God's Reign
Its kind of an ironic stretch to bring together a feast day honoring Christ the King and a reading about the "King" Jesus dying on the cross between two criminals. It seems more sense to spotlight a reading of the glorious risen Christ after the resurrection. But this match of reading and feast day says much about where we are to find this Kingdom or Reign of God and how we are to be a part of it.
If you had to pick out the most important paragraph or two out of the gospel of Luke, it would be these paragraphs that depict the cruxificion. For Luke and the other gospel writers, the message being conveyed here is the epicenter or essence of what the Christian faith is about. What is the Christian life about? Simply, it is the cross. What Jesus taught and lived is that true life is found when a person offers his or her life out of love and dies to the life known before. We all will experience this at the end of our lives, but more importantly we need for this to happen each day somehow and possibly each opportune moment. Dying to self through giving of self in love is the holy and cosmic pattern that Jesus modeled for us and God affirmed through His resurrection. So, we find the Reign of God or the experience of God in the struggle of love of others and in the struggle of surrender in prayer. In this way, in a manner of speaking, the gate to the Kingdom is the one sitting next to us or the one encouraging us to take another spiritual step in our lives.
1 Comments:
One of the ways we can "die to self" is to reach out, in our darkest hour, to someone in need ... as Jesus did on the cross when he reached out in forgiveness to the "good thief". Our 2nd-4th grade religious ed class today brought this Gospel to life. We used a story of a young girl who was feeling rejected and low because of the negative things that happened in her day. She changed the course of the day by reaching out to someone who asked her for help. At first I had the girl in the story reject the plea for help, then I asked the kids to figure out and enact the story ending differently. They recognized that reaching out to help others when you're feeling rejected and low can make a positive difference in the lives of everyone involved. They saw that Jesus did it for a thief ... and think that we should do it for each other. I think they're pretty smart kids!
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