Sunday after Ascension | 16th May 2021

Isaiah 61; Luke 4.14-21

There are two periods of waiting in the Christian Year. The first is Advent when we wait for the birth of Christ. The second is now, the nine days between Ascension and Pentecost when we wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit. In recent years the Church of England has set aside this period as a time for evangelism and prayer. This initiative is called, as you may know, ‘Thy kingdom come’, taking the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer.

I wonder what you mean when you say ‘Thy kingdom come’ in the prayer that we say so often? Tonight’s reading has Jesus reading from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth: ‘He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed’. After reading from the scroll and sitting down, Jesus delivers the punch line, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ Right now, at this moment, Jesus says to the congregation, he is bringing God’s kingdom to his people.

The claim expects a response and the response should have been joy. Jesus is there, the longed for anointed one. He brings deep, deep consolation, a richer life, a deeper hope. Luke in his Gospel is sure that what Jesus brings is ‘great joy’, ‘exceeding joy’, ‘exceeding great joy’: pure, unexpected, undeserved delight, relief, happiness, pleasure to the sick, the depressed and the exhausted, the sinners, the addicts, the chronically unsatisfied and the unrewarded good.

But in the synagogue at Nazareth, as we will see if we read a little further in the text, there was not joy, but amazement. Then doubt and anger, and in the ensuing argument they tried to lynch him. Joy is not welcome.

And yet Luke’s Gospel suggests over and over again that whatever it is - this Kingdom that we pray for - the mark of its appearance is joy.

I think this is really hard for many of us. I have some sympathy for those who were troubled and angry as they listened to Jesus at Nazareth. I understand their suspicious minds. They have lost the ability to trust, they have low expectations. Perhaps we do too. The cynicism of our politics oppresses us. The failure of the Church depresses us. And of course this last year, restriction, anxiety, grief and loss have taken a heavy toll.

Many years ago I came across a prayer which President Rooseveldt apparently kept on his desk, a prayer which has also appeared in a succession of books of prayers for those in military service:

Author of the world’s joy, Bearer of the world’s pain, At the heart of all our distress Let unconquerable gladness dwell.

That unconquerable gladness is what I think is meant by joy. And it doesn’t come by doing a manic flip from depression into ecstasy, or by bobbing about in worship with your hands in the air. The kingdom comes because the kingdom is. It comes on earth

because it already is in heaven. It comes because God is both Unity and Trinity: connection, communion, abundance, gladness, joy. He has created us out of his fullness, out of his overflowing life, out of the sheer goodness of his nature and his will to share his being with us as a gift. If at Advent we wait for Christ to be born among us, at Ascension we wait for the Spirit to be released on the world. Creation, incarnation, fulfilment. The Kingdom, as the Orthodox say, is the Holy Spirit, the manifestation of God’s life among us: love, joy, peace.

There used to be a tendency to over-spiritualise the message of Jesus, to downgrade this earthly life in favour of the life to come. But today I think we have the opposite problem. We imagine there is no heaven, as John Lennon sang, and so all the joy we can hope for must be here on earth. But Jesus does not tell us to pray for the kingdom to come on earth, he does not tell us to go out and build the kingdom, as though we could. He tells us to watch for the kingdom, to proclaim it, to receive it, to pray that God’s will be done as it is in heaven. When we pray ‘thy kingdom come’ we are not praying for some kind of earthly utopia where our social justice warriors ensure that everyone has exactly enough of everything and nobody feels excluded. Utopias are very bad at joy.

Deep down the joy of the kingdom reflects the origin and goal of our, and of all existence. We come from God’s joy and it is to God’s joy that we return.

It comes down to what we declare in the Creed. The Son of God came down from heaven to share our life and to raise us up with him to God. There is no other Gospel. We are made of earth, and destined for heaven, and the genuine depth and beauty we find in this earthly life is what it is because it is a shadow of heaven to come. We pray ‘thy kingdom come’, because there is a kingdom, we pray that ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, because there is heaven, and we can ask for God’s joy to fill our hearts at Pentecost because the joy of heaven is more substantial more solid, more real than anything we can know on earth.

One of the things I have come to love about this cathedral is the way your eye is taken through a series of arches, chambers, passages from west to east. This has become more obvious to many of us with most of our services now being in the nave. To me this has been like a visual parable of the kingdom – it is always ahead, always elusive, casting its bright shadow back towards us. And when I come here to pray and sit looking east I try to become more receptive to the Christ who says, ‘Come, follow me….’ Follow me, onwards, inwards, upwards, higher, deeper, the direction is always beyond. Our new choristers will play a part on helping us to sense the nearness of that kingdom, that deep joy of God that is here and not yet. They will not always know that they are providing a glimpse of heaven, but we will know, we will appreciate and understand. ‘Thy kingdom’ come, indeed, and it is thy kingdom not ours, a kingdom we can just glimpse through the veil of our mortality. And yet that glimpse is enough and more to live courageously and with hope:

Author of the world’s joy,

bearer of the world’s pain,

at the heart of all our distress,

let unconquerable gladness dwell.

Canon Angela Tilby, Canon of Honour