| Jesus and the End-Time The Kingdom and the End-Time The Announcement of the Kingdom |
From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" Matthew 4:17It is impossible to discuss the end-time at length without taking the Kingdom seriously. The Kingdom was the principle them of the preaching of Jesus and the purpose of his work; no wonder, then, that his first message was "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." He went to the heart of the matter from the very first. The work of Christ is not the perpetuation of the Church, not the uplifting of morals, not the improvement of society, except as these are included in his greater work: the realization of the Kingdom. Having said that, one gets a feeling of uneasiness. Church, society, and morals are part of our daily experience, while the Kingdom has an alien sound to our ears. Americans do not have kings. Each July 4 we celebrate our independence from kings. And the only literary category that says much about kingdoms is fantasy; the kingdom is the place where the fairy prince and princess live happily ever after. Obviously that is not the Kingdom Jesus is talking about. In order to understand him we must try to think and feel as his original audience did; there is an enormous difference between the psychology of a twentieth-century middle-class citizen, secure and proud in his freedom, and that of a first-century Galilean peasant whose experience of life is almost entirely circumscribed by external forces. The audience that heard Jesus' announcement of the Kingdom was composed mainly of peasants like that. A brief review of the history of the Jews will help our understanding of them. A thousand years before, Israel under David and Solomon was a secure and proud nation with pretensions of empire. Then the glory began to slip; the nation divided, and though the descendants of David continued to reign in Jerusalem for almost four hundred years, the city never again attained the splendor of its past. After Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar (586 B.C.), the land passed from the influence of one neighboring power to another. The last real bid for independence by the Jews in their own land (that of the Maccabees and their descendants) ended over a hundred years before Jesus came preaching the good news of the Kingdom at hand. Thus you have in the audience listening to Jesus a proud but oppressed people. Further, you have a people who cherish a promise in their sacred Scriptures that one day the kingdom as their forebears had known it under David and Solomon would be restored to them in such a glorious way that it would be called the Kingdom of God. The coming King who would establish the Kingdom was called in Hebrew Messiah, and in Greek the Christ. In both languages the words meant "anointed one" and connoted someone who was especially chosen by God. If you can get this feeling for the concept of kingdom, you realize that the announcement of the Kingdom of Jesus would sound like a thunderclap in the ears of his hearers. The Kingdom for them was not a place at all-most certainly not a fairy-tale place-but the reign of God himself, through his Messiah, over his chosen nation. To the believing Jew the Kingdom was not an illusion but the ultimate reality. No wonder, then that Jesus prefaced his announcement of the Kingdom with the command to repent. If the Kingdom of heaven is at hand, then prepare yourself-turn away from aimless, self-centered living and give your full attention to it. If the Kingdom is at hand, this is a moment of decision. It calls for repentance. And the call is not limited to Jews. The Kingdom is the ultimate reality, affecting every person. No one is prepared for the Kingdom unless he repents. The announcement of the Kingdom is personal, calling for your personal decision. The announcement itself means that God is taking direct control of his world. He has always been in charge, of course, but his control has not always been apparent. In the Kingdom it becomes apparent to anyone who submits to it. According to this plain definition it is unwise and unnecessary to make a distinction, as some interpreters do, between the Kingdom of heaven, as Jesus speaks of it in Matthew, and the Kingdom of God, as he speaks of it in Luke. Both of those uses point to the same ultimate reality; no one but God reigns in heaven, of course, so we should not make a distinction without a difference. We cannot know absolutely whether Jesus used the words interchangeably or not, but comparisons of similar passages in the two gospels seem to indicate that he did. Certainly it is fair to say that both "heaven" and "God" are accurate translations of the same concept, however it may have been expressed in the original preaching of Jesus. So when I refer to the Kingdom, I am referring to the reign of God-past, present, and future. From this point of view human history, personal and corporate, is the account of a struggle against the Kingdom. Occasionally the Kingdom prevails. Often it does not, and humankind flees a little further from God. Few men in the history of the Church understood this as well as E. Stanley Jones, who saw the Kingdom as God's way of doing things-as the way the universe is planned. Therefore, said Jones, the people of the Kingdom have the whole universe backing them up. Jesus announced the Kingdom as good news-not good views. It was a total life plan to be practiced now, both in individual and collective life. We saw that the Kingdom of God was used interchangeably with life-enter into life now, and enter the Kingdom now. If the Kingdom is life, then it is something to be lived, lived now, not merely hereafter.1The Kingdom is the point of the end-time. It is a process now and a goal hereafter. The process continues, but the goal is delayed. It is a mistake equally to push the Kingdom into the future and to contain it in the present. If 2,000 years ago the Kingdom was at hand, as Jesus said it was, then from our point in history the kingdom is past. If God truly reigns, then the Kingdom certainly belongs to the present. And if the Kingdom is also our goal, then it is certainly in the future. The kingdom has been coming from Adam onward. Furthermore, since the King has been here all along, in complete, if paradoxical, charge of his realm, the kingdom has been here tool. In the high Mystery of the kingdom, therefore, all men are somehow both in and out of it.2The decisive moment in the Kingdom was the appearance of Jesus. When he declared the Kingdom was at hand, he meant that in his person, work, and message the Kingdom was present; he was proclaiming himself King. Before this John the Baptist had pointed toward the Kingdom in the person of the coming King, but he could not be the Kingdom. Jesus himself said that of those born of woman none was greater than John the Baptist, but he also said that the person who was least in the Kingdom was greater than John (Luke 7:28). A Hindu philosopher quoted by Stanley Jones summed up the difference between John and Jesus, between good men and the Kingdom: "John the Baptist tried to make people better. Jesus made them different."3 Where Jesus is, there is the kingdom. That is what Jesus meant when he told some people who were looking for the Kingdom that the Kingdom was in their midst (Luke 17:21). He was in their midst. The Kingdom, therefore, is not to be confused with the close of the age. In the events of the end the Kingdom will appear in its fullness, but its reality is present with us now. The Kingdom is the reign of God, revealed to us in Jesus Christ; wherever Christ is present and the will of God is done, to that degree the Kingdom also is present. There are two personal implications of this understanding of the Kingdom. The first is that the world is not your worry and mine after all; it is God's world, he is in control of it, he has never abandoned it. In fact, he has gone to great lengths to establish his claim on the world. It is our responsibility and privilege to live in the Kingdom with the universe backing us up, but we do not have to save the world. The second implication brings us back to Jesus' command to repent. If God is in control and Christ is coming soon to take full and apparent control, then it is time for us to behave accordingly. There is in Laura Ingalls Wilder's account of her husband's boyhood, Farmer Boy, the delightful story of how his parents go away for a brief vacation, leaving the farm in the charge of their four children, the oldest fifteen and the youngest nine. For the first several days they have a wonderful time, doing no work beyond necessary chores. Then they realize suddenly that their parents will be back the next day, and they have to work frantically to get the farm ready for their return.4 For a little while they had pretended that the farm was theirs, but it wasn't. It was their father's all the time, as much when he was absent as when he was present. The children had this advantage over us: they knew when their parents were returning. But we do not know when the Lord will come. But it doesn't matter. The Kingdom is his now. We ought to live accordingly, whether he comes back today or waits for a thousand years. 1 E. Stanley Jones, The Unshakeable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person, Abingdon Press, 1972, p. 69. 2 Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox, Seabury Press, 1974, p. 138. 3 Jones, op. cit, p. 80. 4 Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy, Harper and Row, 1971, pp. 203-220. » Next Page — The Winning of the Kingdom » Table of Contents » Home |