The Dawning of the Kingdom of God (Part 4)
Jesus went to the synagogue in his home-town and read the Scripture lesson:
The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. (Lk 4:18-19)
Then he closed the book and said “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4:21). It was a bold move; Jesus was clearly announcing the arrival of the Kingdom of God, that day “acceptable to the Lord” when justice and mercy would be established on the earth (Is 58:5-14). In fact, he was telling his people that his own ministry marked the dawning of that Kingdom in their midst.
The Kingdom of God is simply God’s global shalom, in other words, the state of affairs in which He reigns over every aspect of human life: over human minds with truth, over human hearts with hope, over human wills with love, over human bodies with health and wholeness, and over human communities with justice and peace. In one sense, Jesus said, that Kingdom is already here, beginning with his own mission: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15) and “[B]ehold, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Lk 17:21). His ministry of healing and exorcism was a sure sign that God’s love is breaking into the world in a new way to set his people free from all that oppresses them: “[I]f it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Lk 11:20). Yet the Kingdom of God has not yet come in its fullness, Jesus said, for it will grow gradually like a mustard seed into a great tree of life (Mt 13:31-32), and leaven the world just as yeast leavens a new loaf of bread (Mt 13:33). So Jesus taught his disciples to pray with hope: “Father, may your kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven” (Lk 11:1; Mt 6:10). Moreover, Jesus knew it would take more than just gradual growth and leavening for the Kingdom to spread and become established on the earth. He predicted there also would be cataclysmic events along the way: earthquakes, plagues, wars, famines, the fall of the great Temple in Jerusalem, and the worldwide persecution of his followers. God’s ultimate triumph, however, was assured, and Jesus promised that one day he himself would return to this world with all the angels of heaven to bring God’s Kingdom to its consummation (Mk 13:24-27).
Christ’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God clearly challenged all of the lesser kingdoms of his day — and our own. Families, economic and religious institutions, social systems, nations, empires: all must make way for the dawning of the Kingdom that God freely offers. Thus, Jesus taught what we may call a new “Kingdom ethic” for social and institutional life. First, he commanded his disciples to serve one another, not to dominate and oppress one another, saying: “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, for the Son of Man also came not to be served but to serve …” (Mk 10:44-45). This ideal of service was to be based on his own example as one who devoted his life to caring for the spiritual and bodily needs of his neighbors: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you …” (Jn 13:34). Furthermore, Jesus put no artificial boundaries of gender, ethnicity, race, class, nationality, or religious adherence on his concept of one’s “neighbor.” The neighbor whom we are commanded to love is anyone in need we meet along life’s way (see Lk 10:29-37, the Parable of the Good Samaritan). Jesus himself broke through the strongest social barriers of his day by freely offering his friendship to women, children, Samaritans, Gentiles, Romans, tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers — all whom society considered second-class citizens or social and religious outcasts were to be included and treated as one’s true “neighbors.” Christ summed up his Kingdom ethic in two commandments, which he said were the greatest of all (both taken from the Jewish scriptures): “The first is, ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mk 12:29-31).
The preaching of Jesus about the ethics of the Kingdom has sometimes been misunderstood. Reza Aslan, for example, claimed that because Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself” was taken from an Old Testament passage that definitely had one’s Jewish neighbors in mind (Lev 19:18; see Aslan, Zealot, p. 121-122), Jesus did not intend to promote any universal, cross-cultural benevolence here. But Aslan forgets that immediately after Jesus delivered his teaching on the Two Great Commandments, he explained what he meant by telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In this parable, the last person that his Jewish listeners would have expected — a Samaritan (in other words, a heretical, sectarian half-breed!) — turns out to be the one who practices true neighbor-love by crossing over the highest social barriers, and showing compassion on a wounded Israelite (Lk 10:29-37).
