Thursday of the
Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time
(Wisdom 7:22b-8:1; Luke 17:17-25)
The man, humbled by years in prison, declared that he
took special note of Jesus saying, “The kingdom of God is within you.” This is a possible rendering of a sentence
from today’s gospel which the New American Bible renders as “…the Kingdom of
God is among you.” Self-help promoters prefer
the former translation because it underlies the vast human potential available when
people discipline their appetites and focus on what they wish to achieve. But does it render completely satisfactorily
what Jesus means by the presence of the Kingdom of God?
Pope Benedict in the first volume of his trilogy on
Christ calls the Kingdom of God none other than God Himself. Yes, God does lie within every righteous
person but what Jesus wants to convey is that God has come to the world to
arrest the forces of darkness and to bring reconcile sinners to Himself and to
one another. God has arrived precisely in
his messenger-son, Jesus Christ, who dies as humanity’s servant. Tying ourselves to Jesus by Baptism and the
Eucharist, we are freed from the dominance of the ego and can submit ourselves
gladly to the ways of divine love.
