increased in wisdom and in stature

There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.

These words, written by our brother Paul to believers in Rome, prohibit a Christian seizure of political power. That Paul lived entirely in the Spirit and that his words are the Spirit’s words: the solidity of my faith in this truth is unsurpassed in any of you. This prohibition of Christian revolutionary politicking is of the Spirit, and yet we now hear clearly a contrary message, a command from the Spirit to unseat the current authorities and to enthrone the Lord Jesus in their place.

The Spirit has given us two contradictory messages. An intelligent student of our Faith would recognize that this is an impossibility. She would seek to determine which of the two messages is True and Genuine and Of God and which is False and Of the Evil One. She would give more credence to the message that is more ancient, written by a Saint of the Church and included in its canonical Scriptures, cited by numerous authorities. Expressing the exclusivity of the statements in two conditionals and applying modus ponens to the one, she would conclude that the new message is False and to be garbaged, and that Christians can continue in good conscience to chill and do sacraments on base, uninterrupted by new marching orders.

The intelligent student, being merely a student, would be wrong, but we would not blame her, because it can be difficult for one shaped by the world to understand what it means to be a member of the Body of Christ, a Body that exists and grows up in the current of Time.

The Body of Jesus Christ, the one anointed to reign for all time as King of the Universe, was not ready immediately to assume a throne. Rather, it entered into this world as a single cell, utterly reliant on a teenage girl for its survival.

The time came for the Body to be born, and still it was not time for the Son of God to reign. It was time for him to lie in the manger of an animal. When the appointed authority ordered a slaughter to eliminate this new pretender, it was time for the weak, fragile King to flee into Egypt in the arms of his forever-blessed parents, who, in their love, in their obedience to God, in their wisdom, succeeded in protecting Jesus from harm.

This King increased in wisdom and in stature, yet full human maturity still did not bring with it all the authority of kingship. We read the Lord Jesus reminding his mother of a reality that had long been familiar to her: that her son was a King whose hour had not yet come. Perhaps her insistence readjusted the schedule, brought closer the hour we all await, because suddenly the Lord worked in a way that he had felt was off-limits moments before.

The difficulties for the mind new in the Spirit really begin when the Lord Jesus triumphantly enters Jerusalem only to be killed. Understandably, his supporters felt at this moment that the dream was over, that Jesus must not have been the messiah. Because He was dead.

But three days later, the time came for Him to rise! And we rejoice at this event. And here the savvy movie director, after putting the audience through the sadness and indignation and deflation of seeing the main character crucified and entombed, figuring he has about reached the limit of his viewers’ attention span and wanting to reward them for their patience, would wrap it up with a marvelous finish, wherein, in the empty and silent night, a brilliant golden light suddenly peeks out from behind the stone seal of the tomb, rolls it away and spreads out over Jerusalem and over Judea and to Rome and China and Alaska and the Congo, etc., causing blooming flowers to cover up the mine sludge, turning the mercury pools into pretty fountained ponds, bringing smiles to the faces of all the world’s children, and making all of their grimy, unjust rulers disintegrate into sooty puffs. Everyone is happy. We get a Hereditary-ending-but-big-budget type scene where Bright Jesus in his spotless white garb sits on the throne as everyone kowtows; we get a final close-up of his face as the score crescendoes. Credits roll.

This ending is something like what the disciples expected.

Lord, will you now restore the Kingdom to Israel?

What could the answer be but Yes? What could it be but Yes? Yet the Lord God is not a Hollywood director. The answer was No. The answer was that the King, having been resurrected from the dead, was not going to take control and reign over his Kingdom, but was departing. The answer was that,

It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.

The Son of God came, the Son of God left, and the world looked remarkably, perhaps dishearteningly similar to how it did before the Incarnation.

Times and seasons. Seasons and times. Our student has strange ideas about the Christian God and His revelation to us. I don’t fully understand them. They smell as though they’ve marinated too long in something. Maybe Plato? Whatever went wrong, there is clearly an ignorance of our Father’s affinity for Times and Seasons; his love for preservation succeeded by dramatic change; his love for saying one thing now, and saying something different later.

To continue: the Lord Jesus, who was born, killed, and resurrected from the dead, did not restore the Kingdom to Israel. He instead sent His Spirit down from the clouds, this time not to be received by a single teenage girl, but to be received by the community of his disciples. He chose to be born again, not as a normal body with a pair of arms and a pair of legs, but as a great Body with many bodies as members. Jesus, the mature male in his thirties, chose to take on again, in this still small and vulnerable and for the most part uneducated community, the Body of an infant, a Body which would need time to grow before it could be expected to change the world.

This was the Body of which our brother Paul was a member, the Body to which he wrote in Rome. This was a Body still a baby, still delicate and weak, a Body which Paul fed with milk and which was still not ready for solid food. This Body was no threat to the powers of the world: those powers could have crushed it with ease. As it was when Jesus and Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt, it was not a time to resist authority, but a time to flee from it, hide from it, to avoid provoking it. This was the Body to which Paul, in the wisdom of the Spirit, from the mouth of Jesus living in him, wrote in Rome.

Was this Body going to stay the same forever, eternally weak and eternally a child? Were the days of its power and its reign perpetually going to remain in the future? Was it the plan that Jesus would always allow subpar leaders to govern his people? I hope that I don’t disappoint anyone when I answer Obviously Not. The Almighty God, whose first children were Time and Change, both of whom He loves dearly, was never going to condemn the Son of Man to perpetual immaturity, was never going to say Psych and leave political authority in the hands of the world. When Paul wrote to the Romans, it just wasn’t the time yet.

But the Body has grown since Paul worked the field. It has grown a million-fold. Now Jesus comes into His Kingdom. The time is now.