NOTES for Luk 9:46-62
Today's reading is entirely devoted to the theme of the Kingdom and to how the people around Jesus understood it, including His closest disciples. And once again we encounter a complete failure, even on the apostles' part, to understand what the Kingdom is and what its laws are. The very question of primacy, of who is greatest in the Kingdom (v. 46), loses all meaning there. Jesus was able to explain this by pointing the disciples to a child, whom the problem of primacy, because of age, does not yet concern at all (vv. 47-48).
According to the laws of our world, still not transformed, the great person is the one who is great by his own greatness; in the Kingdom, as it appears, one's own greatness means nothing, and the less a person relies on it, the more the greatness of the Kingdom shines through him. That is why there is no need to impose this Kingdom by force, as the apostles thought of doing in one Samaritan village where Jews, as usual, were not welcome (vv. 51-54): in that way one can only demonstrate one's own force and prove one's own importance, but it is impossible to bring people closer to the Kingdom by such a method. It is no accident that Jesus tells the disciples that they are not acting in the spirit of the Kingdom: for the Kingdom, any violence is unacceptable; no one can be driven there by force, because to enter it one needs above all a relationship with God and with the One whom He sends, and that relationship must not be imposed but freely accepted.
A Kingdom imposed by force is not the Kingdom, but only its phantom, which can destroy a person but cannot save him. And since the Kingdom is not a place but a relationship, it is not limited by any structure. Even the apostolic community does not limit it, if one looks at that community not as a fellowship of people living in the Kingdom, but as a kind of organization for promoting the idea of the Kingdom of God. That is why everyone who bears witness to it in Christ's name, revealing to those around him its power and effectiveness, finds his own place in it, even if formally he has no relation to the apostolic community (vv. 49-50). Thus, dispelling the myths of mass religious consciousness that were so widespread in those days, Jesus strengthens in the hearts of His disciples those ideas about the Kingdom that must help them live through His death on the cross and receive His resurrection.