| Lectionary: Proper 22 | | Date Created: Oct 06, 2006, 12:05 PM |
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The Epistle/Gospel reading for this coming Sunday is Mark 10:2-16.
The second of the two stories in this week's gospel reading is the "little children entering / receiving the Kingdom of God" story. It's rightly valued for what it says about children, literally, as well as what it says about all of us and what our attitudes should be like.
I'm also fond of the passage in terms of what it says about the Kingdom of God. Evangelicals in the 20th century rejected the notion that the Kingdom of God was some kind of literal geographic entity. But for too long we've been at the other extreme -- to the point where we substitute words like "kingship" or "reign" for "kingdom" as if "the Kingdom of God is at hand" meant the same thing as "the time is close when God will exercise his kingly authority."
Stories like this one show the absurd extreme to which we've taken this corrective. The most common verb to be used with "Kingdom of God" is entering it which rightly suggests the sphere or "realm" in which God's authority will be exercised rather than the authority itself. And the fact that the kingdom belongs to such as these makes the retranslation of kingdom as "kingly authority" impossible.
We need to get back to an understanding of "Kingdom of God" and our place with regard to it in a way that isn't exclusively about God & Me but rather about a network, a community, a kingdom. Me & my fellow subjects & the King. We are a Kingdom in Exile, an inaugurated Kingdom awaiting consummation. |
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