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The Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

Seasoned Christians have heard the expression “kingdom of God” time and time again whether it has been preached from the pulpit, listened to from Scripture read within the Church’s liturgy, or through personal reading of the Bible. This phrase may recede into the background of one’s mind without ever finding a truly adequate understanding.

In today’s Gospel, St. Matthew records Jesus’ parables on “the Kingdom.” In his famous book titled “The City of God,” St. Augustine identifies the Kingdom from today’s Gospel with the Catholic Church: “The Church even now is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven” (Book 20, Ch. 9). This great saint explains how Jesus’ parables of the kingdom in Matthew 13 speak of the kingdom of God in two ways.

The first way is that of the kingdom militant, which is the pilgrim Church on earth, wherein the weeds and the wheat grow alongside one another (see Mt 13:24-30). The second is when we arrive at the “close of the age” when the Son of Man (Jesus) will “send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers” and “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father” (Mt 12:40.43). The kingdom is presently still in seed form.

Pope Benedict XVI, an erudite Scripture scholar, wrote in his book “Gospel, Catechesis, Catechism”: “Early Catholic exegesis often almost completely identified the kingdom of God and the Church, which it liked to describe as the ‘kingdom of God on earth’” (p. 47).

Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Satis Cognitum (On the Unity of the Church) wrote: “God indeed even made the Church a society far more perfect than any other …for this reason we find it called in Holy Writ by names indicating a perfect society … It is spoken of as the House of God, the city placed upon the mountain to which all nations must come. But it is also the fold presided over by one Shepherd, and into which all Christ’s sheep must betake themselves. Yea, it is called the kingdom, which God has raised up and which will stand for ever” (#10).

And what makes the Church a kingdom? Well, a kingdom is only one insofar as it has a king as its head, and the invisible head of the Church is none other than our priestly king: Jesus! Our queen is Mary. We are constituted as a monarchy with decision-making power delegated from the top down. The laity are invested with true royal power from their baptism, to share in Christ’s reign by dominating sin and extending his rule through lives of authentic joyful holiness. The prime minister of the king is the pope, who succeeds in office St. Peter. Let us now go forth and build up the kingdom by extending the reign of our heavenly king.