What is the Kingdom of God? Gerald Darring, a retired high school and college teacher of theology, explains it this way: “The Kingdom of God is a space. It exists in every home where parents and children love each other. It exists in every region and country that cares for its weak and vulnerable. It exists in every parish that reaches out to the needy.

The Kingdom of God is a time. It happens whenever someone feeds a hungry person, or shelters a homeless person, or shows care to a neglected person. It happens whenever we overturn an unjust law, or correct an injustice, or avert a war. It happens whenever people join in the struggle to overcome poverty, to erase ignorance, to pass on the faith.

The Kingdom of God is in the past (in the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth); it is in the present (in the work of the Church and in the efforts of many others to create a world of goodness and justice); it is in the future (reaching its completion in the age to come).

The Kingdom of God is a condition. Its symptoms are love, justice, and peace.”

The Kingdom of God, God’s Reign in the world, is Jesus’ central and urgent message. In proclaiming the Kingdom, Jesus announces that a new age has come and that the Reign of God is near – underway, but not yet complete. Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom was so counter-cultural to those who heard him and witnessed his works that he was put to death on a cross.

Jesus’ Kingship is a reversal of the Kingship of empire building. Instead of striving for power, prestige and privilege, Jesus seeks out ‘excluded’ or ‘forgotten’ people – for example, the leper, the adulteress, the sinner, the blind, the lame, and the Samaritan; people who were oppressed, put down, voiceless and seen to be worthless in the dominant culture of power, control and position. Jesus turns the lives of these ‘little ones’ around, loves them into life, and sets them on new paths of living, loving and relating.

In our time, who are the ‘excluded’ and ‘forgotten’, the demonised and condemned, the oppressed and abandoned, whom we are called to love into life? Called to love into life with love that affirms their dignity, love that breaks down the barriers of discrimination, love that heals and comforts, and love that is practical and hands on.

This week’s Mass Preface describes Christ’s Kingdom as one of “truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace.” Such a Kingdom is not some ‘pie in the sky’ ideal or utopian dream.

The Kingdom is a reality which may have small beginnings but has the potential to change the world and the way we live. And each of us has a role to play to bring about this reality wherever and with whom we find ourselves.

David J Hore CSsR

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