Jan 23: The Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Anonymous Anglo-Saxon: Christ Teaching
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, c. 1000

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel: Mt 4:12-17

From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Mt 4:17, fn. b).”

Father, our first conscious experience of you as God for us, your people, was as you called us out of slavery in Egypt and we met you in a mountain storm in the desert. We were only a small, ragtag band, hardly worthy of notice, it would have seemed, but our encounter with you as we came out of Egypt has changed the history of humanity. We were the first to recognize you as a God who cared for us as his people, who challenged us to love you and one another, and who called us to a future.

We did our best, Lord, to make sense out of everything that you revealed to us. We hammered out a code of laws which expressed as well as we could how you were calling us to live. Coming out of a land of slavery, we could only conceive of the future to which you called us as freedom in a land of our own, a land of promise. But somehow that future never materialized. We were never really free from our own sinfulness and, once in the land, we were constantly overrun and oppressed by others.

When Jesus came preaching the message of the coming kingdom, we could only imagine that the promise was finally to be realized. But, before it could happen, he was taken from us, by a terrible passion and death.

But then something marvelous happened, Father, more wonderful than our deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Jesus, seemingly dead, appeared to those among us, from the world to come. Opening our minds to you, the risen Lord spoke that one Word which you speak from the beginning to everyone, but which now we grasped with greater clarity.

The destiny to which we are called, not only those of who came out of Egypt, but all peoples, is not a kingdom here below at all. It is an eternal, otherworldly kingdom: sharing your divine life, Father, with Jesus forever and ever. It is a kingdom of the future but one which is now bursting into the world here and now, a kingdom in which all of us can share merely by accepting the gift of divine life which you offer to all, a gift offered over and over at every moment to everyone who says “yes.”

Father, help us to be ever open to a greater understanding of who you are and your promise to us. Help us, through Jesus, your Word made flesh, to grow constantly in the life of your Spirit, now and into eternity.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.