Another aspect of the ministry of Jesus that often leads to misunderstanding is his “table-fellowship” with tax collectors and sinners. This is sometimes held to be Christ’s endorsement of post-modern “inclusivity”: in other words, that everyone is welcome and accepted just as they are in the fellowship of his disciples. But Jesus was not a post-modern moral relativist. He clearly stated why he ate with tax collectors and sinners, when challenged by the hard-hearted Pharisees for doing so: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Lk 5:29-31). In other words, Jesus did not condone or turn a blind eye to sin: he simply stretched the boundaries of the outreach of God’s Kingdom to include everyone in need of mercy, even the worst sinners (cf. Lk 18:9-14, the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector). John Dickson in Jesus: A Short Life (2008), explains what Jesus meant by his table-fellowship with the lost and the broken:
Why did Jesus eat with the immoral and the irreligious? Why did he leave himself open to the charge of being ‘a glutton and a drunkard’ and the ‘friend of sinners’? The first thing to say was that Jesus was not approving of the behaviour of sinners. It is quite clear that he called everyone [including the self-righteous Pharisees] to the life of radical renewal defined by his teaching. All were to love God with all their heart and their neighbors as themselves. Sinners, by definition, were not fulfilling this twofold imperative. Jesus did not confine his warnings to the spiritual elite. A passage … makes plain that even the ordinary folk living in the towns and villages of Galilee were destined, if they failed to heed Jesus’ call, to be condemned when God’s kingdom is revealed in the world … (Mt 11:21-24; Lk 10;12-15). …
By deliberately seeking opportunities to dine with sinners, Jesus was embodying the friendship with sinners that he believed God wanted to achieve. There was a message of love here, but it was not a love that left the beloved unchanged. It was a transformative love. Jesus apparently thought that purity — his purity — was a more powerful contagion (if that is the right word) than sin. When Jesus invited sinners to dine with him, he was confident that the welcoming grace of God would overwhelm, and therefore transform, those who ate at his table. He believed in a kind of ‘contagious holiness’ …. (p. 73-74)
The healing ministry of Jesus also powerfully manifested the merciful love of God, and the dawning of the Kingdom. For example, a leper met Jesus along the roadside and said to him: “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” Then Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying “I will” [what could be translated as “Indeed I will” or “Of course I will”]; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him (Lk 5:12-13).
Wherever Jesus went, he channelled the Father’s healing power to people who were sick. In his day Jewish society saw many illnesses as punishments from God for sin (whether for the sins of the sick individuals themselves, or for the sins of their ancestors). Some chronically ill individuals — especially those with exceptionally grotesque or contagious diseases — were cast out from the community altogether. By befriending lepers, Jesus offered them not only a source of bodily healing, but a newly awakened faith in a God of compassion, and a re-union with the community of God’s people, Israel.
Jesus did not heal by “magic touch”: in some places he could accomplish very little because of people’s lack of faith in him. Many were healed, however, because they trusted him in the midst of their afflictions. Jesus often said to them: “Your faith has made you well.” What Jesus meant was that by offering him their whole condition with complete surrender and unconditional trust, they left themselves open to the healing power of the Spirit of God that flowed through him. Their faith did not actually cause them to be healed; it simply removed obstacles so that the healing love of Christ could flow freely into their hearts and lives.
Most historians now recognize that Jesus is portrayed as a miracle-worker in the very earliest strands of the New Testament material, as far back as they can trace. This means that the miracle stories were not legends which came to embellish the Jesus story over the course of time (say, over several generations) in order to heighten his significance. Rather, they were an integral part of the story of Jesus from the beginning, because they illustrated perfectly the central message that he proclaimed: that the Kingdom of God is dawning upon the world through the person and ministry of Jesus himself. He came precisely to proclaim that message, and to perform signs that show that it is true. But the heart of it was his invitation to the sin-sick, the suffering and the care-worn to put all their trust in his merciful Love:
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Mt 11:28-30)
Next Time: Jesus Christ — Liberator and Freedom Fighter?
Robert Stackpole, STD
© 2020 Mere Christian Fellowship
