Already and Not Yet: A Reflection on 2 Thessalonians 1:1-10 and Luke 17:20-25
The Pharisees ask Christ when the kingdom will arrive—as if it’s a future event they’ll observe from the outside. Christ’s answer cuts through their framework entirely: The kingdom of God is within you. Not coming later. Not “out there” somewhere. Within.
But Christ doesn’t mean the Kingdom is merely interior or limited to present experience. He’s saying you’re already participating in reality infinitely greater than you can perceive. The Kingdom within you now extends far beyond what you currently see—like communing with a vast ocean while standing in shallow water. The ocean is real, you’re genuinely in it, but there’s infinite depth you haven’t experienced yet.
St. Gregory of Nyssa illuminates this truth: “The finest aspect of our mutability is the possibility of growth in good; as it changes, more and more into the divine.”[1] Notice what Gregory’s revealing: your capacity for change isn’t a weakness—it’s the pathway for endless growth into divine life. If you were static, fixed, unchanging, you couldn’t participate more fully in God. But because you’re dynamic, alive, growing, you can grow eternally toward the infinite divine reality that’s already present within you.
Paul echoes this in 2 Thessalonians: their faith is already growing exceedingly, their love already abounding. The kingdom isn’t something they’re waiting to enter—it’s something they’re participating in right now, through persecution, through tribulation, through their actual lives.
Transformation Through What You’d Rather Avoid
The kingdom comes through what Christ (and we) would rather skip. First He must suffer many things and be rejected—before the lightning-flash revelation of the Son of Man, there’s Gethsemane, the cross, the descent into death itself.
The Thessalonians are living this same pattern. Their patience and faith in all your persecutions isn’t obstacle to the kingdom—it’s participation in it. They’re being formed into Christ’s image by walking His path: choosing love while facing hatred, maintaining faith through tribulation, growing toward God precisely through what they’d prefer to avoid.
This is the inner work that transformation requires: facing what you’ve been denying, feeling what you’ve been suppressing, letting difficulty shape you rather than performing your way through it. When Paul says they’re counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you also suffer, he’s not saying suffering earns the kingdom—he’s saying suffering honestly faced and walked through is how you participate more fully in divine life that’s already present.
Christ didn’t spiritually bypass His terror. In Gethsemane, He felt it fully—sweating blood, begging God for another way. On the cross, He named the deepest wound every abandoned child feels: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He articulated the pain, didn’t suppress it, didn’t rationalize it away. Then, from that place of complete honesty: Father, forgive them. He chose love—not by suppressing rage, but by feeling everything and then choosing anyway.
St. Athanasius reveals: “He became man, that we might be made God.”[2] This clarifies what’s happening in the Thessalonians through their suffering—they’re being made divine, not by avoiding hardship, but by remaining faithful within it while calling on divine presence to meet them there. Christ entered our suffering to transfigure it from within. You participate in that same divine life by bringing Christ into your pain, not bypassing it.
The Cosmic Pattern and the Ancient Path
Paul promises future vindication—the Lord revealed from heaven, tribulation repaid, rest given, divine glory manifested. This isn’t just consolation for suffering; it’s revealing reality’s actual structure: love is stronger than hatred, life defeats death, beauty and goodness are ontologically prior to evil and ugliness.
That cosmic reality is already present within you—but not only present as interior experience. You’re communing now with divine life that extends infinitely beyond what you perceive. The Kingdom doesn’t arrive externally first and then enter you. It’s growing from within right now, every time you choose love through difficulty, every time your faith persists through persecution, every time you face what you’d rather deny and let it transform you.
This pattern stretches back through the patriarchs who walked with God while facing their own trials. Abraham left everything familiar. Jacob wrestled with God all night. Moses led a rebellious people through wilderness for forty years. They experienced divine presence not by avoiding difficulty but by remaining faithful within it. The Temple preserved this truth: the high priest entered the Holy of Holies through ritual preparation and faithful presence, never bypassing the process.
Christ restores full access to what they glimpsed. The veil tears. Divine presence becomes available to all—but the pattern remains: faithful presence in ordinary life, including (especially) in suffering, forms you into someone capable of fuller communion with the divine life you’re already participating in.
Lightning Doesn’t Need Announcement
They will say ‘Look here!’ or ‘See there!’—don’t follow them. The kingdom’s full revelation will be unmistakable, like lightning flashing across the sky. No need for special interpreters, no secret knowledge required, no manipulative voices saying “only we know where to look.”
That lightning-flash of final revelation will manifest publicly what’s already been growing secretly within those who’ve been doing the inner work all along. The Thessalonians’ faith grows exceedingly—present tense. When Christ is glorified in His saints, He’s revealing what they’ve already become through participation in His suffering and love.
St. Gregory of Nyssa taught that this growth is literally endless—what he called epektasis, the soul’s eternal maturation toward God. The divine nature is infinite, so participation in it can never be exhausted or completed. What you’re experiencing now is real communion with God, genuine transformation, actual participation in divine life—and simultaneously just the beginning. There’s always infinitely more.
Participating Now in What Will Be Revealed
Paul describes Christ coming to be glorified in His saints and to be admired among all those who believe. This isn’t external approval—it’s the full manifestation of what’s been true all along. The divine life they’ve been participating in partially will be revealed fully. Not a different reality, but this reality fully manifested. Not abandoning creation for somewhere else, but experiencing creation as it truly is: charged with God’s glory, saturated with divine presence.
The suffering isn’t punishment or obstacle. It’s the pathway, same as it was for Christ. Not suffering for suffering’s sake, but the honest confrontation with what is, the refusal to spiritually bypass, the choice to love from wholeness rather than suppression. This formation continues beyond death—not as rupture but as continuity, fuller participation in the same divine life.
You’re not waiting for the kingdom to arrive someday. You’re participating in it right now—but in reality far greater than you can fully perceive. Every time you choose truth over comfortable lies, love over self-protection, presence over distraction, you’re communing with divine life. Every moment you face what you’ve been avoiding—feel your anger instead of suppressing it, acknowledge your wounds instead of performing strength, integrate what you’ve denied instead of projecting it—you participate more fully in the Kingdom’s reality.
The cosmic vindication Paul promises is the revelation of reality as it truly is. The universe won’t “catch up” to your transformation as if it’s separate. Rather, what will be revealed is that the divine life you’ve been participating in all along is infinitely vaster than you perceived. Your inner transformation and cosmic reality aren’t two things—they’re your particular participation in the one divine life that holds all things in existence, manifested fully at last.
The Greater Horizon 