This story began just two years before the passion we heard today, and nothing about it suggested it would end here. A teacher with no formal education, a teacher living a life in small towns where people spoke with rural accents, far away from people with money and education, and mostly associating with the dregs of the area, people who couldn’t read or write, day laborers, women who had nowhere to belong, some of them following him around from place to place. They were all powerfully attracted by someone who didn’t seem to care anything about where they came from or what they might have done, and they were also attracted by this man who told them that God was close, and that this closeness was the best news anyone had ever heard.
All he talked about for these two years was the kingdom of God, and the way he talked about it confused everyone. He said it wasn’t coming in the future, but instead he said there were times you were looking right at it now, if you could only see correctly, and if only you could live your life as if it were already here. You could see that kingdom when you saw a man beaten up by the side of the road brought back to health by a stranger who knew nothing about him, you saw it when you saw a tiny seed grow into something huge, you saw it when you saw a shepherd abandon a hundred other sheep to find just one that had wandered off and somehow been forgotten, you saw it when you saw all those people who were the dregs of the earth turned into friends and disciples of God.
All of this talk about the kingdom happened in just a few short months. He could have stayed out there in the middle of nowhere, telling stories about this mysterious reign of God, but instead he came to this city, a tense place where they didn’t like crowds of poor people talking about new kingdoms, and where the police were nervous about security on a major holiday. And so the last vision we have of all his talk about the kingdom of God, this kingdom where everything is changed and nothing is what it looks like, our last vision is this picture up here of a man on the cross.
Every year on Good Friday we wonder what this image means. Is it the end of his dream, the end of a story, or is it really the ultimate picture of what he said the kingdom of God was, something very human transformed into something redeemed and embraced.
I don’t know what your past year has been like, but there are years when we all see too much suffering. We see good people sick who don’t get better, our children struggling, lives spent in prison or in some other form of misery and discouragement. Maybe like me, you are here today with those pictures and those people in your mind, and you are wondering about their story. You don’t want their lives to have turned out the way they have. When do they get that kingdom of God that Jesus promised us? When do we all get to see it?
The only answer we get, if we choose to believe it, is that the kingdom of God is available to us here even now, as he always said it was, and we are already its citizens, even in death, since in this kingdom even death is different from what it seems. Jesus told us that his death on the cross would not end in death, that it would be transformed into something that is not like anything we can imagine or describe. The signs of the kingdom are all around us, Jesus said, and then he gave us this last sign, maybe as a way to show us that there is no place on this earth so miserable and pointless where that reign of God cannot be victorious. That kind of transformation of suffering is the kingdom we are waiting for, the one that we want but can seem so distant. And yet he told us that we would see this kingdom, this real kingdom of God, right now, wherever we see love being victorious. Even on the cross, maybe we can see it being built.