The Kingdom of God is Here Already, Yet Not Yet Here. Anita Mathias, Dreaming Beneath the Spires
(Please click the link in which I lead you through this meditation)
The Kingdom of God is Here Already, Yet Not Yet Here
The Son of Man will come on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. (Matthew 24:20)
This knowledge hums in our bones: Our life on earth
will end, and our immortal spirits shall be with Christ,
the beloved people and creatures we have loved and lost.
This Kingdom in which God reigns and his will is done,
which we try to establish in the tiny kingdom of our own
lives is “here already, yet not yet here.” Christ, who rose
from the dead, is now forever, vibrantly alive; he stalks
the earth. His presence sings in the joy of creation—birds
carolling in the cold, trees swaying in the cosmic dance;
the leap of a dolphin, the ecstatically wagging tail of a dog.
In lightning flashes, we glimpse this shimmering Kingdom
–great palaces of peace deep within and all around us. On
invitation, Christ walks into our rooms with his clarity and wisdom,
and things change. We experience wave upon wave of the love
of God deep within, and all around us. Our prayers are answered.
Sometimes. We are healed. Sometimes. We feel our hearts
strangely warmed with loving-kindness and warm-fuzzies. Sometimes.
But we also experience sin, deep within and all around us. Our
biting words, our unkindness, our laziness and selfishness. “I do
not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do,
this I keep on doing.” The Apostle Paul wrote that. Yes, me too.
And we are bruised by other people’s greed, stinginess, bossiness,
carelessness, and deceit. And then…there’s the sin of the world
—the cruelty, pride, unbridled greed and environmental destruction.
And yet, some people live in a kind of heaven right now, as pastor
John Mark Comer writes. The Kingdom, God’s presence, is always
available–its peace, its guidance, its wisdom and its joy. We can
leap sideways into it, sometimes. At other times, it takes a hard
wrestling with our own traumas, grudges, habits, and neurology.
Repentance is one portal into the Kingdom. As is our slow
meditative breathing. As is gratitude. And absolute surrender.
Our eyes still perceive the glory of the coming of the Lord–
in shalom, well-being, which envelops us like sudden sunshine;
in glacially slow but unmistakeable personal change; in the
acceleration of coincidences and answers once we start praying;
in the glory of creation, new species evolving even as others die.
And so, we, with quivering voices, sing our broken hallelujahs
as we observe Christ’s kingdom inexorably, infinitesimally appear
on earth, too, as Christians have prayed for twenty centuries.
