Three Brisbane Aussie women are all in world boxing title contention: Che Kenneally, Skye Nicolson & Cherneka Johnson. Skye Nicholson recently fought for the World Boxing Council Featherweight title in Las Vegas and won. Chernaka Johnson fights in a month in Perth for the World Boxing Association (WBA) Bantamweight world title. And Che Kenneally will fight in June for the WBA Heavyweight world title. (See the ABC news article here.)
3 Aussie women fighting for world titles. Win or lose, that is greatness. How did they come to such greatness? They all started boxing in a converted garage in Yatala. Yatala is familiar to many SE Queenslanders because of its mighty pie shop on the edge of the Gold Coast. But it’s nothing special. Convenient between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, sure. But quite ordinary, if not a little industrial.
Do you think Che, Skye and Cherneka thought they would one day fight for world titles when they started training in a shed in Yatala? Perhaps someone spied greatness in them. But even then, to think, ‘Ahh. Here we are in industrial Yatala in a garage but soon, we’ll fight on the world stage and be honoured around the globe.' This would have seemed a touch on the crazy side. And yet, they are all fighting on the world stage.
This reminds me of the mustard seed story (Matthew’s Gospel chapter 13). Jesus picks the mustard seed because it is the most unlikely seed to produce greatness. It is the smallest and most insignificant seed. It is the shed in Yatala. And yet, the mustard seed produces a great tree. The greatest in the garden. How great? Jesus says it’s so great, ‘the birds of the sky come and nest in its branches’. Now, that still sounds a little ordinary – isn’t that what birds do – nest in trees. But it isn’t ordinary at all.
Jesus has in mind more than a massive Jacaranda or a towering gum tree. This parable points back to two Old Testament passages in which ancient kings ruled kingdoms that were so great and so powerful they were like trees in which ‘all the birds of the heavens nest’ or ‘all living creatures feed themselves from it’ (Egypt’s Pharoah and Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar). The trees are metaphors for kingdoms that ruled the world. They were the kingdoms that threw shade on everyone else. And history bears this out: the Neo Babylonian kingdom under Nebby was the most powerful state in the world after 600 BC. For a short while.
The great tree Jesus promised is a world-conquering kingdom that will throw shade on every other rule be it a national or multinational power. The Kingdom he will bring, the Kingdom of Heaven, though it looks tiny and insignificant will be the greatest there is. Now, you could say we can already see the greatness of the Kingdom of Heaven. The 12 disciples which included one betrayer have led to 2.1 Billion people calling themselves Christian.
But this underestimates the greatness. The greatness of the Kingdom of Heaven is not the number of people. It is more than that – it is a quality thing. It will be great because it will be perfect and eternal. The Kingdom of Heaven will never end. It started with Jesus, but it will never end, ever. For its citizens will never die – they are eternal. Their king and ruler, Jesus, will have brought them back from the dead. With him, they will have conquered death, never to die again.
And it will be perfect. For all those who deny the king, Jesus, will be thrown away, like unwanted fish from a hauled-in net. Not thrown away, back into the ocean, but fearfully and frightfully thrown away into judgment. Along with every evil seen and unseen. Those who are kept will now live lives where every goal is good, and every goal is achieved with perfect consequences.
So, why can’t we see the greatness of the Kingdom of Jesus now? Michael Horton puts it well.
'In its present phase, the kingdom is like its king before he was raised from the dead and exalted to the right hand of the Father. It can only appear weak and foolish to the world, even though this kingdom is more extensive in its global reach and more intensive in its redemptive power than any earthly empire in history.'
- Michael Horton
There is a hiddenness and behind-the-scenes hard work about being Christian now. For the kingdom life follows the pattern of Jesus, the humble teacher and man of sorrows. It is like all the sweating, skipping rope, early morning runs and grinding through hundreds of situps in a shed in Yatala. It is a lot of hard work (sometimes fun hard work – punching with skill is fun) but it is a long, long way from greatness, the world stage and from being lauded and loved around the world. The Kingdom of Heaven is hidden. It is hard work and sweat and inglorious garages.
So, why should you, if you’re a Christian keep turning up your local Bible-teaching, Jesus-centred church? Or put another way, why keep boxing? Because the Kingdom of Heaven that will come with Jesus’ return will be so great and so glorious that all the glory and greatness of this world will be smaller than a mustard seed stored in a shed in Yatala.
But, what if you’re not a Christian? Please find some garage, shed, school hall or church building where Jesus is taught from the pages of the Bible and discover the Kingdom of Heaven. The church might seem like an unlikely place from which greatness can be found but a garage in Yatala would argue otherwise.