Building Bridges

This past Wednesday evening at our monthly Faith for Living session we looked together at the topic of the kingdom of God.  Here at the beginning of the liturgical year, how      appropriate to pause at this central reality of Jesus public proclamation of the Gospel.  “The time in fulfilled.  The   kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent, therefore, and believe  the good news” (Mk 1:15).

Permit me to share with you just a couple of the fresh thoughts I have gained on the kingdom as found in Jesus’ preaching from the biblical scholar Richard Bauckham.  “The first three Gospels, the Synoptics, make it abundantly clear that at the heart of all that Jesus said and did lay what he called ‘the kingdom of God’.  This translation is the familiar one, but ‘rule’ might be closer than ‘kingdom’ to what Jesus meant.  The term is dynamic and refers primarily to the activity of God.  But, in Jesus’ usage, ‘the kingdom of God’ is also something one can ‘enter’, and in this case, it designates the sphere of God’s rule, which in English we would call his ‘kingdom’ or ‘realm’.  So we need to bear in mind both dimensions—active rule and territorial kingdom—if we are to do justice to Jesus’ usage” (Jesus:  A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2011, 35).

Jesus’ teaching concerning this kingdom can very often seem radical.  Most especially, as it is found in the famous Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 where we hear such things as, ‘Blessed are the poor,’ and “…do not worry about your life, what you will eat [or drink], or about your body, what you will wear.”  “What transforms society in Jesus’ ideal is knowing God as the utterly reliable and endlessly generous provider of all good, on whom all creatures are completely dependent.  Trusting this God is what enables the generous sharing among people that makes God’s generosity credible.  The kind of trust in God’s provision that Jesus envisaged is enshrined in one petition of the Lord’s prayer:  ‘Give us this day our daily bread’” (Ibid. 79).

The kingdom, based on this experience of God, is at the same time above political societies and transformative of them.  “Jesus’ vision of God’s rule was not of a Jewish state liberated from Roman rule, but of a society formed by the experience of God’s healing and forgiving grace, sustained by God’s fatherly provision, inclusive of all those who tend to be left out of or pushed to the margins of society, characterized not by domination but by mutual service, and in which all status and privilege are replaced by brotherly, sisterly, and motherly relationships of loving mutuality” (Ibid., 80).

Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God was, as we witness in today’s gospel passage, filled with power, with unmatched authority.  It attracted and inspired many while also alienating and angering many others. Though this kingdom has never by fully enacted in any place, by any state, it has profoundly influenced many people and governments.

Let us set out again on the way of learning Jesus’ kingdom!

~Fr. Tony