The Kingdom of God

The Kingdom of God

The kingdom of God in the broadest sense is God's supreme sovereignty. God’s reign is now manifest in the church and in the life of each believer who is submissive to his will. The kingdom of God will be fully manifest over the whole world after the return of Jesus Christ when all things will become subject to it.
(Psalms 2:6-9; 93:1-2; Luke 17:20-21; Daniel 2:44; Mark 1:14-15; 1 Corinthians 15:24-28; Revelation 11:15; 21:3, 22-27; 22:1-5)

Psalm 2:6-9 - "I have installed my King on Zion, my holy hill." :7 I will proclaim the decree of the LORD: He said to me, "You are my Son; today I have become your Father. 8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. 9 You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery."

Psalm 93:1-2 - The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and is armed with strength. The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved. 2 Your throne was established long ago; you are from all eternity.

Luke 17:20-21 - Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, 21 nor will people say, `Here it is,' or `There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."

Daniel 2:44 - In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.

Mark 1:14-15 - After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.

1 Corinthians 15:24-28 - Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For he "has put everything under his feet." Now when it says that "everything" has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. 28 When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.

Revelation 11:15 - The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said: "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever."

Revelation 21:3 - And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

Revelation 21:22-27 - I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25 On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. 26 The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. 27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life.

Revelation 22:1-5 - Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

What is God’s Kingdom?

The kingdom of God is the major theme of Jesus’ teaching in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. This concept, expressed in various ways, had been a central part of Jewish religious aspirations for generations. At the time of Jesus, it was popularly anticipated as a time when the promises of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the place of Israel in God’s plan would be fulfilled in a dramatic way: the hated Romans would once and for all be driven out of their land, and the people would enjoy a new period of political and religious freedom, and self-determination.

It is no wonder, then, that when Jesus emerged as a travelling prophet after his baptism and the temptations, and declared that ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark 1:15), people of all kinds showed great interest in what he had to say. This was what they were waiting for: a new kingdom of God that would finally crush the old kingdom of Rome. Moreover, they fully expected that they, the Jewish people, would have a prominent part in this coming kingdom under the leadership of their long-awaited Messiah.

From the very beginning of Israelite history, God had always been regarded as ‘king’ of the people (Psalms 96:10; 99:1; 146:10). The Hebrew Bible declared that the whole world belonged to God, because God made it—and Israel as a nation belonged to God because God had rescued its ancestors from slavery in Egypt and led them to a new land. When they wanted to appoint Saul as their own king a century or two later, some people opposed the move on the grounds that God was the only true king the nation should ever have (1 Samuel 8:1–18). Subsequently, when David became king in Jerusalem, the two ideas were brought together: David and his successors were the rightful rulers of the nation, because God had chosen them (2 Samuel 7:1–17). Their duty was to do God’s will, so that the kingdom would reflect the standards of God’s law. In reality, things were rarely that simple. As one king succeeded another, it was painfully obvious that many of them were interested only in power and self-fulfilment, and the earlier ideals gradually disappeared. They certainly disappeared as practical politics, though they never quite vanished altogether, for they were transformed into a hope for the future: that at some time God would step in to put things right and establish a kingdom of justice and righteousness. The prophet Zechariah was only one of many who fervently looked for that time to come, a day on which ‘the Lord will become king over all the earth’ (Zechariah 14:9). By the time of Jesus, there was a widespread expectation that the arrival of the Messiah would herald the coming of this kingdom.

The kingdom of God

But what did Jesus mean in speaking of ‘the kingdom of God’? Today, the notion of ‘kingdom’ most obviously denotes a state or territory that, if not actually ruled by a king, is nevertheless a political entity of some kind. In the ancient world, things would have been no different, and there can be no doubt that it would have been perfectly understandable for Jesus’ contemporaries to conclude that he was announcing the establishment of a new state which, in contrast to the countries around, would somehow be ruled by God in person.

