Servants of the Left-Handed Kingdom

By Neil Earle

World news is looking more discouraging all the time and violence is becoming a hallmark.

We hardly have time to mourn for victims of the Orlando and Dallas shootings when Nice, France rockets into the headlines. The world into which Jesus first launched his Kingdom message was also full of atrocities and tensions. A tower fell on people in Siloam and the Roman governor had executed worshippers in the temple precincts (Luke 13:1-5).

Remember, the Jewish people of Jesus’ day were expecting a great Deliverer to come from Bethlehem. They were chafing under the oppressive heel of Roman rule. One of Jesus’ disciples was a former Zealot named Simon. The Zealots were sworn terrorists who had vowed to wreak whatever havoc they could upon Roman rule and their puppets, the Herods.

The Gospels are written against this backdrop of explosive political and social tension. Jesus’ statements about carrying someone’s baggage two miles if they forced you to carry it one was a commentary on a situation whereby Roman soldiers often pulled a sword to forcibly conscript Jewish peasants to carry their gear.

So when Jesus showed up preaching the kingdom of God it must have seemed like a cry of release in the ears of his hearers. His disciples may have passed on the stories about Jesus’ birth, how wise men came from the east bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the young baby.

So many of our daily concerns are explained in the parables.

God, in other words, moved heaven and earth and influenced a mighty Roman conqueror to arrange a census so that Jesus would not only be born in Bethlehem but worshipped by Gentile kings at his birth.

So with all that show of might – including an angelic choir appearing over Bethlehem to certain shepherds – what happened to the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed and of which he was indisputably King?

We can ask the same question today. Where is God? If the Messiah has come where is the power to end the senseless evil in this world? A few years ago a book came out titled “The Upside Down Kingdom” about how the Kingdom Jesus Christ brought was so different than what everyone was looking for in the First Century…and ever since.

Left-Handed Power?

Surely, the very fact that the Christ child was born in a fairly “small potatoes” town such as Bethlehem and not mighty Jerusalem five miles north should have made people think. It should make us think. These small details paint a picture of a Kingdom coming in weakness, coming in great humility, coming in great insignificance to most of the rich and famous of the First Century. Which is why the title “The Upside Down Kingdom” is such a good one.

Anglican minister Robert Capon in his writing on the parables has said that Jesus consistently represented “left-handed power” as opposed to the right handed power of the despots and rulers of his era, the Herods who had all the boy babies killed in Bethlehem to stamp out this rumor of “King of the Jews” and the Romans with their 6000 crosses erected on the road to Rome in putting down a slave revolt.

Grisly stuff.

Left-handed power, says Capon, is “a paradoxical power, power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention.” It’s an intriguing phrase, like “Upside Down Kingdom.” It’s all about the way Jesus worked and taught – a ministry that highlights cups of cold water given in his name, boys with a basket of loaves and fishes enlisted to feed thousands, meek children as the forerunners of the kingdom, forgiving fathers to sons who have blown the family inheritance, charitable half-breeds named Samaritans and a housewife who throws a party because she’s found her lost coin and thus ending up as poor as before.

All this helps answer the question – “Come on, Lord, where is the Kingdom you promised?” Why are people still dying in Pakistan, or Iraq or Somalia, or in our streets, on the highways or in hospitals or trying to stay warm under a freeway tunnel or falling helpless from a ladder? What’s going on? Has Jesus let us down? Where is the King of Mighty David’s Royal Line, the Deliverer the Jewish people were expecting, the Lion of Judah? Were we all deceived? Come on, we could use a Deliverer right about now after a year like this.

Well, take heart. Jesus wasn’t deceiving us. We just happened to be looking in the wrong direction. We are “now people,” we want answers right away. “Action this day.”

