Today marks the recognition of the one’s of the biggest concepts in popular culture: a history of Galactic Republics, Civils Wars, cruel, authoritarian Empires and the practitioners of a religion that explores the light and darkness of the universe. It is an epic story.
For me, it raises the question in our epic story of faith: What are we about? I would like to return to exploring the central ideas of our Christian faith. The Kingdom of God can be an inaccessible and confusing term. It sounds very heavy: what exact relevant can the image of the Kingdom (and God as King) offer to us, living a democracy that has a complicated relationship with faith, a society that values the economy as the marker of success and a community navigating its way through issues of trust and apprehension with the Church?
The Kingdom of God, referred also as the Kingdom of Heaven and the Reign of God, is a central concept of Christianity, and one that Jesus himself used and articulated extensively in his ministry. In a nutshell, Jesus was all about proclaiming this radical vision of a life transformed by God, individually and collectively. We see this in the Gospel of Luke, where the words that Jesus speaks at the beginning of this ministry completely summarises his purpose. It is like his inaugural speech, his introduction at the beginning of assembly when the new teacher is starting at a new school: Jesus wants to tell people, right from the beginning, what he is about.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. (Luke 4:16-20)
Let me give you two brief explanations to help you out.
The first is from Oxford Biblical Studies, a foundational theological resource.
The central theme of Jesus' preaching according to the synoptic gospels, and a major subject of scholarly investigation for more than a century.
The term does not occur in the OT; it is mentioned in the book of Wisdom (10: 10) about 50 BCE and in the targum of Isaiah (c. 100 BCE) and was current, though not common, in the time of Jesus. Matthew usually prefers the term ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, which is not to be understood as the realm of the departed hereafter; ‘heaven’ simply reflects Jewish reluctance to utter the divine name.
The primary meaning of ‘kingdom’ is ‘rule’ or ‘sovereignty’ or ‘kingship’, and Jews could not believe that the existing state of the nation, subject to Roman rule, was compatible with the justice of God and the covenant with his chosen people. God their king was bound to intervene. The proclamation of Jesus was that this kingship of God was indeed to break in on the world. Albert Schweitzer wrote the classical exposition of the view that for Jesus the Kingdom lay in the near future. In the Beatitudes, the Kingdom is promised as a future reward. In the Lord's Prayer, the disciples are to pray that the Kingdom will come. Schweitzer maintained that Jesus regarded himself as the Messiah to come and that he went up to Jerusalem to take upon himself the ‘Messianic woes’, the period of suffering sometimes expected by Jews before the coming of the Kingdom, and thus force the hand of God. He was willing to die because God would be obliged to vindicate him. Jesus did not tell the public about his role, and imposed a seal of secrecy on the lips of the disciples, though Judas betrayed this secret to the leaders.
An alternative reading of the synoptic evidence is that Jesus preached that the Kingdom was actually present in his own ministry, as demonstrated by the exorcisms (Luke 11: 20). The main thrust of the parables is that of the mysterious arrival of the Kingdom—e.g. the Hidden Treasure, the Costly Pearl. A greater than Solomon was there! It is these sayings, of the presence of the Kingdom, that make it difficult to accept Schweitzer's theory that Jesus regarded the Kingdom only as God's future intervention. For the Kingdom will not come with apocalyptic signs to be observed but could be discerned already—it is ‘among them’ or ‘within their grasp’ in their own society (Luke 17: 20–21)—if only they would recognize it. The present-ness of the Kingdom is obscure and expressed in the parables in which the seed is hidden in the ground or so small that it is almost invisible. Jesus did not encourage expectations that there would soon be a dramatic manifestation of God's rule. He did not foretell an eschatological battle or the intervention of a host of angels, as in the OT book of Daniel, or in the War Scroll at Qumran, or in the Assumption of Moses (a Jewish work
probably written during the lifetime of Jesus). Evil, in his view, was to be eliminated by suffering and refusing to retaliate (Matt. 5: 38–48).
The Kingdom is still future in the sense that the Rule of God is not yet fully operative in the world. Like the mustard seed, the rule of God will continue to grow and this is how it will be to the end of time (Mark 4: 26–9). So disciples are to act ‘as if’ they were already members of the Kingdom, ‘as if’ the new Age was already here. Absolute obedience in our human conditions may not be possible, but Jesus by his words and deeds laid down the guidelines which should be our aim, which is to live as though the Rule of God is already in our midst and yet preparing for its ultimate fullness when ethics will be irrelevant.
Modern scholarship has made it plain that in the gospels the Kingdom cannot be identified with the Church, as it has often been since the time of St Augustine, nor can it be envisaged in terms of human virtue or social righteousness, ‘building the Kingdom’. Nevertheless both these interpretations have relevance: the rule of God implies a realm in which rule can be exercised, and the Church is the society which aims to keep alive the incentive and the attraction of the Kingdom. And although the kingdom of God is not to be equated with a human Utopia, there are important ethical and social consequences of embracing or entering the Kingdom, the coming of which is to be sought (Matt. 6: 10). Social hierarchies and class discriminations are irrelevant (Matt. 22: 9–10) and evidently Jesus himself lived out these principles (Luke 7: 33–4). The Rich Young Ruler was asked to give away everything; there must be unquestioning trust in God and selfless love of others; Peter was told to forgive seventy times seven; the Samaritan of the parable did help a wounded Jew. And there could be an allusion to the concept of the Lord enthroned as king in the Holy of Holies in the Temple.
The second comes from the Centre for Action and Contemplation’s faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault.
Throughout the Gospel accounts, Jesus uses one particular phrase repeatedly: “the Kingdom of Heaven.” The words stand out everywhere. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like this,” “The Kingdom of Heaven is like that,” “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Whatever this Kingdom of Heaven is, it’s of foundational importance to what Jesus is trying to teach.
So, what is the Kingdom of Heaven? Biblical scholars have debated this question for almost as long as there have been biblical scholars. Many Christians, particularly those of a more evangelical persuasion, assume that the Kingdom of Heaven means the place you go when you die—if you’ve been “saved.” But the problem with this interpretation is that Jesus himself specifically contradicts it when he says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (that is, here) and “at hand” (that is, now). It’s not later, but lighter—some more subtle quality or dimension of experience accessible to you right in the moment. You don’t die into it; you awaken into it.
Others have equated the Kingdom of Heaven with an earthly utopia. The Kingdom of Heaven would be a realm of peace and justice, where human beings lived together in harmony and fair distribution of economic assets. For thousands of years, prophets and visionaries have laboured to bring into being their respective versions of this kind of Kingdom of Heaven, but somehow these earthly utopias never seem to stay put for very long. Jesus specifically rejected this meaning. When his followers wanted to proclaim him the Messiah, the divinely anointed king of Israel who would inaugurate the reign of God’s justice upon the earth, Jesus shrank from all that and said, strongly and unequivocally, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
Where is it, then? Author Jim Marion’s wonderfully insightful and contemporary suggestion is that the Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place.
Marion suggests specifically that the Kingdom of Heaven is Jesus’ way of describing a state we would nowadays call “nondual consciousness” or “unitive consciousness.” The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. These are indeed Jesus’ two core teachings, underlying everything he says and does.
The Kingdom is here, and not yet here. It may take a lifetime to understand it, and yet also, you living a life of love, faithfulness and hope is exactly the Kingdom in its reality.