Glimpses of the Kingdom
Text: Luke 10:1-9
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We truly live in an age of medical wonders. Earlier this year in the New Orleans area, a 23-year-old man has become the first person cured of sickle cell anemia after two years of treatment. He said it was like being reborn, saying that God had given him another life, a new chapter. Elsewhere this year, gene therapy has allowed children who were born deaf to hear through a one-time treatment that has let children hear their mother’s voice, dance to music, and experience the world like they never have before.
St. Luke would have witnessed things like this, both as a trained doctor and in the miracles he would have witnessed that are spoken of in the Gospel reading. Today we heard the Lord appoint seventy-two of His disciples, those who had listened to Him and believed in Him as the Messiah, and sent them out two by two into every town He Himself was about to go. The tradition of the early Church is that Luke was among that number that went out. He was likely from Antioch originally, born a Gentile by blood. He clearly had contact with the synagogue there and was familiar with the Scriptures. Like many of the God-fearers, as the Jews called Gentiles who came to share the faith of Abraham, Luke had eventually found his way to Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem. It was here that he had the joy of hearing Jesus preach and came to believe that this was at last the fulfillment of God’s promises.
As an emissary of the kingdom of God, going to all of these towns ahead of Jesus, St. Luke was something of an ambassador. He got to announce that these places were being reclaimed by the Lord so that they were no longer under the dominion of sin, death, and darkness. These were going to be ground zero for the new restored heavens and earth, foretold by the prophets that he had come to know so well. With the proclamation that the kingdom of God was coming to this place, it would be as Isaiah had prophesied in our Old Testament reading for today, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.” Luke would get to see, and even perform, these first signs that the light was turning back the darkness.
For humanity has made a disaster of this present creation. From the Garden of Eden, to the murder of Abel by his own brother Cain, to the wickedness before the Flood that brought about destruction by water, to all of the ways in which we harm one another and misuse all these good gifts we have in God’s beautiful creation—gifts like food, drink, drugs and medicine; the people surrounding us, the poor and weak and smallest. In all these ways, we have, through our own selfishness, dragged this world into the kingdom of darkness. We can see it in all the evil we do and the evil we experience: the damage to human souls, the destruction of life, the effect of living in a world that we break—things like disease, pain, blindness, deafness, war, famine, aging, corruption, and death. We don’t have to look very hard or very far to see what living in the domain of darkness is like. It’s always right at hand.
But now, through the preaching of Jesus’ arrival by St. Luke and the other preachers sent, the tide is turning. They healed the sick in every place. They cast out demons. They restored senses. The kingdom of God was coming near. The great reversal was coming, the lowly were being raised, the broken and wounded and grieving made whole. It’s what happens when Jesus arrives.
Through this we learn what to expect when Jesus comes to any place. Thus, especially at this time in the Church year, we eagerly wait and expect this kind of restoration to reach its fullness. The heavens and the earth will be remade entirely when the kingdom of God becomes fully visible at Christ’s return at the end of time. That is the age that Isaiah is ultimately foretelling, that so many of the prophets write and sing and chant of with one accord. When our Lord comes to judge the living and the dead, when He destroys the last enemy death, when He brings about the life everlasting, then we will see the sick healed forever, the blind given their sight, the deaf hearing, the lame dancing for joy, even the dead raised.
But our gracious Lord simply cannot resist giving us samples of this new restored reality, appetizers for the feast. He’s excited about giving this to us, and He just has to give us a preview. So He allows little bits of the curse from Eden to be reversed, even here and now, in time, in our lives in this world. And miracle of miracles, He uses mortals to do it. St. Luke was an evangelist who wrote one of our four gospels, a deliverer of the Gospel of Jesus. He was also, famously, a doctor. The Lord worked through Luke as a preacher and as a physician to give glimpses of the new heavens and new earth, reversing the curse through his calling in those fields.
The Lord does this with all godly callings. He reverses the curse from Eden, where it was decreed that there will be thorns and thistles growing out of the wild soil, that the ground wouldn’t agree and work for us as it ought, that there will be pain and suffering and even death. But the Lord uses godly vocations, callings like doctors, nurses, researchers, farmers, gardeners, to relieve that curse so that we have healing and health, food and drink. He works through those in callings like construction workers and architects and engineers so that we’re not left wandering outside of Eden in the dangerous elements. He works through artists and craftsmen, through cooks who feed others, through all artisans who take the raw elements of creation and bring them to their proper purpose of glorifying God and caring for and delighting His children. In addition to his callings as an evangelist and a doctor, it is also a tradition that St. Luke was an artist, namely a painter. That’s why he’s depicted with a paintbrush and painting palette in our stained-glass window. Whether he painted the earliest images of Mary is a question that’s still open in the realm of pious legend, but it’s clear that he was a gifted writer. He took the basic elements of grammar and vocabulary and speech and used it to deliver the same message that he preached to those towns, the same message declared by Jesus Himself: the kingdom of God has come near to you. And indeed, the kingdom of God is coming to you, to heal you, to restore you, to strengthen your faith to life everlasting. It’s all coming to you with Jesus’ arrival. So let’s greet Him in His Holy Supper now as He comes to us in the foretaste of eternal life, filled with blessings for this life as well. In the name of Jesus, whose kingdom is at hand. Amen.