But God has lots of time. He has all eternity. And he promises that one day he will dry way all tears, make sense of all our suffering. But we have to wait for it. Still, the Kingdom is here only it is different than we thought. It specializes in Left-handedness. It is present in weakness, in smallness, in near invisibility. The Parables Jesus gave make this clear. We’ve already alluded to some of them. Over and over again, he taught, the Kingdom of heaven is like…well, in one case, like leaven, which a woman puts in three measures of meal.

“The Kingdom? Like Fleishmann’s yeast? Jesus – you’ve got to be kidding,” we might say.

Jesus parables and teaching moments often emphasized the weakness of the Kingdom and the power of its ultimate effects.

A Kingdom of the Everyday

But wait! There’s something about leaven. It is small and miniscule yet steady, relentless, unstoppable and ultimately quite transformative. That is a great tipoff to the way thing work in the Kingdom of God. In his provocative Commentary on Matthew’s Gospel, Michael Green raises the questions about the Kingdom that the parables of Matthew 13 answer. As well as the hidden-ness and ordinary every-day-ness of the Kingdom enshrined in the leaven analogy, Green explores other answers Jesus offers to our fervent questions:

Why does the kingdom, dear Master, seem so ineffective in the disastrous news of the world today.” But don’t look in the wrong place. Remember the parable of the Mustard Seed – starts miniscule and tiny and then takes over (Matthew 13:31-32). New England began with 51 of 100 survivors from the Mayflower. The abolitionist movement started in a very small village in 1700s England and the house churches of China – now numbering in the millions – grew steadily while few were aware of it (Mark 4:27).

Well, it seems, Lord, that we’ve preached and we’ve taught and hardly anyone is responding.” The Parable of the Sower reminds us that of four categories described only the fourth group seems to “get it” (Matthew 13:1-9). This shows the varied responses to the Gospel across the years. The soil is crucial and tilling and preparing the soil takes hard work that may take time to bear fruit. A Scottish pastor in a lonely outpost reported to his superiors on no responses to his preaching except “one young lad in a poor village named David Livingstone,” the eventual mentor to missionaries of the 1800s. Capon reminds us that even seed scattered by the wayside has a habit of growing up against the odds.

Well it seem – forgive me, my King – so hard to keep that vision before us with all that’s happening.” Ah, well don’t forget the parable of the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:44-45). It takes a special kind of person to spot the kingdom at work. If you have responded to the message you are such a special person. Look up, look around, your redemption is always nearer than you think. St. Augustine’s mother was a Christian but he sorted through many philosophical systems before surrendering to the Faith.

Why is it so weak, Jesus, and why does evil persist/” – Remember the parable of the weeds among the wheat. This reminds us that the Good God has allowed good and evil to coexist for a time. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. But…there is a judgment coming. Sometimes it even falls in this life. Where are the Hitlers, the Idi Amins, the Milosevics today? The future glory of the Kingdom will be the great equalizer (Matthew 13:24-30).

Forgive me dear Lord but …why do we have to wait, so long for vindication?” Ah, remember the parable of the great dragnet cast into the sea. In God’s good time the good are sorted out from the bad. The Lord is keeping score and even in this life the great villains of history seem to get their comeuppance (Matthew 13:47-50).

The Galilee – where the Kingdom message was first heard.

Preparing the Soil

By now we begin to see. Our questions have answers. And we have work to do, soil to prepare, seeds to sow. Our job is to pass out cups of cold water, scrounge about for loaves and fishes to feed the hungry, to visit the sick and the dying, encourage the prisoners, pass out Thanksgiving turkeys, run food banks, staff cold-weather shelters – in other words, the kind of work that Christians have been doing for centuries. It doesn’t seem like its changing the world does it? But it is making a big big difference in the lives of those who receive the benefit and that includes millions and millions of people.

I was struck how when the earthquake recently devastated Haiti the TV crews clambered ashore to interview World Vision workers already serving there as a Christian agency, formed in response to the Kingdom message. Be encouraged. The kingdom that began at Bethlehem is small, quiet, humble, but insidious – as unstoppable as…well…as leaven.

Take another look, friends, the Kingdom is at hand.