During his ministry, Jesus clearly had a following that was large enough to worry the Jewish religious and political leadership. According to John’s Gospel [6.15], the people wanted to make him king and Jesus withdrew in order to be alone.
Towards the end of his ministry, Jesus deliberately acted out a prophecy from the OT book of Zechariah [9.9ff]. That described God’s idea of kingship. It was not of might and warfare. It described God’s king not as protected by armies, but as getting rid of the instruments of warfare. And so it says
Rejoice, your king comes to you,
humble and riding on a donkey.
Jesus does just that, rides into Jerusalem, not on a horse like some victorious warrior, but – and probably looking a bit silly - on a donkey, in the hope that people will recognise what God’s definition of kingship is. It backfired. Those who chose to be his enemies were able to say, at his trial, that he had claimed to be king.
They had the authority to have him stoned to death as a blasphemer, but that would have brought the wrath of his followers on their heads, and created just the riot they were trying to avoid. But if they persuaded Pilate that Jesus would lead a revolution, Pilate would execute him with as much compunction as he would squash a fly; and they might avoid the riot and preserve their jobs.
Luke tells us that Jesus’ closest disciples misunderstood at first. In his Gospel [24.13ff], he describes two disconsolate disciples walking to Emmaus after the crucifixion, and telling a stranger that they had hoped he might have been the one to redeem Israel. It was until later that they recognised that the stranger was Jesus.
In Luke’s second volume, the book of Acts [1.6], he describes the disciples asking the risen Jesus if he would “now restore the kingdom to Israel”. His answer was to tell them to wait for Pentecost, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. The OT prophet Isaiah [11.2] wrote that the Spirit was the Spirit of wisdom and understanding.
And the disciples did come to understand. Their teaching was passed on to those who, some decades later, wrote the Gospels. From those, we can get a picture of what Jesus thought about the Kingdom of God.
We ourselves might easily misunderstand since, for us, a kingdom is a territory. The Queen rules over the kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; but she has no jurisdiction in Spain, which has its own King. In the Greek in which the NT was written, and in the Aramaic that Jesus spoke, the word kingdom does not have that connotation.
The phrase “Kingdom of God” is not a good translation [of the Greek and Aramaic words which mean] strictly “reign”, “sovereignty” – “kingship” rather than “kingdom”. It is not so much a place over which God rules as God’s reign itself. The Hebrews had been familiar with the concept of God as King, ever since the earliest teachers of prophetic religion had demythologised the ancient cultic notion of the king as god.
[Alan Richardson, Introduction to the theology of the NT, SCM, 1958].
If we are good at our OTs, we shall recognise that the author of the book of Wisdom, who wrote in about 100 BC, was taking about Esau and Jacob - and they came long before the political and territorial ideas of the kingdom of Israel. The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God, make it quite clear that he is not talking about a restoration of the ancient OT kingdom of David and his successors. He is talking about God reigning in the hearts and minds and lives of those who commit themselves to God.
So, as you might expect, the Kingdom has both a present reality, and a future fulfilment. If we want to know what Jesus thought about it all, we need to read his parables which often begin – in the rabbinic way – with the words “The Kingdom of heaven is like …”
“The kingdom of heaven is like this [Matt 13.24ff]. A man sowed his field with good seed; but, while everyone was asleep, his enemy came, sowed darnel among the wheat, and made off. When the corn sprouted, and began to fill out, the darnel could be seen among it. The farmer’s men went to their master and said, ‘Shall we go and gather the darnel?’
‘No’, he answered; ‘in gathering, you might pull up the wheat at the same time. Let them both grow together till harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the darnel first, and tie it in bundles for burning; then collect the wheat into my barn’”.
It sounds as though the kingdom has to do with judgement at the end of all things. But what about this? Luke [14.1ff] gives the story of Jesus having a meal with a pious Jew and telling him to invite the poor and the lame – those who were not able to repay him. Another guest – who also sounds a bit pious – said “Happy are those who will sit at the feast in the kingdom of God!”
In the context of this particular story, it seems to be the future tense that gets Jesus’ goat: Happy are those who will sit at the feast. And so he tells another parable.
A man was giving a big dinner party and had sent out many invitations. According to the custom of the day, when the meal was ready, he sent his servants to conduct the guests to his house. Of course, many came; but a few made excuses. One had got married and was off on honeymoon; one had bought some cattle and needed to see to them; one had acquired some land and needed to inspect it. When the servants told their master, he was angry and told them to go into the town and invite the poor, the blind and the lame. Even after that there was still room, and the master told them to persuade the vagrants to come in. He wanted, he said, a house full of people enjoying themselves.
