part of the Kingdom.
The Kingdom is present: In Luke 17 Jesus is asked by the Pharisees about the coming of the Kingdom of God, and Jesus tells them that the Kingdom of God is within them. He’s trying to explain that the Kingdom will not suddenly arrive with things that can be observed, with neon signs and flashing lights. The Kingdom is already present within them, and Jesus is trying to encourage them to let that kingdom love out in the here and now.
The Kingdom is future: In Luke 22:15 Jesus is joined by his disciples for the last meal they will share together before his crucifixion. During this meal Jesus says, “‘I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’
The Kingdom is future, it’s something which God was still to give, and which must be prayed for and sought after. The consummation of the whole word was still to come, and Jesus wanted his disciples to be alert and ready for when the time came.
The Kingdom is past, present, and future. But how can it be all of those things at once? To help understand that we can look at the Lord’s Prayer. There are two petitions in it side by side: “Your Kingdom come”, and “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” One of the things that we learn from the writers of the Psalms is that in the Hebrew language things are often repeated twice, with the intention of the second time developing or amplifying the first. That’s the case here in the Lord’s Prayer.
So if you put those two phrases together, “Your Kingdom Come,” and “your will be done on earth as in heaven,” you end up with the second explaining the first… so what it’s saying is something like: “the Kingdom of God is a society on earth where God’s will is as perfectly done as it is in heaven.”
If anyone in the past has done God’s will, that person is in the Kingdom; if anyone does that will now, they are in the Kingdom; but the day when everyone will do the will of God is still far off and distant, so the consummation of the world is still to come. The Kingdom is past, present, and future.
Doing the will of God isn’t always easy though, is it? Perhaps you’ve heard this prayer before,
“Dear God, So far today, I've done all right. I haven't gossiped, and I haven't lost my temper. I haven't been grumpy, nasty or selfish, and I'm really glad of that! But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to get out of bed, and from then on, I'm probably going to need a lot more help”
Sometimes we obey, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we don’t because we just don’t want to, and sometimes we don’t because we can’t seem to make ourselves choose the good even though we know we should.
Only Jesus always did God’s will perfectly. That’s why he’s the foundation and incarnation of the Kingdom. He came to make it possible for us to do the same… to follow God’s will, so that we can become citizens of the Kingdom of God too.
So in light of today’s Gospel, and Jesus’ insistence to the crowds that he was sent to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom to all people, and the Hebrew linguistic tool of the next line emphasizing the one before, I’d like to leave you with this short prayer this morning:
Lord, let your will be done, and let it begin with me… Lord, let your peace fill the earth, and let it begin with me… Lord, bring about your Kingdom on earth, and let it begin with me.” Amen.