What, some people have asked, does the title of our latest service books mean? What is the Kingdom Season? It is a way of referring to the period from the Feast of All Saints at the beginning of November to the beginning of Advent at the end of the month. It includes a cluster of themes related to the commemoration of the heroes of the faith on All Saints’ Day; of the faithful departed on All Souls’ Day; and on Remembrance Sunday of those who died in war faithfully defending what they believed to be right . It culminates in the Feast of Christ the King and so brings the Christian year to an end with a celebration both of the reality of God’s rule and of the final ingathering into his kingdom. It therefore raises a range of questions about what the kingdom actually means and how it relates to this life and this world; questions about our own individual futures and the future of the world, questions about death and the afterlife and the end of the world. A lot of questions for one month!
Some of these questions seem to be on the minds of the authors of this morning’s readings. Job longs for the time when he will be vindicated – when a redeemer will make clear the pattern of his life – when God will be on his side rather than mysteriously absent as he seems to be in the midst of Job’s suffering. Paul seems to be trying to damp down an over eager expectation of the imminent return of Christ on the day of the Lord. His Thessalonian congregation seems to have been misled by false teachers; they have to be told that before the end there will first be some sort of crisis in which the opposition to God will become far greater than it is now. In the mean time they must hold to what they have been taught and be strong in every good work and word. In the gospel reading, Jesus is being challenged by the Sadducees, who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. He provides an answer which says something about different a way of being in the resurrection and about the true nature of God.
How to make sense of all this? The Sadducees and the faithful of Thessalonica both provide a warning about how not to proceed. Both are concerned with details which at some level might seem to be important but which are also deeply misleading. In effect they want to know when and how; when will the end be and what will it be like to be resurrected? It almost seems as though if they can’t have the answers to those questions then they can’t believe in the rest. The big picture is too big for them if it can’t be pinned down. We can of course sympathise with them to some extent. We all know accounts of the faith which are so abstruse and vague that they leave us nothing to hold on to. At the same time too much thirst for detail can mean we lose the point altogether.
What we have here then is a contrast between an unhelpful thirst for information on the one hand, and on the other, a search for ideas and images which will inspire us to live in hope with our feet on the ground. So now for the key ideas and images. Jesus preached the coming of the kingdom. He pointed to a world in which human beings would discover how to live together justly and peacefully, enjoying the abundance of life God longs for us to live. Though he committed his life to the possibility of such a world he had no illusions about our capacity to build it for ourselves; only God can do that. He did not believe in human progress. In fact his alertness to our capacity for sin meant that he pictured a situation in which faithfulness to the vision of the kingdom might well result in struggle, hardship and persecution. We should be alert to the possibility that if the church flourishes things might well get worse rather than better. And a flourishing church is still only a foretaste or pointer towards the reality of the kingdom, just as the company of Jesus himself provided a flavour of the kingdom, albeit with a fuller and more gracious taste.
How then is the once and future kingdom related to the death of the individual and the end of the world? The idea of an end for the world has been muddied by too many placards in Oxford Street and too much science fiction. The universe is too large and too complex for the meaning of its end to be imaginable, but we can think of an end in a different way. We can think of an ending as a goal and also a resolution. If we believe in God then we can believe in the end of the world as we know it not as a bang or a whimper but as an Amen. When we think of the end we should think of it as a culmination of the purpose of its creator – and only God can know what that will be, only God can be the author of an ending that will make sense. In the meantime, however, our own endings are to be metaphors of that final ending. We cannot prepare for the end of the world we can only prepare for our own endings, but the one may inform the other. So can our own death be seen as a goal and a resolution? Can we prepare for it by letting go of inessentials and concentrating on what is most important to us? Can the approach of an ending encourage us to do something about the loose ends and seek reconciliation where it is needed, and to do those things we have put off for far too long? Can death help us to see the simple things?
And finally what again of the kingdom? When we pray ‘thy kingdom come’ what are we praying for? What Jesus thought he was praying for goes I think something like this: God is the creator; his creativity is inexhaustible; he has created the narrative of this world but the goal of that narrative is an act of redemptive recreation, a making new of what has been broken, marred, corrupted and grown old. In that act of recreation we and all who have gone before us and all who will come will be raised up and made new in lives we cannot possibly conceive of now. And yet to glimpse what that might be like, we need to give up our quest for information, and focus solely on whatever it is which speaks to us of the kingdom, whether it be the red glow in an autumn leaf, the sound of a trumpet, an act of spontaneous kindness, or courage in the face of injustice, or the look in the eye of someone we love – for all these things can prepare us for the coming of God’s kingdom. Amen.