Jordan Hillebert⎮  Summer 2012

Over the last three centuries, both the rising tide of secularism and the counter-offensive waged by many earnest Christians have made the “good news” of the Kingdom of God nearly unintelligible. The existence of God, where it has not been dismissed altogether as a naïve or even dangerous superstition, has been relegated to a sphere wholly detached from our daily lives. God is either vanquished altogether or pushed so far into heaven that, at best, all that we can hope for is some encounter with Him in the afterlife or the privacy of our own religious experiences. God is either a figment of our imaginations or our own personal ticket to heaven—a myth or a means of escape. Either way, God becomes largely irrelevant to the world in which we find ourselves.

What sense then, if any, are we to make of Jesus’ opening proclamation in the first chapter of Mark: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news” (1:15)? What can it possibly mean for the kingdom of God to come near?

In looking for an answer to this question, it helps if we first place ourselves alongside Jesus’ original audience. For a first-century Jew, the good news (or gospel) of the kingdom of God was hardly a private religious matter. Ever since the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians some 600 years before, the Jews had lived in exile or under foreign occupation. At the time of Jesus’ ministry, Judea was under Roman rule and subject to the reign of Herod Agrippa, a mercilessly cruel and compromised puppet king. This long history of oppression and foreign domination had tremendous theological as well as social and political implications. For if the Jews were truly the people of God, chosen by God to be His treasured possession (Deut. 7:6-7), why then were they still under pagan rule? How was it that the people of Israel, the children of Abraham in whom God had promised that all the families of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 12:1-3), seemed to have become themselves accursed?

These very questions ring throughout the Psalter and the Old Testament prophets. Psalm 79, for instance, reads:

O God, the nations have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins… How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever? Will your jealousy burn like fire? Pour out your anger on the nations that do no know you, and on the kingdoms that do not call upon your name! For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation… Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of your name; deliver us, and atone for our sins, for your name’s sake!” (Ps. 79: 1, 5-7, 9).

We might summarize the longing of the Jewish people at the time of Jesus with the simple refrain of Psalm 80: “Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

You see, the salvation for which the people of Israel were longing was not only the forgiveness of their sins—though this was certainly a part of it, as we just read in Psalm 79. Salvation was not simply a ticket to heaven in the afterlife. Salvation was the very in-breaking of God’s rule upon the earth, the return of God’s people from physical and spiritual exile, the ultimate manifestation of the Kingdom of God. When Jesus proclaimed that the time was fulfilled and the kingdom of God had come near, his audience would have expected nothing less than the vindication of Israel. And for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, this in-breaking of God’s Kingdom on earth meant more than simply the restoration of a single nation, it meant salvation for the entire world. We see this vividly, for instance, in the latter half of the book of Isaiah:

Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me… He said to me: ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’” (Is. 49: 1, 6).

The good news of the Kingdom is that God did not will to leave His creation alone, under the tyranny of sin and death. God was coming to fulfill His covenant with Abraham, and in so doing all the families of the earth would truly be blessed. What’s more, as we make our way through the gospels, we come to see that Jesus was not simply someone who came to preach the nearness of this kingdom like one of the great prophets of old. Rather, Jesus spoke and acted as if God’s mighty work of salvation was being accomplished through him. Jesus performed miracles, he cast out demons, he forgave sins (surely the scribes were correct in asserting that God alone had the authority to forgive sins!).

And yet, the kind of kingdom that Jesus inaugurated was not exactly what one might have expected. Rather than coming to rule by force, Jesus humbled himself, taking the form of a servant (Phil. 2:7). Rather than liberating the nation of Israel from Roman rule, Jesus was handed over by his own to be nailed to a Roman cross. Rather than coming to crush his enemies, Jesus allowed himself to be crushed on their behalf. But the good news of the Kingdom of God did not die with the death of Jesus. For, as we confess together every week in the words of the Nicene creed, “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”

Though we wait eagerly for the consummation of this kingdom on that day when Jesus will return in glory, we must not forget that the kingdom of God has indeed already come near and is presently at work among us. We see this, of course, most clearly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus visits a synagogue in Nazareth and reads from a passage in Isaiah that looks forward to the coming Messiah and the salvation of Israel. When he had finished reading, Jesus astonishes his audience by proclaiming: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21).

The time was fulfilled—the kingdom of God had come near.

Immediately after announcing the nearness of the kingdom of God, Jesus calls the first disciples. As his ministry progresses, Jesus sends these disciples out to proclaim, as he had proclaimed, the nearness of the kingdom of God. Likewise, these disciples participated in Christ’s kingdom work, healing the sick and casting out demons (Luke 10: 1-20).

The time was fulfilled—the kingdom of God had come near.

Just before his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus tells his disciples that he was soon going to be with the Father. But he promises not to leave them alone. “I will ask the Father,” says Jesus, “and he will give you another Helper, to be with you for ever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you” (John 14: 16-17). After Jesus’ ascension, when a small number of his followers were gathered together for Pentecost, “there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each of them. And they were filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2: 2-4).

This kingdom community, from which the Church today traces her heritage, devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of bread and prayer. Many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles, and all who believed were together and had all things in common. They sold their possessions and belongings, and distributed the proceeds to all in need (Acts 2: 42-47).

The time was fulfilled—the kingdom of God had come near.

Today, the Church carries on this kingdom ministry as the body of Christ, “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23). Through repentance and baptism—by giving up on our attempts to be the lords of our own lives, and by placing ourselves under the sole lordship of Christ—we have been incorporated into this kingdom community (Acts 2: 38-39). By faith, through Christ, God has reconciled us to Himself and given us in turn the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18). God’s kingdom, therefore, is not simply a reality to be hoped for in the future, a heaven to be hoped for in the afterlife; it is the Church’s vocation. It is our vocation. It is our very way of being in the world under the grace and lordship of Jesus Christ. Like the Church gathered around the apostles, therefore, we dedicate ourselves to caring for the sick and needy, and we devote ourselves to the apostles’ teachings in scripture, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer—praying together as our Lord taught us to pray: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt. 6:10).

The content of the above post was originally delivered as a sermon on the third Sunday after Epiphany to the congregation of St. John’s Episcopal, Aberdeen.