By the time St Luke wrote this Gospel, the Church was facing the challenge of learning to live with what seemed to be the absence of Christ, the absence of that single, clear guiding voice for God’s people. The New Kingdom had clearly been promised. It had clearly been revealed; the Kingdom is Christ’s. It is of his design, and it would be through his merits that it would come to be. But at the same time, it was becoming clearer that much of the building of it was not to be by his hand. Rather, it would be slowly built by the patient conscious effort of the people over generations of time.

Luke pictures the challenge clearly in the second parable. In the face of what seems to be the Lord’s absence, what seems to be Christ’s reluctance to build his kingdom, the great temptation is to build one’s own kingdom. If this is all there is to be, if this world is where we are to live, if it really is our world and not Christ’s, I am going to carve for myself as comfortable a chunk of it as I can. If I look around me and see that, as far as I can tell, what really makes a difference in the world are power, possessions, influence, then I would be foolish not to put my reliance on these things as well.

But there is another facet to that temptation, one proper in a very real way to believers, to those who wait with an honest desire to see the building of the Kingdom. That is the temptation not to buy into the values of a grasping and materialistic world but rather buy into my own design … for what the kingdom should be like, what the Church should be like. If Christ seems strangely silent in revealing his design for the kingdom, that leaves all sorts of opportunities for me to fill that silence with my own voice, my own design. Perhaps that silence should not

be so readily filled. Perhaps that silence is not so much an invitation to speak but to listen.

What can seem to be the absence of Christ is not. It is merely his presence in a different form, the form of the Church, a very human gathering of very human beings faced with the mission of drawing on one another’s insight, one another’s wisdom, and guided by all of that, building a Church, a Church ready to be made the Kingdom of Christ.

In Christ’s own words, “Don’t be anxious, my Kingdom is real, and it is being formed. All the rest of what you see when you look around you is not real, and it will not last. Your fidelity is not pointless, and your hope will not be frustrated.”

It is the single greatest truth of the waiting, building Church. There is a very great deal more to come. Fr Andrew