If there is one thing that stands out in my conversations with others about what people are learning from the pandemic, it is about the quality and honesty of relationships, especially with strangers. It’s like the pandemic has heightened our awareness of other people we pass on the street or in the mall, or even in our home. We have been re-introduced to what is important, what is real, in those relationships.

For example, folks have shared with me how strangers are often friendly towards them. And how they themselves feel more willing to return or initiate a kindness. Perhaps in times of social anxiety that we feel all around us, we know and behave out of a deepening awareness that we are all, indeed, in this together.

Physician Ruth Martin received the Governor General’s Award in 2015^[1] for her work with incarcerated women in British Columbia. Half of the women she helped were Indigenous.  And most of these women struggled with addiction to drugs and alcohol. 

Challenging the assumption that addicted people make irresponsible choices, Ruth listened to the women’s histories—the physical and sexual abuse they endured as children, young teenagers and women. She said, “I would put my pen down and listen, and I realized that if I had been dealt the same cards, I might have been sitting in their chair. I would often place the Kleenex box close to the woman who was sharing her history, but also close enough to me that I could reach for a Kleenex for myself.”^[2]

In the Gospel reading for this Reign of Christ Sunday^[3], Jesus is the judge who separates the sheep from the goats – those who loved from those who cared less. For the early Christians who first heard and read this text, not only did the story call them to love “the least of these” in their midst. For they, themselves, were the persecuted and the hungry, too. 

“All the nations” gathered before the king; and the roles between those who love and those who need love are not fixed. They apply to Christians and non-Christians alike. 

This vision includes all people. And therefore, there is a call to respect the mutuality and common humanity we share with all people. As Ruth Martin experienced in her care for Indigenous women, she admitted the line separating her from the women for whom she cared was thin.

God identifies with the side of ourselves we normally don’t want to show to others: our weakness, our neediness, our vulnerability. Simone Weil said that we give not out of our strengths, but out of our weakness. What separates us, distinguishes us, are our strengths; but what unites us is our weakness.

Not only is this text about our role in giving and receiving care in mutual, loving relationships, it’s really about God. And “God is not a remote supreme being on a throne up there above the clouds or out there somewhere in the mysterious reaches of the universe.”^[4]

If we are looking for God in our world, we need to look in our midst through the lives of our neighbors. “Jesus articulates in rather blunt terms that how you treat another child of God in this life is in actuality how you treat God. By seeing the infinite worth in our neighbor, we keep God as our center and focus.”^[5] By seeing Christ in the face of those in need we give ourselves permission to connect with God in the brokenness of our own hearts.

But what’s the point of doing all this hard work when we are heading to heavenly kingdom in glory? Isn’t that our eternal aim anyway? Why worry about what happens on earth?

But the Reign of God is not only about eternal life, or where we go after we die. That idea is disproven by Jesus’ own prayer: “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven”.^[6]

“Your Kingdom come” means very clearly that God’s realm is something that enters into this world, or, as Jesus puts it, “is close at hand”.^[7] It’s futile mental energy to project it into another world. What we discover in the New Testament, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, is that the Kingdom of God is a new world order, and a promised hope begun in the teaching and ministry of Jesus—and continued in us.

I agree with Richard Rohr to think of the Kingdom of God as the Really Real (with two capital Rs). That experience of the Really Real—the “Kingdom” experience—is the heart of Jesus’ teaching. “It’s Reality with a capital R, the very bottom line, the pattern-that-connects. It’s the experience of what is.”^[8]

God gives us just enough tastes of God’s realm, just enough joy and grace to feel the blessing of God and therefore to believe in it and to want it more than anything. In the parables, Jesus never says the Kingdom is totally now or totally later. It’s always now-and-not-yet. When we live inside the Really Real, we live in a “threshold space” between this world and the next. We learn how to live between heaven and earth, one foot in both worlds, holding them precious together.

The Reign of Christ begins in community – in relationships – beyond our private, self-centred preoccupations. That is where Jesus finds us. It’s when we risk reaching beyond our own concerns, to think about the needs of another who is also vulnerable, weak and suffering, that we meet the Lord – in the pattern-that-connects, in the mutual love that we experience together.

The Kleenex box is never out of reach for both of us. And when both hands reach for the Kleenex, both find healing.

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^[1] Status of Women Canada – government website

^[2] Cited in Ken Shigematsu, Survival Guide for the Soul; How to Flourish Spiritually in a World that Pressures Us to Achieve (Michigan: Zondervan, 2018), p.153-154.

^[3] Matthew 25:31-46; the Gospel for Christ the King/Reign of Christ Sunday, Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), Year A.

^[4] John M. Buchanan, “Matthew 25:31-46”, in David L. Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor, eds., Feasting on the Word Year A Volume 4 (Kentucky: WJK Press, 2011), p.334

^[5] Br. Jim Woodrum, “Center” – Brother, Give Us a Word (Society of Saint John the Evangelist, Nov 6, 2020), www.ssje.org

^[6] Matthew 6:10

^[7] Matthew 10:7

^[8] Richard Rohr, “Jesus and the Reign of God” in Daily Meditations (Center for Action & Contemplation, Nov 15, 2020) www.cac.org