TWEAKING the word order of the first verse of this Gospel could help to highlight its reassurance: “It seemed good to your Father to give you the Kingdom, which is why, little flock, you should not be afraid.” Tackling the word “little”, though, is indispensable: is it literal (“modest in size/number”)? Or does it suggest affection, like a diminutive (“my dear flock”)?
If it was merely a statement of magnitude — “small in size” — we might picture a cluster of true believers holding out for vindication when the Kingdom comes to them, but to no one else. That attitude is not unknown. Most of us know people who believe in Jesus, yet speak of their fellow-Christians with suspicion, or contempt: “He’s just a Sunday Christian!” “She’s a cafeteria Catholic.”
Despite this, there are plenty of the faithful who instinctively read Luke 12.32 as a sign of love. That feels truer to Jesus’s compassionate heart. In his eyes, we are all “little”: vulnerable and dependent (“like sheep without a shepherd”, Matthew 9.36).
When we wrestle with surface meanings and deeper messages in scripture, it often transpires that words do not mean what we once assumed they did. In this instance, I should probably drag my attention away from Jesus’s affectionate reassurance (“Do not be afraid, little flock”) and consider instead the half of the verse that I am less moved by: “it seemed good . . . to give you the Kingdom”.
Those two elements are causally connected (“for”). One objective, then, could be to reflect on the linkage between the factual statements: “Do not be afraid,” and “It seemed good to give you the Kingdom.” Once we have worked out what the little flock is afraid of, it might equip us better for understanding the Kingdom that the Father has given to us.
We may still prefer to hear Jesus reassuring us, as he does here. Every child, of every f/Father, prefers such comfort to the rebukes or judgements that must also come our way, whether as children or as disciples. I was surprised to find that this form of reassurance (“Do not be afraid”) from Jesus is not spread evenly throughout the four Gospels. There are two examples in Mark (5.36; 6.50); John has one (6.20); and Matthew records four (10.28; 14.27; 17.7; 28.10). In Luke, there are five occasions when Jesus tells a person — or people — not to be afraid, and three of them are in chapter 12 (5.10; 8.50; 12.4, 7, 32). Luke even shows how Jesus’s solicitude for his “little flock” transcends human existence; for the Lord spoke from beyond his resurrection to tell Paul not to be afraid (Acts 18.9).
Each Evangelist chose from a body of material what he crafted into his own Gospel. They did not all have access to the same records and remembrances, and we have few clues to the materials that they discarded. Still, it is interesting that Matthew and Luke — who both record a chunk of Jesus’s ethical teaching in sermon form (the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain) — highlight the Lord’s teaching on the importance of not being afraid. They may have preserved this aspect of Jesus’s ministry because it was in their sources, or because of their own faith-experience.
It is as if Matthew and Luke have seen into our hearts, foreseeing how our lives would be constantly riven by uncertainty within (“Do I matter?”) and without (“What should I do?”)? But, in truth, it is Jesus, not the two Evangelists, who recognises the corrosive effect of chronic anxiety: the way in which it chokes off joy, making us so afraid for the future that we are incapable of enjoying the present.
Not all fear is unreasonable. There is no point telling someone “Do not be afraid” if they are about to enter a war zone or have just received a terrible medical diagnosis. But most of the fears that beset us are by-products of our hamster-wheel minds, unable to turn the “What if?” switch to “off”. In this Gospel, we know what the little flock must have been afraid of, because of what Jesus offers them as reassurance: our Father will give us the Kingdom.
I still have not tackled that “Kingdom” that God has given us. But, if we must wait until Advent to discover what that Kingdom is, we can bear to do so precisely because of the encouragement that Jesus has given us: “Do not be afraid.”