Matthew 4. 17: ?Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.?
One of the many peculiar things about Christianity is its relative lack of emphasis on the things Jesus said, on his teaching. The Church has always been primarily concerned with who Jesus was and what he did, being born, crucified, resurrected, and ascending. Only after that are we taught what he said. I cannot help thinking that this is largely due to the stress on Christ?s death and resurrection in the message of Paul; in fact, it is difficult to tell from Paul?s writings how much he actually knew about the teaching of Jesus ? he may not have witnessed Jesus in life at all, and Paul was dead long before the four Gospels were written. Even the Gospel-writers devote a lot of their space to the events of the last days of Jesus. But they do give us enough of what Jesus said for us to be sure of one thing: he stressed that the Kingdom of Heaven was close.
I am not at all certain what he meant. A few things are clear. By ?kingdom? Jesus did not mean any kind of political structure or defined area; I am assured by those who know that that is not signified by malkuth, which is the Aramaic word Jesus will have used, or basileia, which is the Greek word Matthew used. No, they mean ?sovereignty? or ?reign?. And ?heaven? is just a careful Jewish word for ?God?. One?s first reaction is to think that Jesus is talking about himself, that he personifies the rule of God. But that cannot quite be the case, because one has only to think of the Lord?s Prayer, ?Thy kingdom come? to see that Jesus did not envisage the coming of the kingdom in terms of himself.
So, many people suppose that Jesus was thinking about the immediate future, that he was expecting God to be intervening dramatically. The trouble about this interpretation is that it implies that he got it all wrong. The rule of God was not about to begin in that sense. The world has continued for two thousand years to be ruled by men (and women) who see their own political advantage in war and the promotion of misery. We need not refuse to think that eventually things will be different, but we are not persuaded that such times are at hand. I do not want to believe that a new world regime is at the heart of the Gospel, and that Jesus was cruelly mistaken.
In that case, we must suppose that, whatever his hearers thought (and we have no guarantees that they listened attentively or transmitted his words accurately) Jesus was not talking about the defeat of the Roman Empire. S Augustine of Hippo believed that ?the Kingdom of Heaven? was identical with the Church, but, for various reasons, you will not expect me to agree with S Augustine.
I would like to suggest that Jesus was talking about personal religion, about the relationship between the individual creature and his Creator. Despite much in the Old Testament, notably in the Psalms and some of the Prophets, on this topic, it appears that Jewish piety had become somewhat ossified by the time of Jesus and that mechanical obedience to the purity laws, to an extent only possible for the leisured classes, was prized above personal devotion. Hence the reported attacks by Jesus on the religious leaders of his time and on ?whited sepulchres?. External purity was seen as more important than anything else. But, in proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus seems to have stressed the simple virtues of the Beatitudes, and the need to do to others as you wish them to do to you. His religion was about loving God and your neighbour equally, as well as keeping the law.
But I want to remind you of a point I have made before from this pulpit. Jesus made no effort during his lifetime to ensure that we should receive his message intact. We know he could read; according to Luke, anyway, he read in public in the synagogue; yet he took no pains to find a secretary able to record his preaching. I suspect that he did not want to deprive us of our freedom by imposing his teaching; so he left it to unreliable witnesses in uncertain forms. Then the Holy Spirit took over the task of inspiring those who spread the gospel. It is on the Holy Spirit, as much as the gospel-writers, that we must rely to understand the message of Jesus. He is with us here and now. We are not obliged to follow what we suppose Matthew thought.
So, I suggest that Matthew, who attributes the same words to John the Baptist as to Jesus, believed, as John certainly did, that God was about to take charge in a dramatic way, but that Jesus did not mean that at all. John, and after him Matthew, meant: ?Say you?re sorry or God will get you!? Jesus meant: ?Change your way of life, and let God rule in your heart!?
If that is what Jesus meant, then we haven?t got Christianity as wrong as we sometimes fear. If our religion is primarily about our individual relationship with God and not about clerics taking charge, then the number of our worries is considerably reduced. We, as Christians, are not supposed to be solving all the political, environmental, and economic problems of our day. We can leave that to the professionals and the enthusiasts, and concentrate on behaving as we think Jesus taught. Of course, we can pray about such subjects, but we need not take responsibility for them, as if we were under an obligation to introduce a new world organization on strictly Anglican lines called ?the kingdom of God?. I don?t know about you, but I find that a relief. All we have to do, and it is a sufficient task for a lifetime, is to love God, trust him, and try to obey him, and to love our neighbours as ourselves. Loving our neighbours may well mean pressing for change in how things are run; but perhaps it does not mean that we have to organize that change.
Amen
Alan Goodison