If you sit in church long enough you will hear it read that Jesus brings a kingdom, or rather, the capital ‘K’ Kingdom—the Kingdom that never comes to an end, unlike all the others that have appeared in history. He’s relentlessly talking about it in the gospels.

Even the capital ‘P’ Prayer he taught his disciples (the ‘Our Father’) is above all concerned with the Kingdom’s arrival or accomplishment. This Kingdom defines His mission. Since we share his mission, we share too his Kingdom.

As members of the Church, we are his chosen collaborators. But why God would choose people like you and me, flawed human beings, people like St Peter (who denied him when things got dicey), and like St Paul (a violent persecutor of his followers), and so on, to accomplish his most important purpose with his creation? The old quip about Jesus being either a lunatic, or a liar, or the lord he claims to be is appropriate here. It’s one of the three.

Sometimes he can appear to be a liar (when, for example, you feel abandoned in a time of profound suffering) and sometimes he could appear to be a lunatic (when, for example, the people who bear his authority seem to fall very short of their calling). So, at the very least, his lordship and the kind of kingdom he is accomplishing both require some adjustments in our outlook to perceive their wonders.

The good thing is that he clearly anticipated this need of ours for adjustment. His teachings gathered in the gospels are full of precisely such adjustments. You could even call his parables ‘outlook adjustment training’ for his Kingdom collaborators. One of these is his comment on the poor widow’s offering to the temple treasury. The widow gives out of her poverty, two small coins, worth next to nothing in monetary value. The fact that she gave “all she had to live on, everything she had” means that she had just about nothing and gave just about nothing.

And yet, she gave “more than all the others” who were putting in large sums. Jesus’ Kingdom is radically different, upside-down you could say, compared to the kingdoms of this world. Amid our kingdoms, our ways of power, authority, greatness, wealth, and so on, the poor widow gave a negligible amount. Nothing to pay attention to or applaud, of no value, with no effect. In reality, however, in the Kingdom, she gave an incredibly large amount.

The adjustment of outlook Jesus requires of his collaborators is radical. But once made, you will find that opportunities for greatness abound, maybe especially for the nobodies, the overlooked, the weak, and the poor.

Are you counted among one of these? Act on your opportunities! Are you wealthy, powerful, honored, rich in the goods of the world? Be humbled and see and act according to Reality, the Reality of the Kingdom.   

W Chris Hackett

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