He said therefore, A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return (Luke 19:12).
A terrible danger of being a wounded creature in a broken world is the temptation to redraw the boundaries of reality in our own image and likeness. As with all seductive fantasies, this one is not without some connection to reality. We humans are immortal creatures designed to rule this divinely created realm in truth and equity, designed to one day fashion our best dreams into a Kingdom unspoiled by a slavery to self-destruction. So much of our life spent in the here and now must be devoted to defeating the parts of our ourselves still haunted by the suffocating, false comfort of the happy slave.
The apostles we meet in chapter nineteen of Luke’s Gospel are not immune to this human curse; it is a tremendous blessing then that their friend and Lord has come to save them from it. Again and again, Christ tells them He will be violently ripped away from them by a horde of self-righteous monsters and false priests too blind to see in Him the only hope for Mankind, to deaf to hear from His lips that first voice which spoke the universe into existence. Jesus tells the apostles not to be afraid when all of the world’s black evil is poured upon Him because He can take it; He must take it.
This gospel is too much for the apostles in the long days leading to Christ’s crucifixion; they either refuse to believe it or actively try to stop Him from saving the world. Call it fear or perhaps even the understandable desire not to see their friend be murdered, but the apostles decided they would rather trust in a comfortable false belief than the truth from God’s own mouth. This false belief, namely that Jesus, the Son of David, would conquer Jerusalem like King David of old and place the apostles in positions of authority over a restored earthly kingdom, did have the gigantic upside of them all not dying in the most gruesome ways evil men could devise, but one more earthly kingdom, even a restored Davidic kingdom, would not be the medicine our sick and dying world needs.
Anyone familiar with the legend of King Arthur should know this truth intuitively. The good and noble Arthur builds a kingdom of justice where righteousness is celebrated and enforced by the brave knights of his round table. After a series of battles, peace is established in the land, and for many years, a kind of heaven on earth spreads forth from the capital city of Camelot, but of course, the entire kingdom is brought down by the personal sin of Arthur, his wife Guinevere, and his best friend and first knight Lancelot. Some form of this story has been told in Christian Europe for centuries, second only to the Bible in forming the imaginations of millions of people. Why? The story drives us to long for the true king of this Earth; the one who will build something greater than even the greatest kingdom a fallen man could build with his sword and his honor; after all, swords become dull and honor melts in the face of unchecked temptation. Mankind’s true enemy can only be defeated by the King strong enough to die at that enemy’s hands, strong enough to invade the enemy’s hellish lands with heavenly light, strong enough to show the world no grave can defeat the love of God for His children.
The parable Jesus uses to illustrate the mysterious, otherworldly kingdom for which He will soon die speaks of a nobleman who goes off into a far country leaving ten servants to prepare for his return. We are told the other citizens of this place hated their Lord, rebelling against his rightful rule. Those ten chosen men should bring to our mind the ten men Abraham prayed Sodom contained: the ten good men whose presence in that grotesque city would have be enough to hold back the righteous wrath of God.
It is here that we begin to piece together another part of Christ’s revelation of how His reign as King will look. As Jesus approaches Jerusalem, He knows the city will utterly reject Him and that its fate will be the same as Sodom and Gomorrah. As He says, ‘But into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you not, go your ways out into the streets of the same, and say, Even the very dust of your city, which cleaveth on us, we do wipe off against you: notwithstanding be ye sure of this, that the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you. But I say unto you, that it shall be more tolerable in that day for Sodom, than for that city (Luke 10:11-12). Just as the apostles refuse to accept the death of their master, so too are they incapable of understanding the terrible judgment coming for the city which rejects its savior. Jesus, Himself, pauses as He nears the city and weeps, crying out in rage and sadness, because He knows the destruction which will find the city in AD 70, when the Romans will act as the instruments of God’s vengeance: burning Jerusalem to the ground and destroying forever the temple made with hands.
This punishment of the generation who slaughtered Christ and rejected salvation serves as a good test for our own sense of justice. I fear any sense of injustice we feel at the destruction of Jerusalem has more to do with our relation to God, rather than any misplaced feelings for a city destroyed 2,000 years ago. As we read in Proverbs today, ‘The wicked worketh a deceitful work: but to him that soweth righteousness shall be a sure reward. As righteousness tendeth to life: so he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death (Proverbs 11:18-19). When a man sins, he asks God for death. Of course, we pretend otherwise; we try to convince ourselves that living outside of the boundaries of God’s divine order for the universe is either no big deal or that we can make it up to God or that, God forbid, we are the one’s who decide what those boundaries should be—we are the ones who decide what is ordered and what is not. The seductive power of this lie, even as countless corpses pile on top of our individual codes of morality, is a testament to how sick and broken we are as a human people. Tragically, history has shown we deserve to be our own gods.
But what of the ten? It is these chosen servants of the nobleman who have been tasked with working for the coming kingdom even as their suicidal neighbors choke on the easy rebellion of the damned. The two faithful servants realize the value of the gift they have been given both in receiving that which was not their own but also in knowing what is expected from those to whom much is given. We of the church militant are to see ourselves in these men of courage and industry who accept the challenge of living and working even as things seem to fall apart all around them. It couldn’t have been easy; we aren’t meant to think it was easy, but they knew in their hearts and souls that the one to whom they owed everything would one day return, and in that blessed advent, he would be bringing death to evil and a reward to the righteous.
And, what is the reward? As we read, ‘he said unto him, “Well, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in very little, have thou authority over ten cities’” (Luke 19:17). ‘Thou good servant,’ I pray we all long to be addressed by the King of the Universe with such a noble title, may we dream at night of hearing those words and hold them as tight as we can while we are wracked by the terrible sufferings of this world. The reward is for the king to transform their humble service, responsibility for what amounted to a few month’s wages, into the right to rule alongside the nobleman. The gracious gift of the nobleman, combined with the faithful work of the servants, has changed the destiny of these men forever. These common servants have been reborn into the inheritors and rulers of a glorious kingdom.
I hope we all begin to see who we are in this parable. No one who is in rebellion against the King of Kings will thank you for serving the world’s true and rightful ruler. They are still in the throes of their madness: men and women building sandcastles as the incoming tide inches closer and closer—pretending as if this empire or that company or whatever temporary dying thing to which they cling will make them whole. We should feel sorry for those who are trapped in this mad rebellion, and then we should go out and try to save them. For Chrisitan, this is the work our good nobleman has commissioned us to complete. We are to stand against evil, love with passionate abandon, and work each and every day to bring the lost home to their Lord. This is the unavoidable cross of the Christian life; it is here we meet the God who became a Man in His mission to save men who deserved nothing but death; it is here that our own death-to-self brings men and women back to life before our eyes.
And when it is all done; when we too meet the nobleman, in this life or the next, we will have the privilege of embracing God the Son as a vindicated servant, a fellow worker, a brother. His victory is our victory because the pulsating evidence that we fought alongside Him will be seen in the five, ten, or ten thousand brothers and sisters our cross shaped love gathered for our King. It is then we will hear those words, ‘Thou good servant,’ and it is then we will be home.