Daily Liturgy and Scripture

Lest we think that Jesus is telling the story of the investing servants as some kind of indication that our talents are needed to built the Kingdom, remember this: the money given belonged to the master in that story, What we have, we have from God. We are to be faithful with what we have so that we may become experienced in living in that kind of Kingdom that Jesus built, and it will certainly take some practice.

Jesus has been asked for a sign on his divinity before, and has criticized the religious leaders for doing so. Now, he gives them a preview of the future: at his second coming, all things wil be made new and judgement will occur. The encouragement here is for obedience, because this is really the best thing we have to offer the God of the Universe.

The destruction of the Temple that Jesus describes actually happened a few decades after his crucifixion and resurrection. The Temple was central to Jewish life, so this was a pretty big deal. Luckily, there was a new Temple. The place where God came to meet man became a man, and the Holy Spirit moves among us as a constant connection to God. The violent end of the Temple may have been sad, but it was not the end of God’s work.

Jesus is really picking apart the legalism of the Pharisees, and for good reason. They draw out tiny, nit-picky details of the law that miss the entire point of the Kingdom. Making access to the God of the universe impossible is the opposite of Jesus’s mission, and it was important that he said so.

Today, Jesus is drawing out some pretty distinct differences between his Kingdom and the religious establishment of the day. Instead of status, people in Jesus’s Kingdom are seeking to serve. It’s like a race to the bottom. Seeking titles and glory are the opposite of what he came to do, and a radical renovation of the heart and mind is required.

How do we shake loose of thinking about things like the world, so we can allow our minds to think like Jesus? Of course, it isn’t possible to think fully like Jesus without being him, but these rivals who take him on in today’s passage are about as far away as you can get. Challenging Jesus about who’s going to be married in the afterlife is missing the point: resurrection is far better than anything we could imagine.

Jesus is really ruffling the feathers of the religious leaders, because he is exposing their selfishness. This isn’t because Jesus came to cut off those who were the religious elite of the day, they did that to themselves. Jesus confronts them because the Kingdom he came to bring needed to be seen for what it really was so that it could be found, and nobody but him held the keys to that.

The sound of rowdy children seems to have been disturbing to the more refined of religious leaders, but Jesus considers them worshipers. This moment, paired with Jesus driving out the vendors who were selling in the temple, points to a more innocent Kingdom, more like the children than the adults. 

Sitting at Jesus’s right and left hand would have been positions of esteem, but James and John didn’t realize what that really meant. How do you sit in a position of authority for a king who has come to serve? Indeed, they would hold memorable places in church history: according to tradition, James was the first and John was the last to die. John was exiled to an island, while James was killed just as the church was getting started. If either of them thought fortune and glory would come with the esteem of Jesus’s Kingdom, they were sorely disappointed.

This upside-down Kingdom continues to take shape, and he seems to make a grave error… if you have a wealthy person interested in your cause shouldn’t you ask them to fund you? Build you a building? But that’s not the way Jesus goes, because his Kingdom is already firmly established. His choice to to turn the man’s posturing (especially when he claims to have kept all the commandments since birth) into an teachable moment.