That idea is so obviously contrary to what Jesus taught about the kingdom of God that, right from the beginning, it is clear that he must have been using the phrase in some other way. If Jesus wastalking about a new state, then he must have seen himself as the agent of a new political dynasty, in effect a Zealot. Yet both his words and his actions seemed to deny that. So what was Jesus really talking about? Some Christians have concluded that, in spite of all the indications to the contrary, Jesus must have been mainly concerned with starting a society that was to be ruled by God, distinct from those ruled by ordinary mortals. Many theologians of the Middle Ages, for example, followed St Augustine in identifying the kingdom of which Jesus spoke with the organized society they knew in the church. Throughout the days of Christendom, the concept that the church was a legitimate successor to the Roman empire, with a political mandate to expand its own empire, motivated Western exploration of other parts of the world, and played its part in the emergence of colonialism. Even today, it is not difficult to find Christian leaders who will speak as if ‘the kingdom’ is just another word for ‘the church’, while many more are prepared to talk of it as if it is a kind of political manifesto. Here, we will suggest that Jesus’ use of the term ‘the kingdom of God’ cannot be limited to any of these things, but is in fact more comprehensive than all of them. A good definition of it is ‘God’s way of doing things’ It begins from those values and standards that most adequately reflect God’s own character, though as Jesus expounds the significance of that, he inevitably provides insights into how all this might be applied in practical terms to different life situations. That means that we can expect to find models for how discipleship might impact politics, economics, or other tangible social realities. But these things do not exhaust the meaning of ‘God’s kingdom’, which is both wider and deeper than that: wider because it is a way of being that was to be applied to the whole of life, both private and public, and deeper because it would address not only material but also spiritual realities, giving those who committed themselves to it a fresh understanding of true freedom and justice, and the renewed experience of God’s presence in their lives.

A new way of being

There were already clues pointing in this direction in the actual words that Jesus probably used to articulate his teaching. Though Jesus might well have been able to speak two or three languages, it is very likely that most of his teaching was given in Aramaic, for that was the language that most people in Palestine knew best. The gospels were written in Greek, of course, like the rest of the New Testament, and we therefore have no direct record of the actual Aramaic words used by Jesus. But even the Greek word that is translated into English as ‘kingdom’ (basileia), more often means the activity of a king rather than the territory over which a sovereign might rule. The Aramaic word that most scholars think Jesus himself would have used (malkutha) certainly had that meaning. So we are justified in supposing that Jesus was talking about what might be called ‘the kingship of God’, rather than ‘God’s kingdom’. ‘Kingship’ would be about God’s style, the way that God operates, and the example that God sets to others. This helps to explain why Jesus was concerned more than anything else about the quality of human life, and the nature of meaningful relationships, rejecting attitudes of power and control in favour of love, acceptance and mutual service. For him, these qualities were to characterize the life of his disciples because he perceived them as central to the person of God.

This helps to explain some of the apparently more difficult things that Jesus said. For example, he told the Pharisees, ‘The kingdom of God does not come in such a way as to be seen … because the kingdom of God is within you’ (Luke 17:20, 21). On another occasion he told his disciples, ‘whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it’ (Mark 10:15). It would have been nonsensical to speak of a political territory existing in the lives of individual people: there is no sense in which a person could ‘receive’ a state, nor could it be ‘within them’. But Jesus was saying that from the moment God is recognized as sovereign in someone’s life, then the ‘kingdom of God’ has really arrived. He could say this kingdom was already ‘among’ his hearers, because he himself was there, and he was completely committed to exploring and putting into practice the values and standards that God represented.

In a similar way, Jesus compared ‘entering the kingdom’ to ‘entering into life’ (Mark 9:43–47). Those people who ‘inherit the kingdom’ also ‘inherit eternal life’ (Matthew 25:34–46), and the gate leading to the kingdom is ‘the way that leads to life’ (Mark 10:17–23). The well-known story of the son who ran away from home also emphasized the fact that to be a member of the kingdom is to share in God’s family life, and to experience God as a loving parent (Luke 15:11–32). In the same way, Paul reminded his Christian readers in Corinth that ‘the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power’ (1 Corinthians 4:20), the empowerment of God that enables those who wish to change to live in ways that will truly reflect God’s ways of doing things.

At the same time, it would be wrong to understand the kingdom exclusively in terms of an individual relationship between people and God, for there are many statements in the gospels which show that Jesus regarded the kingdom of God not only as the inward rule of God in the lives of his followers but also as some kind of tangible reality. For example, he spoke of people who would ‘come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God’ (Luke 13:29). At the last supper Jesus told the disciples, ‘from now on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes’ (Luke 22:18). Matthew records him saying that his followers would ‘inherit the kingdom prepared … from the foundation of the world’ (Matthew 25:34).

