2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10 Ps.48
2 Cor.12:1-10 Mark 6:1-13
Many of the people of Nazareth said to Jesus and about him, "We've read about David the Messiah, and Jesus, you are no David. You're only Joe and Mary's boy whom we grew up with. You became a wonder worker and a traveling preacher but you're just Joe and Mary's boy to us. Why do you let so many people idolize you?"
To read the Bible is to appreciate the great gap between the actual and the ideal, the way life is and the utopia that we would like it to be.
To read the Bible is to appreciate the gap between sinful us and the ideal people that we wish we could be for our own benefit and for the benefit of the entire world.
Why is this gap between the actual and ideal even an issue? Why can't we just be brute fact realists unburdened by the illusions of the ideal. Why take the utopian opiates of the people to live in denial about the dreadful material conditions of inequity among the people of any society?
The incredible horrifying cruelty of countless events of human history has not been able to surgically remove Hope from the human psyche. If we did not have indelible hope, we could resign ourselves more easily to inequities and the seeming random distributions of the kinds of weal and woes in the field of probabilities, of what may happen to anyone at any time or any place.
What is the relationship of hope to the actual? What is the relationship of what happens to the utopia of what we would like to happen in ideal situations? What is actual provides the visionary possibilities for what we hope for. How so? Situations and people have been good enough to inform us about what is good, and what is better, and what might be best. Situations and people have been good and favorable enough even when they co-exist with bad and horrible conditions and people acting their very worst. The actual good becomes the visionary inspiration for what might be better.
The genre of the hero happens within human community. The ideal or utopian person tales are generated because of people who have been legendary or specifically impactful in their lives.
For people of the Hebrew Scriptures, King David was one such actual person on whom a future ideal person could be modeled. David was not without his faults, even some serious faults, some faults which would get him imprisoned in our modern notions of lawful behaviors. But David was impactful enough in his long reign in Israel, and his reign in comparison with the many other forgettable kings in their history, meant that he was the model for the future anointed or messiah which Israel hoped for and needed. This hope for a perfect and ideal person was the analgesic which they applied to their pain of having to experience so many long years of oppression and exile.
During the time of Jesus, Israel was an occupied land and the hope for an ideal utopian person based upon the Davidic ideal prevailed. Such hope with visualization is part of the continuing comfort of knowing things could always be better for us and certainly for those who suffer the most. The Psalms, like the appointed one for today, are also about God having a special presence in Zion, the city of the great king. There was a hope that somehow hope's plans could be articulated through Jerusalem and the city of the great king.
What happens when the hope of a liberating king and kingdom does not seem possibly or likely? By the time that Jesus appeared in Palestine, the actual kingdom of the world was the Roman Empire, and it did not appear to be leaving anytime soon. The record surrounding Jesus gave no indication that his message of the kingdom of God had anything to do with the likes of the kingdom of the Caesars, or even a kingdom like the one presided over by king David.
Also by the time that Gospel were written, the Temple had been destroyed, and Palestine had been evacuated. How could the city of the great King with God's special presence in Zion be the place of dissemination of any kingdom at all?
What happened within the followers of Jesus was mystical experience which altered their entire perspective. They attributed this altered perspective to the life, ministry, and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and to the experience of be baptized by the Holy Spirit.
How could there be a historical kingdom of God when in fact the kingdom or realm of God was always, already from the beginning of creation? To believe that the kingdom of God had to be an earthly political reality was to deny the obvious realm of God everywhere, as the realm in which we live, move, and have our being. The realm of God did not have to come into existence; rather people had to accepts its omnipresent reality. This was the stealth realm of God and Jesus taught in figures of speech and in parables to confuse literal thinking to provoke another kind of perception.
In St. Paul, we have the movement from the one Temple in Jerusalem as the singular special presence of God in the world, to an understanding that the human body, starting with the body of Jesus was God's temple and dwelling place.
St. Paul came to accept his body as the place where he met God in glorious ecstasy of seeming out of the body experiences, but also in the full continuum of human experiences which could happen to him. The understanding of the realm of God became spiritually generalized in accepting omnipresence but in particular accepting the interior of the human body as the special meeting place of realization of oneness with God in this great Divine Realm.
One of stumbling blocks of understanding the Realm of God as being the truth of creation, and understanding the body of Jesus as being the intensely present divine, is that the divine can seem to be too ordinary to be believed. Jesus was just Joe and Mary's boy who lived next door; how can he be God's specialized presence? If Jesus was a general with liberating armies for Nazareth and Palestine, then perhaps he might have been better regarded by his fellow townspeople, who were limited to having but literal external notions of having a king within a kingdom.
Jesus did not come to impose a kingdom upon this world; he came to proclaim that God's kingdom already was and the secret was coming to accept it and to accept oneself as the place where God would be made known.
So, the strategy Jesus was to send his disciples who had realized the kingdom of God to go forth and to teach and instruct people how to realize the realm of God within their own lives.
Today, people still miss Jesus, and the obviousness of the realm of God, and people still miss their own interior lives as the telling meeting place with God.
You and I are sent to spread the Gospel of the realm of God, that we live and move and have our being in God, and God can and does get inside us to meet us with love, peace, joy, and hope. And in the events our our continuous inner meeting with God we are commissioned to help others realize the same in their lives.
Let us not miss the obviousness of the Christ, who is all and in all, in our lives today. And let us not wrongly think that we can replace the always, already, realm of God with some American Christian National government. Let us awaken to the obviousness of God, God's Realm, and the meeting place with the divine within each of us. Amen.
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