The Kingdom: Break in case of emergency
By the time I reached my senior year in college, my religious life had been a total roller coaster. I was constantly switching back and forth from a position of attacking it to defending it, like a disgruntled child who complained endlessly about his family but would still defend them—with violence, if needed—if anyone badmouthed them.
I was in a weird middle zone, a no-man’s land between knowing and not knowing, or, more accurately, believing or not believing—because I was never really going to “know” about the divine without empirical evidence. Until then it was hope, fear, conjecture, and which way the preponderance of the evidence leaned.
Emergency Christianity
This was the year I took the next class on my theological journey. It was called “The Emergence of Christianity,” and took a close look at the religious and cultural milieu of 1st-century Palestine, and how, out of that particular intersection of spiritual views, political pressures, and societal force, the cult of followers of an unemployed son of a carpenter gave birth to the largest and most powerful religion on earth.
Due to the brokenness of my own spiritual self at the time, and the emotional stresses of that time of my life—right on the cusp of adulthood and feeling completely unprepared to launch out into the world—I renamed the class “Emergency Christianity.”
After the last few years of calculated attacks on Christianity—on the Bible, on the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, on the motives of the Apostles and Church Fathers, and on the knowledge and authority of current religious leaders—my faith was on the ropes.
This was the class I thought was going to finally show me that Jesus was just another itinerant Jewish rabbi preaching about the end of the world (which was in vogue at the time), whose Gospel was copied from the ecstatic religions of the near east, whose death and resurrection were exaggerated and unsupported, and whose religion only survived over others because Emperor Constantine decided 300 years after the fact to take advantage of Christian infrastructure as an infrastructure on which to build his empire.
I was ready to sacrifice my belief on the altar of evidence.
But what I learned was nothing short of a revelation. It made my heart beat fast, and made me want to run out onto the lawn and shout how I’d finally found the real Jesus.
Discovering the real Kingdom of God
We began with the context. In Palestine, in the 1st century, there were indeed multiple religious groups, messianic prophets, and cults, mixing with one another and with their Roman occupiers. There were a range of beliefs, from the emerging idea of a conscious afterlife to religious groups who believed in nothingness after death, and from ascetic monks whose self-denial was seen as holiness to those who ate and drank whatever they saw fit.
The ideas for which Jesus is most famous—particularly that the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor as oneself are preeminent among God’s commandments—were not original ideas that began with Him. The modern dichotomy between Jesus’ open, heart-based teaching and the legalism of the Old Testament is somewhat artificial, in that the Hebrew Bible had been teaching that the love of one’s neighbor was at the heart of the law all along—even in the outpouring of the law in Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 18 (KJV) says:
Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.
The notion that the Old Testament God is solely a God of Wrath, and that Jesus brought a God of Mercy, misses the fact that mercy is also a quality of the God of the Hebrew Bible, as God is quoted as saying through the prophet in Hosea 6:6 (KJV):
For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, And the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.
I was amazed but comforted by the notion that there was a direct through-line from the Hebrew Bible—the only scriptures in existence in Jesus’ time—and the teachings of Jesus himself.
This gave me an interpretive tool that I had not had before. I didn’t know how to articulate it at the time, but writer and minister Brian Zahnd put it into words for me perfectly years later in his book Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God:
The immutability of God is foundational to our faith. If God is subject to change, then the very ground beneath our feet is moving and nothing is stable….What I can accept is that our own understanding of God is in the process of growth, change, and mutation. Something is changing, but it’s not God.
If Jesus is like God, and God does not change, then Jesus has ALWAYS been like God. Meaning God has ALWAYS been like Jesus.
And here’s where things get interesting.
Because Jesus is preaching about the end of the world, it is easy to interpret much of what he says within that context. In particular, it is tempting to interpret the constant mentions of the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven (depending are the translation) as talking about Heaven, that is, some far-off, future, post-death, non-earthly kingdom that has no relationship to what is happening here.
But what I learned is that the words of Jesus, as they are communicated to us through the Gospels, are much more immediate than that.
Seeking the Kingdom instead of waiting for it
The Kingdom of God, I learned, is not a far-off future utopia. At least not entirely. The Kingdom, which might more accurately be translated as “the Reign” or “the Authority” of God, is something that is already begun. Here. Now. Among us.
It is not yet fully fulfilled, but it has started. If the Kingdom of God were a bomb, it would not have exploded yet, but the fuse had been lit.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus did say “My Kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:3). But he did not say that there was no trace of the Kingdom IN this world. In fact, in Luke 17:21, Jesus is quoted as saying “the Kingdom of God is within you.” (KJV). Other translations render this as “in your midst,” or “among you.”
When Jesus says “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” in Matthew 4:17, (echoing an earlier end-times prophet, John the Baptist), he is not just talking about the Kingdom of God being close to happening in time. It is also starting to happen here WHERE WE ARE, as well.
As Jesus says in Matthew 12:28, “the Kingdom of God has come unto you,” (KJV), or “come upon you.” (NIV)
All of which explains a lot of Jesus’ ministry.
If one reads the words of Jesus as they appear on the page of the Bible, his primary teaching is NOT about God’s wrath toward sinners and the desperate need for forgiveness and salvation.
Jesus’ main teachings are about the values of this Kingdom of God. Values that upend accepted power structures. Values that give strength to the poor and take down the rich. Values that reward risk and spit out conservatism as a drink that has gone lukewarm. Values that do not follow the normal laws of cause and effect—people are rewarded for doing little, forgiven without paying their dues, healed even when Jesus doesn’t think their worthy of it.
The power of the Kingdom at that point even exceeds the imagination of Jesus! (Reminding us, of course, that he was as fully human as he was fully God).
In the Kingdom of God, shepherds leave their safe flock of 99 to save one that has wandered off. Tiny mustard seeds become mighty trees. The poor are blessed and the meek are strong. Swords are beaten into garden implements.
The Kingdom loves its enemies, turns its other cheek to more violence, and saves the best wine for last.
Jesus uses the Kingdom of God as a window through which to see the nature of God, the nature which is in Jesus and which Jesus reflects back onto God.
The values of this Kingdom are upside down and topsy turvy from what we expect.
And those values are the values we are supposed to start living now.
It gives “Seek first the Kingdom of God” a whole new meaning.
This wasn’t just a teaching about how to prepare to die—if it had ever been about that at all.
This was a teaching about how to live.
This eye-opening vision completely changed the way that I conduct my life, perhaps forever.
Was this being blind and now seeing, having ears closed but now hearing?
Maybe this, this transformation of my vision—maybe this is what it meant to be born again.
The Kingdom of God truly did feel like it was upon me.
