Wednesday of Ad Te Levavi – 6 December A✠D 2023
✠ Psalmody: Psalm 25:1-3a;25:4–5, 21–22;25:3-4;85:7
✠ Lection: James 5:7–10; St. Matthew 3:1–6
In the Name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! Don’t be scared. Don’t shrink back from this stern warning coupled with its awful, awesome reason. Remember that your King comes to you not to condemn you but to save you; not to break you or quench you like a bruised reed or a smoldering wick, but to lift you up from the darkness of this world; to satisfy your thirst in this wilderness; to give you life everlasting; to bring you into the kingdom of heaven.
What is this kingdom of heaven? It is a favorite term of St. Matthew throughout his Gospel, and it means the same thing as kingdom of God, yet for various reasons the evangelist chose to repeatedly write kingdom of heaven instead. Among those reasons is the pious, Jewish avoidance of constantly naming the Holy One in a set formula. Instead, St. Matthew uses the name of the place, heaven, from whence this good and gracious God sends forth His grace and from which He establishes His kingdom.
But what does kingdom mean? Being now billions of people scattered across a globe, a limited amount of space, for thousands of years, we have seen and heard of countless kingdoms coming and going. So, we most associate the term kingdom with an area, a place over which a king or ruler has dominion. Our states resemble such kingdoms, for Ohio, to a certain extent, can be considered the kingdom of our top elected official, Governor Mike Dewine. But cross the Ohio River into Kentucky or West Virginia, and you’ve left his kingdom for another.
So how are we to understand the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom belonging to God? Are not the whole universe and everything therein already His dominion? Indeed, and thankfully so, yet it is upon this part of the cosmos, in this little corner of creation, this little planet, that His most beloved part of it all rebelled and turned against Him and demanded that He leave us to the gods of our own making, thus, in effect, handing this place, and ourselves, over to the prince of the power of the air, the prince of darkness, our wily foe, Satan. In the transgression of our first parents, and in our daily proclivity toward and committal of innumerable sins, we have distanced ourselves from the kingdom of heaven. If it is by action that we have done this, then it is by action that the Lord undoes it. Thus, the kingdom of heaven is best understood not as a place, but as the action of God reigning in this wilderness that has alienated itself from Him.
So, St. John the Baptist says Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! It’s no longer far, far away. John beheld, he baptized, he proclaimed that that kingdom that we had pushed far off was at hand, that it was drawing near. This kingdom was drawing near by the actions being taken by the Almighty Himself and He was having the way before Him prepared on the banks of the Jordan where the Baptist cried out this Good News.
Non-coincidentally, John was standing in the Promised Land, a place in which the lost house of Israel no longer desired to have God or His promises. Even better, the prophet, yes more than a prophet, was proclaiming God’s coming at the very waters through which Israel had passed after being freed, after being loosed by God from their slavery in Egypt. John’s sermons were calls to those who walked in darkness to return to their first love, to the One Who promised that His children shall dwell in their own land, to the Loving One above Who first loved them when they were unworthy of it. Where John preached, where he baptized, was God showing that it would be by His own doing again to return them, to repent them to Himself through holy waters into the eternal Promised Land through the life, death, and resurrection of the Promised Seed of the woman, Jesus Christ our Lord.
The close proximity of Matthew three to chapter one, and especially chapter two, shows us that not only was their, and our, only hope in returning to God’s Promise through His means of grace, but that that hope is fulfilled Himself as the Promise fulfiller. In chapter one, we follow the blessed earthly genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham, the Son of God born of the Virgin Mary. We hear of Bethlehem, of the wise men from the East, of the flight into Egypt, and of the Holy Family’s return to Nazareth where the Son grew in wisdom and in stature. Then, to give us a strong tie to how the kingdom of heaven is at hand, St. Matthew begins the third chapter with the words In those days. In those days that were defined by the first Advent of Jesus, in those days that are the pivot of all of creation’s history past, present, and future, in those days when the far-distanced kingdom of God was at hand, drawing near, coming not to gain earthly territory with luscious beaches, bountiful mountains, or fertile valleys that were all already His, but to actively expand His kingdom into the foreign strongholds of men’s hearts. The people in Jerusalem, all Judea, and all the region around the Jordan had not only handed over the Holy Land to their own accuser and executioner, but had set him up in the temple of their hearts by rejecting the one true God.
Praise be to His most holy Name that He did not leave us to our own demise or devices, but instead came; came as that Babe, came as that Boy in the temple, came to be beheld as the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. That activity of God in the flesh, in our flesh, is the Kingdom of Heaven coming. That coming of the King in the flesh to be the One by Whom any are brought into life is the Kingdom of Heaven actively being spread regardless of territory.
O Bride of Christ, rejoice, because the reign of God, the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, is active in your hearts this very day and will continue to be until your King’s return. It is active by the means which the King established, first through His forerunner, then in His institution of the Sacrament of the Font. Jerusalem, all Judea, and all the region around the Jordan went out to John and were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins. The Kingdom of Heaven is active in the lives of all the baptized in your baptismal life that consists of repentance and confession of sins, for such is the kingdom of heaven at work within you, just as how all those people turned at John’s proclamation of the Word and went to hear more from God and confessed how they had not kept His holy commandments. They could not repent on their own. It was God working through His Word just as He does with you, to live in your baptism, to daily drown the Old Adam with all sins and evil desires, and to embrace the very One by Whom, through Whom, in Whom the kingdom of heaven came, comes, and is coming in its full measure on the Last Day when there will be no more dark corners; when there will be no more foreign lands; when there will be no more wars, no more tears; when there will be no other kingdoms than that of heaven’s; and, praise be to Jesus, when there will be no more sins to struggle against and be forgiven of. Until that day, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand in the new heart that Christ has created in you and in those places and times where that heart is kept with Him in the one true faith by how He feeds in the verdant pastures of His Word and in the Blessed Meal of Immortality. Jesus is the glorious kingdom of heaven at hand, no longer distant, but brought near to you, for you. Fear not, for this Kingdom is the One that will outlast all the others.
In ✠ Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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