Jesus seems, therefore, to have understood this idea of God’s kingdom in at least two ways: on the one hand, as God’s guidance in the lives of those who would be disciples, and on the other hand, as something that God would somehow display to the world at large. Both these concepts were already found in the expectations of the Old Testament writers. Though it is true that certain parts of ancient Judaism had expected God’s sovereignty to be displayed in the form of an organized kingdom, which would replace the empires of the world, not all previous generations had seen God’s future intervention in human affairs in the same nationalistic terms as some of Jesus’ contemporaries. Circles inspired by apocalyptic thinking had a tendency to magnify the material aspects of ‘the kingdom of God’. In Daniel, for example, ‘the saints of the most high’, represented by ‘a figure like the Son of man’, receive the kingdom of God and possess it for ever (Daniel 7:13–18), and this kind of expectation was heightened and magnified by later apocalyptic writers, some of them contemporaries of Jesus. It was an outlook expressed by some of Jesus’ own followers when they wanted to make him their king after the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 (John 6:15) and it was by no means absent from the inner circle of his closest disciples. When James and John tried to claim the chief places on either side of Jesus’ throne they were obviously thinking in crudely political terms (Mark 10:35–45).

Though Jesus rebuked them on that occasion, he never denied that God’s kingdom would in some way affect society in a political sense. He sometimes suggested that it would do so in relatively undramatic ways, comparable to the way yeast makes bread rise, or a mustard seed quietly grows into a large tree (Matthew 13:31–33). But he was also quite convinced that God would act decisively and directly, not just in the lives of individuals, but also in the public affairs of nations and empires (Mark 13).

At the time of Jesus, many of the rabbis were emphasizing that God’s kingship over Israel was already in existence, even under the Roman rule, and that it operated through the Torah, or Law. The rabbis sometimes referred to people ‘taking upon themselves the kingdom of God’, and by this they meant accepting and obeying the Torah as the instrument of God’s rule over his people.

This tension between what God can do now in those who are prepared to order their lives according to God’s standards, and what God will ultimately do through them in society at large, is found elsewhere in the New Testament, so that there is a constant balancing act between what God is accomplishing now, and what God might be expected to bring to pass in the future. Paul, for example, says that ‘the kingdom of God is not concerned with material things like food and drink, but with goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ (Romans 14:17), thereby linking it inseparably with moral choices and personal spirituality. Elsewhere, however, Paul easily connects the arrival of God’s kingdom with the events surrounding the end of the world: ‘The end comes when Jesus delivers the kingdom to God … after destroying every other rule and authority and power’ (1 Corinthians 15:24), making it clear that he also believed God would break into history and alter its course, and that this too was part of the coming of God’s kingdom. This was made quite explicit in Revelation, in which ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of … Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever’ (Revelation 11:15). It was also an important element in the teaching of Jesus himself, which needs to be considered alongside the more personal aspects of his message, in order to produce a rounded account of what he wanted to say.

‘Eschatology’ and the kingdom

This whole question of the different things that might be meant by ‘God’s kingdom’ is generally called ‘eschatology’. The actual word ‘eschatology’ is derived from the Greek words eschaton and logos, and means ‘ideas about the end’. But eschatology is not just concerned with what might happen at the end of the world: it is essentially concerned with God’s sovereignty, and with all the different means by which God’s ways of doing things can make themselves felt, whether in the lives of individual people, in society, or in the ultimate meaning of the entire cosmic process. Over the last century or so, three main perspectives have dominated discussions about the meaning of Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God.

‘Futurist eschatology’

The first of these views Jesus’ teaching as part of a ‘futurist eschatology’. Used in this context, the word ‘futurist’ means in the future from Jesus’ point of view, and not from the standpoint of the present day. There are many contemporary Christians who have a ‘futurist eschatology’ in the sense that they expect God’s kingdom to come in a tangible, material form at a time that is still in the future from now, and they often further identify the coming of God’s kingdom in this way with beliefs about the second coming (or parousia) of Jesus himself. But when scholars talk of the gospel traditions, they normally reserve the term ‘futurist’ for Jesus’ own expectations about the kingdom, and not the expectations of modern Christians.

