What Jesus asks
By Rev. Frank Majka, S.J.
associate
director, University Ministry
Jesus asks us to do some things that aren’t very realistic — to forgive without limit, love our enemies, hunger and thirst for justice, live as peacemakers, accept the crosses in our lives and become great by serving others.
His words certainly don’t fit the way our world normally works, with its love of status, power, competition and excessive individualism. But Jesus says that God’s world does work that way, and Christ means for us to live here according to the way things work there. He wants the community of His disciples to be a sign of the Kingdom already breaking into our present world and transforming it.
When we as individuals and as communities act in forgiving, loving, sharing, self-sacrificing ways, we make it easier for people to believe that Christ’s words aren’t just fantasy. In so doing, we help carry out Christ’s work.
Jesus knew that living according to the values of the Kingdom of God would put Him and His companions in conflict with His society and its culture. In fact, Jesus told the disciples that He was sending them to be “like sheep in the midst of wolves” and that the world would not accept them, just as it had not accepted Him (Matthew 10). The same is as true today as it was then. But Jesus said not to lose heart because God’s Kingdom was already present, acting like yeast and sending out its branches like a mustard tree.
The great feasts of Christmas, which we just celebrated, and the Easter Triduum, which we will celebrate soon, give liturgical expression to the reality of the Kingdom of God and how different it is from the ways we often think and act. When Christ comes at the end of time, then finally God’s Kingdom will be the only world. When we live now by the values of the Kingdom, we prepare ourselves to live in the world to come. When that world does come, then the words of Jesus won’t sound unrealistic at all.
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