NOTES for Luk 9:43-62
As we can see, the apostles still had little understanding of what the Kingdom Jesus spoke to them about was. They clearly imagined it as something like earthly kingdoms, perhaps with its own special features, with daily miracles, but still resembling the states of the untransfigured world. In any event, judging by the Evangelist’s testimony, they had no doubt that this kingdom would be governed just like any kingdom of ‘this world’: naturally, Jesus Himself would be King, but after that... after that came the most interesting part: whom would He make His closest associates? How would He distribute the places in His Kingdom among His disciples?
Jesus continually tries to explain to the disciples that His Kingdom is ‘not of this world’, not because it is full of miracles and supernatural phenomena, but because it is built differently—not according to the laws of the untransfigured world, but according to its own laws, which may seem strange, to say the least, to the people of ‘this world’. The one who is least of all is great: from the standpoint of the untransfigured world, this is of course utterly absurd. But every earthly state is built on force; there must always be some centre of force that also becomes the centre of the authority founded on that force.
The Kingdom the Saviour brought into the world is built on love, whose source is the breath of God. What gives this Kingdom its form is the web of relationships binding its inhabitants to one another, each of them to God and to Christ, and Christ Himself to His heavenly Father. In such a Kingdom, a person’s importance is determined not by their capacity to wield power, whatever kind of power it may be, but by the measure of love they can receive.
As one can readily guess, this measure is determined by the degree of their transparency to God’s breath. It is then that Jesus’ words about children become understandable: children really are receptive to every action of God, not because they are sinless, but because they have not yet had time to lose that spiritual wholeness which adults lack unless they deliberately think about it and take care of it. This is how the Kingdom resolves the question of precedence—the chief question of the untransfigured world.