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) was a German musician and theologian who became a medical missionary in Africa, and in the early days of his career he did a great deal to promote the idea that Jesus was obsessed with a futurist eschatology. By that, he meant that Jesus held roughly the same expectations as the apocalyptic writers of his day, and that he believed God was about to intervene immediately and dramatically in the affairs of humanity, and his own life’s work was to be the decisive climax of history. By definition, therefore, that climax would have to come within Jesus’ own lifetime. On the basis of this perception, Schweitzer suggested that when, for example, Jesus declared that ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’, he really expected the cataclysmic end of the world to come almost immediately. More than that, Jesus also imagined himself to be ‘the Messiah designate’ who would assume a position of full authority once the kingdom had actually arrived. Like many other visionaries both before and after him, Jesus found the reality of life rather different from these idealistic dreams, and as life went on very much as before it began to seem as if the dream had been only an illusion.

Early in the course of his work, said Schweitzer, Jesus was sufficiently confident to announce to his disciples that the Son of man was about to appear in glory—so soon that they could expect his arrival in the course of a few days (Matthew 10:23). When it failed to happen, Jesus decided to try to force God’s hand by going to Jerusalem and pressing his claims with the authorities there, and it was this move that resulted in him being arrested, tried and tragically sentenced to death. However, even this astonishing display of blind faith did not produce the desired result, but ended with defeat and a cry of despair from the cross, as Jesus realized that the God he served had abandoned him.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the fact that Jesus’ ministry so evidently ended in failure did not invalidate his teaching, for Schweitzer claimed that an even greater power resulted from this incredible act of misplaced confidence than would have been the case if the hoped-for apocalyptic kingdom had actually arrived. The example of Jesus is something that can still exert a dynamic moral and spiritual influence over those who are willing to be obedient. Schweitzer himself certainly put into practice the lessons he saw there, though ironically his overall perspective on Jesus prevented him from taking his actual teaching very seriously, for he regarded even the Sermon on the Mount as an ‘interim ethic’, valid only for the very short period of Jesus’ own ministry. Instead, he attached the greatest importance to Jesus’ faithfulness to his convictions, even when those convictions were apparently seriously inadequate.

Schweitzer’s views were published in a remarkable book that first appeared in English in 1909, under the title The Quest of the Historical Jesus. It is still regarded as one of the great theological classics, not least because of its comprehensive presentation of the course of scholarly debate over the decades preceding its publication, and the fact that Schweitzer put his finger on some key aspects of Jesus’ life and teaching. The way he placed Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God in the same frame of reference as the work of the apocalyptic writers opened up many new possibilities for understanding the impact that Jesus must have had in the cultural context of his day. He was also certainly correct in seeing that Jesus’ style of life, and especially his death, could not easily be separated from his message, and that it was inappropriate to try to understand his teaching without also taking account of his personality.

But taken as a whole, Schweitzer’s view failed to convince as a comprehensive account of the whole of Jesus’ life and teaching. For one thing, he consistently underrated the claims made in the gospels about Jesus’ own significance, preferring instead to confine his attention almost exclusively to the statements about the kingdom of God. But for a holistic view that takes account of all the evidence, these two parts of Jesus’ teaching must be understood together, for what is said about the kingdom of God is complementary to the teaching about Jesus’ self-claimed special relationship with God.

Unless we are prepared to deny all historical credibility of the gospel narratives, it is hard to believe that Jesus realized the importance of dying at Jerusalem only after the failure of all his previous efforts to bring about the kingdom. Nor is it necessary to believe with Schweitzer that Jesus’ death also failed in its intended purpose, and left only a vague spiritual influence to affect the lives of those who take time to think about it.

Schweitzer made much of statements such as Jesus’ words to his disciples just before his transfiguration: ‘there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power’ (Mark 9:1), something which, on Schweitzer’s understanding, never happened. But he was able to reach this conclusion only because of his generally sceptical attitude to the evidence of the New Testament. The whole conviction of the early church, however, was that God did intervene in human affairs in a powerful and dramatic way with the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit to his followers—and that both of these were the direct outcome of Jesus’ death on the cross. Since much of the New Testament was written less than a generation after these events took place, its evidence cannot be brushed aside quite as easily as Schweitzer thought.

‘Realized eschatology’

The exact opposite of Schweitzer’s theory was C.H. Dodd’s idea that Jesus had what he called a ‘realized eschatology’. According to Dodd (1884–1973), what Jesus was really saying was that the kingdom had already arrived in his own person. We could say, therefore, that the coming of Jesus was itself the beginning of God’s reign; though the kingdom might need to grow and develop, the ultimate and decisive act has already taken place.

This proved to be an attractive view, especially to people of the mid-twentieth century who were still optimistic that the world could gradually be made into a better place, and generally saw this coming about through a scientifically inspired evolutionary process of moral improvement and education. Whereas the thought patterns familiar to first-century Jewish apocalyptists seemed bizarre and unbelievable, this image of the kingdom naturally commended itself to middle-class social activists in the Western world. Moreover, the idea that Jesus saw his own life and work as the coming of God’s kingdom did actually shed new light on some aspects of the gospel narratives. The miracles, for example, are much easier to understand when they are viewed as signs and demonstrations that God was at work in bringing the kingdom to birth through the life of Jesus than they would be with the more traditional view that had regarded them as ‘proofs’ of Jesus’ divine nature.

Dodd was a sufficiently careful scholar to recognize that not all the gospel materials can be easily understood in the context of a realized eschatology. What could be made, for instance, of those parables that appear to be concerned with the last judgment and some kind of future winding up of things—parables like the story of the ten bridesmaids or the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:1–13; 31–46)? Dodd proposed that these should be interpreted not as images of a final judgment that would come at the end of the world, but as pictures of the kind of challenge that presents itself to anyone whenever they are confronted with the message about Jesus and God’s kingdom. There is certainly plenty of evidence that Jesus regarded the declaration of his message as, in some sense, a judgment on those who heard it and did not respond. The terms in which he condemned the Pharisees often seem to imply that they had placed themselves beyond the possibility of salvation (Mark 3:28–30; Matthew 23), and the author of the fourth gospel is surely giving an accurate representation of at least part of Jesus’ message when he comments that ‘Whoever believes in Jesus is not condemned; but whoever who does not believe is condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil’ (John 3:18–19).

It is not difficult to find passages in Jesus’ teaching that can give some support to most aspects of Dodd’s theory. But the theory ultimately proved incapable of accounting for all the evidence. There were two major stumbling-blocks:

l Although there are many passages in Jesus’ teaching which are consistent with a ‘realized eschatology’, there are a good many more which are not. In many cases Jesus refers to the Son of man coming ‘with the clouds of heaven’, and his whole outlook was undoubtedly coloured by the kind of apocalyptic imagery to which Schweitzer so strikingly drew attention.

l It is also necessary to consider what the rest of the New Testament reflects about the beliefs of the first Christians, and there can be no doubt that other writings reveal a mixture of a ‘futuristic’ type of eschatology and a ‘realized’ type alongside one another.

In the letters Paul wrote to the church in the Greek city of Thessalonica in the early 50s of the first century, there is a considerable emphasis on the expectation of the early Christians that Jesus would return in glory. Paul himself obviously shared this expectation, though not in the same extreme fashion as the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:11; 2 Thessalonians 2:1–12). In Corinth, on the other hand, the same Paul knew people who believed that the conventional descriptions of the end of things were to be taken as symbols of their own spiritual experience—and to them he again emphasized his own belief that Jesus would return in the future (1 Corinthians 15:3–57). At the same time—and paradoxically, perhaps—Paul himself was not totally one-sided in the matter, for in Galatians, one of his earliest letters, he suggested that in a very real sense the fullness of God’s kingdom had come and was already at work in those who were Christians.

If Dodd’s theory was completely correct and Jesus did actually think that the kingdom had already arrived in its final form, it is hard to see how and why the first Christians should have forgotten this emphasis so soon and turned instead to speculations about the future. This is an especially important question, since so many of these Christians were not Jews, and they would not naturally have thought of the future in terms of traditional apocalyptic teachings. We should also bear in mind that the gospel traditions themselves were preserved in the churches, and for the churches’ use, and it is surely unlikely that such a glaring inconsistency between the teaching of Jesus and the actual beliefs of the church would have gone unnoticed.

‘Inaugurated eschatology’

Because of the difficulties involved in both the futuristic and the realized views of Jesus’ eschatology, there has been considerable support for a view that would take the best from both of them, recognizing that in a sense God’s kingdom did actually come in the person of Jesus, but that its complete fulfilment was still seen in the future. Thus Jesus’ teaching is what might be called an ‘inaugurated eschatology’.

This is probably the best explanation of the matter. It is essential to recognize with Schweitzer that Jesus’ background was that of first-century Judaism, and his teaching included a complete view of the future course of events, including last judgment and final resurrection, as part of the consummation of God’s kingdom. But it is also important to recognize that Jesus claimed that the kingdom had arrived already in his own person, and so people must make their own response to God’s demands upon them here and now. If, as has been suggested here, ‘the kingdom of God’ is a way of speaking about ‘God’s way of doing things’, then there is no intrinsic difficulty in bringing these apparently diverse understandings into dynamic relationship with each other: they are simply different aspects of the same divine will.

This rather complex subject can be summarized by noting four points which seem basic to understanding what Jesus had to say about the coming of the kingdom:

l Jesus certainly used the language and, perhaps to some extent, shared the views of those who expected the kingdom’s imminent arrival through a direct intervention of God in human affairs.

l Jesus believed that the fundamental nature of the kingdom of God was being revealed in his own life and work. It is clear from the gospels that this proved to be very different from what most of his listeners had expected, for the kingdom was revealed not as a tyrannical political force that would take over from Rome, but as a loving community of those whose only allegiance was to God, whose values in turn were quite different from the norms of conventional society.

l God’s direct intervention is to be seen not only in the life and teaching of Jesus, but also in his death, resurrection and gift of the Holy Spirit to the church. It might well have been in these events that some of Jesus’ own predictions about the last things were fulfilled—for example, the statement that some of his disciples would see the kingdom coming with power before they died (Mark 9:1).

l Since there is so much variety in the language used by Jesus to describe the kingdom, its full understanding also requires a similarly broad and comprehensive interpretative framework. The kingdom can arrive secretly, like the yeast working in the dough (Matthew 13:33), or it can come by the sudden appearance of Christ in glory, as at the expected second coming (Mark 13).

The kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven

One of the striking facts about Matthew’s Gospel is that it consistently uses the term ‘kingdom of heaven’ to describe the subject of Jesus’ teaching. The only exceptions to this are in Matthew 12:28; 19:24; 21:31 and 21:43, where we find the term ‘kingdom of God’, which is used throughout Mark and Luke.

On the basis of this distinction, some interpreters have thought they could differentiate two quite separate phases in Jesus’ teaching. But, in fact, there can be no doubt that the two terms refer to the same thing. This can be demonstrated quite easily by comparing the same statements in Matthew and in the other two synoptic gospels. For example, whereas Mark summarizes Jesus’ message as ‘the kingdom of God is at hand; repent’ (Mark 1:15), Matthew has, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ (Matthew 4:17). The two statements appear in exactly the same context (the beginning of Jesus’ teaching ministry), and it is obvious that they are different versions of the same saying. There are many other examples of the same thing.

The most obvious explanation of this variety of expression is the fact that Matthew was writing for Jewish readers, whereas Mark and Luke were both writing for a predominantly non-Jewish readership. The Jewish tradition had always avoided direct use of the name of God in case people should unwittingly find themselves breaking the commandment, ‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain’ (Exodus 20:7). To minimize the possibilities of this happening, they often used other terms instead, and ‘heaven’ was a favourite substitute for ‘God’. Matthew, therefore, speaks of ‘the kingdom of heaven’ in order to avoid offence to his readers. Gentiles, however, had no such reservations, and to them a term like ‘kingdom of heaven’ would have been unnecessarily complicated, if not altogether meaningless, so Mark and Luke use the term ‘kingdom of God’ instead.

It might be thought that since ‘kingdom of heaven’ was the most natural term for Jewish believers to use, this would be the one originally used by Jesus himself, and later adapted for non-Jews by Mark and Luke. But the likelihood is that Jesus actually spoke of the ‘kingdom of God’, and Matthew has adapted this to ‘kingdom of heaven’ for his own purposes. There are two reasons for thinking this:

l In general, Jesus never showed any reticence in speaking about God. Not only did he claim to know God in a close and personal way, he also dared to place relationships with God in the intimate context of family imagery, thinking of himself as a child and God as a parent.

l There are, as we have seen, four instances in Matthew where the term ‘kingdom of God’ is actually used. This can readily be understood if we suppose that Matthew overlooked these four occurrences of the word, but it is really impossible to think that in just these four cases he changed an original ‘kingdom of heaven’ into ‘kingdom of God’ for the benefit of his Jewish readers.