Kingdom of the Damned

Propers: The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 17), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A rising Western power, technologically and militarily superior, yet concerned with the economic and security impacts of instability in the Middle East, decides to invade. It’s pretty much a cakewalk; they sweep all the lesser armies before them. And then they elect to try their hand at nation building. They want to remake the region in their own enlightened image—bring a little West to the East.

And so they build cities. And so they pave roads. And so they attempt to civilize the barbarians, to cure them of their backward, savage ways, through education and of course judiciously applied hyperviolence. But it doesn’t sit well. Eventually, the natives grow restless. One can only tolerate foreign occupation for so long, before one starts to look for a hero, a savior.

The bloodshed began over the usual things: cultural clashes, religious differences, taxation. It started with protests and ethnic thuggery but before you knew it, the whole region was in open revolt. So the military had to send a surge. This was the situation in Roman Judea immediately following the time of Jesus Christ. Jesus died at the hands of Roman Legionaries for the crime of rebellion, for claiming to be a King when Judea had no king but Caesar.

The Crucifixion occurred around AD 33. By AD 66—less than 40 years later, less than one biblical generation—the First Romano-Jewish War, sometimes called the Great Revolt, was in full swing. It was about everything, but mostly about the fact that Romans walked where Romans were not wanted. They thought that everything under their boots was Rome.

Judea disagreed. They were used to outlasting foreign invasions. They’d done it for centuries, and they had very long memories. The Middle East perpetually produces this volatile mix of fanatic drive and depthless patience. Once called to action, they cannot wait to start, and simply will not stop. And this has proven to be the bane of Western societies, which bore and tire easily.

So how did it go? Remarkably well, at first. Judean forces surprised the Syrian Legion and managed to slaughter 6000 Romans, a fantastic upset for some backwater desert. Surely, they thought, this showed that God was on their side. But the Italians make an art of vendetta, and soon a new general with four Legions, brutally crushed the Zealots and Sicarii, the leaders of the revolt. Jerusalem fell. The sacred Temple burned. The Judeans were scattered to the winds.

Jesus had warned us of all of this, mind you, that not one stone would be left upon another. And as for that general, Vespasian, he had heard the prophecies of the Christ, and had now the gall to claim them for himself. He marched back to Rome and made himself Emperor, burning the great temple there as well, filled as it was with his enemies. And he said, “Behold, I am the one prophesied. I am the savior from Judea. I am your christ.”

That was the first Great Revolt, the First Jewish War. There were others, one led by a man named Bar Kochba, “Son of the Star,” because of course the Messiah was supposed to have been heralded by a miraculous star. His revolt ended in a place called the Cave of Horrors, so you can gather how that went. The Judeans rose up, time and again, in Yahweh’s name, and were crushed, time and again, in the name of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

I tell you all this because it is vital for us to understand what sort of kingdom people expected God to bring. They expected war. They expected armies. They expected a soldier-messiah descending from Heaven to put all of their enemies to death. That’s the kingdom they wanted, the kingdom they fought for, the kingdom that all of us tend to desire: fire and brimstone and armies of angels and Christ on a horse with a sword. Because kings are killers. And the greatest king by right should be the greatest killer of all.

So imagine then, under Roman occupation, under the threat of a well-sharpened sword, Jesus proclaims out in public: “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. The Kingdom of God is like a bit of old, sour dough.” What? What on earth is He talking about? How exactly are we to take that? Confusion must have been the initial reaction. Puzzlement, followed by amusement, since humor is predicated upon the unexpected.

A mustard seed is indeed a tiny little thing, some 75 thousandths of an inch. Yet it grows wildly, does it not? It spreads in an unruly manner, hard to contain, hard to tame. Left unchecked it can form a shrub some 15 feet high, a veritable tree. Due to this invasiveness, rabbinical teaching at the time of Jesus gave mustard an unclean status. It refused to stay in its lane. So it may seem silly, it may seem unthreatening, but there’s something subversive here. It has teeth. Kingdoms in the Bible are often compared to trees. Jesus’ Kingdom undermines them.

Similarly the parable of leaven. No-one in the first century was buying packets of yeast at the store. They didn’t know what yeast was. They just knew that if you took a pinch of dough and let it go bad, let it get sour, then that little nubbin of defilement could bring life to a whole batch of dough, or a great vat of beer. Again, the Kingdom is something tiny and unclean, unnoticed, undesirable, that nevertheless changes everything around it, brings life to everything around it.

It isn’t just about big things having small beginnings. It’s about the inversion of values, how the weak overcome the strong, the humble outgrow the prideful. It is active and powerful yet utterly nonviolent, and therefore cannot be combatted, cannot be contained.

Jesus then goes on in private to teach His disciples that the Kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in a field, like a pearl of great price, like a net catching all in the sea. And the typical interpretation of these latter parables is that you’ve got to give your all. The Kingdom is worth sacrificing everything else, because the Kingdom is everything and more. These are the Apostles, after all. They will be called to lay down their lives to spread the Gospel abroad.

Yet I think there’s more to it than that. Just as the former parables cannot be summed up as “big things start small,” neither can these latter parables be reduced to the admonition that we have to give all that we have unto the Lord. For indeed, all of these images—the soil, an oyster, the sea—are all commonly used to represent the grave. They each allude to death: buried in a field, contained within a stone, caught beneath the waters.

They allude to death and resurrection. And here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s just or only Jesus’ Resurrection. Why did Jesus die? So that death would be conquered by death. So that Christ would be Lord not only of the living, not only of earth and the heavens, but even the Lord of the dead, the liberating King of the damned.

In the Eastern Church, the icon of the Resurrection is not an image of Jesus emerging from the Sepulcher upon that Easter morning, but of Christ triumphant in hell, reaching down into the earth, and pulling up from the grave Adam and Eve, the parents and type of us all. He is raising up humanity to life.

We are the treasure hidden in the field, my brothers and my sisters. We are the pearl entombed within the shell. We are the catch dragged up and out from Davey Jones. We are the Kingdom of God. We are the ones He has claimed. And He has given up everything for us. Jesus sells all that He has, all that He is, and purchases us for all that we are, all that we have. And He rejoices to do so.

This is not a kingdom of death. This is not a kingdom of war. This is not a kingdom like any we’ve seen in the length and the breadth of the world. This is the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Jesus Christ our Lord. And it is small and unexpected. It’s unclean and ignored by the world. Yet in its very weakness, it infiltrates, it infects, it brings life to the death that surrounds us.

God gives His all—His Son, His very self—to raise us from death unto life. And not just us, but our neighbors, our enemies, the whole of this fallen Creation. And no sword can cleave that. And no fire can burn that. And no grave can claim that. We have been bought with a price, the Blood of Jesus Christ, even we who murdered Him. And this will be our life, our love, our joy, throughout eternity and beyond.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

 

 

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