Ezekiel 31:10-31
Psalm 23
1 Corinthians 15:20-28
Matthew 25:31-46

Blessed of My Father,
Inherit the Kingdom

I did not realize it until I visited there that the Holy Land is about Kingship and its celestial near-relation, Godship. Please pardon my pairing these two things, but by the first century the Roman emperor claimed the title divus, or "god" for himself. The soaring temple built at Caesarea Maritima, in honor of the Roman Emperor, was intended to be seen from far out at sea. The imperial intention was obvious: in a world where ships constituted the only effective international travel, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean would been seen as the gateway to Asia, suggesting a Roman mastery of the world. Monuments to kings or to pagan gods are scattered throughout the Holy Land — at the headwaters of the Jordan, at the Decapolis, which is the Ten Cities, and throughout the crossroads of the ancient world, where major trade routes to Europe, Asia, and Africa intersected.

It would be here, at this center-of-the-world, where God would enter history as a man. And He would be addressed more than 700 times in the New Testament as κυριοσ (kyrios), which means Lord. But because kyrios was used as the Greek translation for the Hebrew Adonai, the word used to address God, kyrios means much more than Lord or Master or even King. Appearing nearly 7,000 times in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the LXX (which the Disciples and St. Paul used as their Bible), the term kyrios — God, King of the Universe — would be etched deeply in their hearts and imaginations. For in a culture that had stopped using YHWH three hundred years earlier out of respect, kyrios becomes, in practical terms, the name of God. Yes, Pilate asked Jesus if He referred to Himself as being a king. The truth is, everyone did. What is more, three kings gathered at His birth, and three kings met at the point of His death: Herod, Pilate (viceroy to Caesar), and the King of the Universe.

Did you know that the phrase "the Kingdom of Heaven" does not appear once in the Bible of Jesus' time? Yet, He spoke daily of it, which must have captivated the minds of those who heard it. The Kingdom of Heaven. What a phrase! I wonder if we can still hear it obscured by the clutter of culture and faded by overuse. The Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus speaks also of the Kingdom of God, which also was unheard of except for one, lone mention, in the Book of Wisdom (10:10), which, after all, is about Him, Who is the Eternal Word of Creation and the pre-existent Son of God.

What is this Kingdom? Where is it? Who are its subjects? What are they like? Could they be connected to us somehow? To learn about this Kingdom, we must listen very closely when the nearly silent Jesus confides its details to the Roman Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate: "My kingship is not of this world," He says (Jn 18:36). Not of this world. Hearing this, we might think otherworldly or supernatural. We might have the image of a land far, far away: "There, but not here." But that is not what Jesus says. Let us listen again: "Not of this world." He does not say that it is someplace else, only that it is not constituted of the things of this world. Like John the Baptist or the Desert Fathers or the many thousands of saints, the Kingdom of Heaven is understood to be set apart from this world. And suddenly it makes sense that a great king or emperor or, yes, God, might roam about this Holy Land of kingship dressed as a beggar. No Praetorian Guard surrounding Him, nor brass trumpets announcing His near arrival. No troupe of men carrying Him about in a gold sedan chair with courtiers following adorned in gold and purple. His kingship is not of this world. And His most faithful disciples, such as Saint Francis, the little poor man in rags, would emulate Him and also have nowhere to lay their heads .... in this world.

After all, did King Jesus not say in a prayer to the Father, "I am not praying for the world but for those whom Thou hast given me, for they are Thine" (Jn 17:9). He will pray only for the ones that belong to the Father in this world. Who, then, does the world belong to .... and those who belong to the world? Jesus' closest disciple, John, is very clear on this subject: "We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one" (Jn 5:19). Likewise, Saint Paul raises this subject repeatedly, here in his Letter to the Church at Ephesus, in which he describes those who follow "the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience" (Eph 2:2). The Early Church took this to be a commonplace: there are two kingdoms. One is the kingdom of rebellion against God, "the sons of disobedience," whose sovereign Jesus calls the Murderer — for he drags souls off to eternal life which is an eternal death — and the Liar — for God alone is One, but the Deuce, as we now call him, is Double, the Deceiver, "the father of lies," (Jn 8:44). The second kingdom, however, is not of this world. It is a fellowship of lives, both living and no-longer-living-on-earth, which is apart from the world, whose daily life and atmosphere are Heaven. The opening sentence of the Teachings of the Apostles, the Didache, begins on this subject: "Two ways there are: life and death."

