NOTES for Luk 17:20-21

Speaking about the Kingdom, Jesus gives no dates and points to no places. He says: the Kingdom is within you. The corresponding Greek expression also allows the translation "among you," but this does not change the matter radically: in any case He does not promise the Pharisees who asked the Savior the question the kind of Kingdom they hoped to see.

So what then: will there be no Kingdom? Is everything only within us, in our hearts? Or among us, in our gatherings? No, of course not. The New Testament books say quite enough to make us look at the Kingdom as a reality on a universal scale. But the Pharisees were asking about something else. They hoped to see an earthly Kingdom. Well, perhaps not entirely earthly.

Perhaps one in which a little of the heavenly would be added to the earthly, exactly as much as needed for the Kingdom to be revealed to everyone as precisely God's, as something impossible to resist because not only human but also superhuman forces faithful to God are on its side.

Yet this Kingdom would still appear to the world as something completely objective. As something whose obviousness does not depend on an individual person. And a person would only have to accept this obviousness, or oppose the Kingdom and perish. The Kingdom was expected first of all as a manifestation of God's power. So that a person would only have to submit to this power, since it is impossible to resist it.

Jesus speaks of another Kingdom. Of one that can enter the world only through the human person. That makes strong the one through whom it enters. And by its breath transforms the world, acting from within it through living bearers of the Kingdom. First the hearts of people, then the assemblies of the faithful, and at the end of the path and the end of time, the Kingdom in all its universal fullness. A Kingdom that not only conquers people by its power, but also transforms them by its breath. By the breath of God's love.