What are we to make of that? First of all, perhaps, that the invitations have already gone out and that the party – which is the kingdom of God – is already in process. Second, that those who don’t come, don’t come because that is their choice. God does not arbitrarily exclude anyone; but he can’t stop people excluding themselves.
Does that mean that God, having sent out the invitations – perhaps by ensuring we have a Bible – simply sits back and lets us get on with it? Well, no. Luke [15.1ff] tells us about the Jewish religious leaders complaining that Jesus shared meals with people they regarded as sinners. Jesus’ response was to tell two stories.
One was about a shepherd one of whose sheep wandered off and got lost. The shepherd, hoping the rest of the flock would be all right, went off to find the lost sheep. Maybe that was difficult and involved crossing difficult terrain. Eventually he found it and, because the sheep could not look after itself, put it on his shoulders to bring it home. It must have been heavy – like the weight of a cross – but he brought it home; and then invited his friends to the pub to celebrate.
Again, there was a woman who lost a coin. We are probably meant to understand it was part of her dowry – it had been entrusted to her. Probably she wore it on a string, as part of a necklace, next to her skin. Having lost it, she searched the house for it, sweeping the earth floor and rifling through the straw that covered it. When she found it, she invited her friends round for tea and cakes. They needed to celebrate with her.
It’s interesting that Jesus represents God as a woman in that story. There are several stories in the OT which talk of God as female but we tend not to notice them.
With all that celebration, are we to suppose that the kingdom of God must be obvious and advertised with neon lights? Well. No.
The kingdom of God, said Jesus, [Luke 13.20,21] is like a woman who took yeast and mixed it with three measures of flour until it was all leavened. The dough rose, and became bread for the family to eat.
It’s interesting that he again compared God with a woman. Now does that story mean that the kingdom, like the yeast, looks small and insignificant? Well, no. It might start small but it doesn’t stay that way.
The kingdom of God, said Jesus [Luke 13.18,19] is like a man taking a tiny seed and planting it in his garden. It grows into a tree and the birds nest in it.
Clearly some of the parables contradict one another. But Jesus did not tell them as scientific descriptions. He told them in order to make us think; to help us see things in ways that make sense – and, maybe, that would make sense in different ways and on different occasions; that would fill our needs for understanding.
In different parables, Jesus sometimes says things that are not always consistent. That isn’t because he doesn’t know his own mind. It’s because he is trying to make our mind like his, and to see the enormous riches of the Father’s grace. Some of his parables, after all, are ambiguous within themselves. Here’s one [Matt 13.44].
The Kingdom of heaven is like a man who found treasure buried in a field. He went and sold everything he had, and bought the field.
Now then: does that mean that the kingdom is so precious that we are to give up everything in order to possess it? There are times in our life when that might seem to be the right way to understand the story.
Or does the story mean that we are the treasure, and that God was so anxious to have us that took human form and gave up everything – even life itself – in order to possess us? I think what it means depends on what we need it to mean; and that was what Jesus intended. Either way, it is not a matter for complacency.
Jesus takes the Law of Moses as the hallowed instrument of the rule of God in Israel, and affirms it to love God with one’s whole self, and to love the neighbour as one’s self. But now, in the section of St Matthew’s Gospel that includes the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus pushed the Jewish moral code to its limits.
To nurse anger, says Jesus, is as bad as murder; to lust after someone in addition to our spouse is as bad as adultery. Loving one’s neighbour is extended to loving our enemies. “There is no possible situation which is not related to the rule of God” [CF Evans: The Lord’s Prayer, SCM 1963, 1997].
Only a very few of us live up to that. We may have been moved by a report in the press of a priest in Bristol who resigned her living because she could not bring herself to forgive those who killed her daughter in the London bombing. We can sympathise with her, and we ought to admire her integrity.
If we can’t live up to our faith, and if most people think it silly to try, and if a few people with great power think it takes second place to their place in the world – then what sense does it make to pray: Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven? We know that this world will never be such an idyllic place.
I think it makes a lot of sense. Prayer doesn’t prevent natural disaster or acts of folly by others. But prayer does change those who pray, just as yeast turns flour into bread. Maybe we should end with a quotation from Pat’s sermon last week.
“If we accept Jesus’ invitation to call God ‘our Father’ – if we are bold enough to do that – then we are also saying with Jesus, ‘Let the kingdom be now – let the kingdom be us’. It is a hugely risky thing to say. Jesus called his disciples, and he calls us, to take that risk”.