But if the Kingdom of Heaven is here and now, then how does one enter this Kingdom? Let us go back to basics. Heaven is not a time, for it is an eternal now. It is not a place, for it is everywhere. It is "a way," the Apostles teach. In fact, Christianity's earliest name was "The Way." It is, therefore, a state of being. Yet, that phrase is beggared by Heaven's splendor, its expansive beauty, and its incommensurable nature. Heaven is everything that everything was made to be in its goodness and perfection. Saint Paul uses this phrase in our readings this morning: "When God will be everything to everyone." Wonderful! — have you ever said to someone, "You are everything to me?" Heaven is the Creation but without the corruption of the world, without the poison of culture, and without the "spirit .... now at work in the sons of disobedience." In that pure state, the Kingdom of Heaven is that greatest beatitude, the company and friendship of God. It is the Kingdom of God.

From Saint John to Saint Paul then through Origen and on through the Fathers so indebted to them, we learn that Heaven is what we already are in our inmost being, like the purest gold cleansed of less noble elements that have hidden its lustre. Perhaps this is the "treasure buried in a field" that Jesus talks about, for which we must sell everything to obtain. That is, we must strip away all our worldly goods, our worldliness, in order to make it our own. And we do this instantly because we recognize that this treasure is everything about ourselves to be most treasured ... which we had lost, but now, mysteriously, have been permitted to regain.

Some years ago, I met the girl who was my first love, with whom I could talk for hours without noticing that any time had passed. We would hold hands, and that was the most fulfilling act of love in the world to us, walking in wide circles in the parking behind her parents' general store in rural Colts Neck, NJ. Many years later, she said, "We were in a garden ... of a love so pure. How could we have known that we were standing on a precipice? That we were about to leave that garden forever, to lose that goodness and purity, never to regain it?" And then she said something I will never forget: "I do not know any man or woman who would not give everything in order to enter that place again .... even for a short time."

Some years ago, returning to the U.S. from Haiti, and visiting my bishop at that time, I told him, "I learned a very deep lesson in Haiti. You know, from the time of my ordination as a priest, I have been troubled by a truth that has weighed heavily upon me: could I really, honestly say that I loved God with all of my heart, with all of my soul, with all of my mind, and with all of my strength? Can any priest or bishop say this? I am not talking about the idea of loving God or striving to love Him, but of loving Him, in fact, with such an overwhelming love that I have no eyes for this world, not even for a moment, with a towering love that completely fills and dominates my life every second. Who can say truly this? But in Haiti, God broke my heart. He split the thick callous that covered its once tender, pink flesh, and I had never noticed. He broke me open, and then He stretched me with a love so great that I did not think I could endure it. And then He stretched me beyond that. And He filled me with His love, a love I could not conceive of until then." Abp. Fulton J. Sheen wrote that "Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them." Surely, God had broken mine.

As a hospital chaplain several years earlier, I saw how severe illness can make the heart tender, how quickly tears would come to the gruffest and toughest of men. As a university chaplain who worked with students ministering to the homeless, I knew how the streets could strip away all reserve and indifference, which comes naturally to comfortable people, and how grateful a homeless man could be simply by looking into his eyes and addressing him by his own name. That is, I learned by living in society's most extreme places that if you strip away all the accretions and encrustations of this world, what you will find in every human being is love, for in the end it is the only thing that matters.

Do you know what these people have in common: the tough, self-assured man whose body has been so subtracted by illness that his soul is magnified; the once secure and comfortable man who has lost all his worldly possessions and now lives on the streets; the well-intentioned priest whose heart has been broken and his life turned upside down who now loves God truly with all his heart, mind, and soul? All of these people have had everything stripped away to expose the breathing, beating heart of love, no longer hidden or calloused-over, but tender flesh and pure. They are the naked and the lonely and the ailing and the dying. What of the two youngsters sharing a first love so great that they would sacrifice anything for it, even their lives? They need have nothing stripped away: they are the purity of love ... in its innocent and first, brilliant bloom. And their hearts are tender for the afflicted and the poor. All of these stand at the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven, for they share the urgency of human essence which is love, even the love of God — a love so great that you would lay down your own life for it. This is the love that Jesus took to the Cross. The King of Love their Shepherd is, and He has anointed them. Their cup overflows.

As we prepare for the coming of His birth at Christmas, let us recall what three kings told a mother of poverty at the point of our Savior's birth at least, as one man imagined it (Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors):