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Christendom is to the Kingdom of God as cancer is to the human body. It’s a corruption that insidiously warps and seeks to kill our Lord’s spiritual vision. That’s why it’s beyond tragic that so many Jesus followers today hear the words “Kingdom of God” and conceive of something vaguely akin to Medieval Christianity where the institutional church exercised hegemonic power over the rest of society. That’s as nauseating as hearing the phrase “Body of Christ” and thinking of the Ku Klux Klan. To quote Michael Scott, “NO! GOD! NO, GOD, PLEASE, NO! NO! NO! NOOOOO!”
Understanding the Kingdom of God proclaimed by our Lord requires an expanded spiritual imagination. Jesus is King and His Kingdom is a transformative movement for shalom–a just and peaceful world living into God’s perfect will for human flourishing. The principles undergirding this movement are such virtues as love, grace, compassion, forgiveness, hope, humility, justice, mercy, redemption, reconciliation, and truth. It is a beautiful vision of kinship that transcends such barriers as sex, ethnicity, nationality, language, educational level, and socio-economic class.
Christ’s Kingdom is a prophetic subversion of not only empire, but most of the presuppositions on which this world is built. The entire Gospel narrative undermines the allure of wealth, power, and prestige. It culminates in an inversed Kingdom ethic where “the last shall be first and the first shall be last” and “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.” The Kingdom reimagines, reforms, and renews the world while flipping the script from Adam’s death to Jesus’ life. As Yoda put it, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”
That’s the radically countercultural vision Jesus is describing when He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” It’s not about instituting a theocratic government like ancient Israel, escaping the corrupting influence of paganism or secularism, or dominating the wicked via culture war. Each of those has been tried numerous times in church history, and they’re all exercises in missing the point. We keep trying to fashion Jesus’ Kingdom after the world but with a bit more benevolence. No, that’s unacceptable. The Kingdom of God is incongruous with the expectations of this world.
The original beatniks also imagined a different vision for the world. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, the beats and their hippie successors faced constant derision from the religious establishment for upending the apple cart. Much of the Christian community felt their countercultural instincts were dangerous and their emphasis upon radical love was simply unrealistic. Well, here’s the thing: the Gospel is radically countercultural and the Kingdom is about upending the apple cart. My hunch is Jesus would’ve said to some of them, “The kingdom of God is not far from you.”
