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May 13 - July 4, 2017
Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not. What we have to believe or do now, by contrast, is real life, bursting with interesting, frightening and relevant things and people.
True, you will find few scholars or leaders in Christian circles who deny that we are supposed to make disciples or apprentices to Jesus and teach them to do all things that Jesus said. There are a few here and there, but they are, at least, not widely influential. Jesus’ instructions on this matter are, after all, starkly clear. We just don’t do what he said. We don’t seriously attempt it. And apparently we don’t know how to do it.
Whatever the ultimate explanation of it, the most telling thing about the contemporary Christian is that he or she simply has no compelling sense that understanding of and conformity with the clear teachings of Christ is of any vital importance to his or her life, and certainly not that it is in any way essential.
With this book I complete a trilogy on the spiritual life of those who have become convinced that Jesus is the One. In the first, In Search of Guidance, I attempted to make real and clear the intimate quality of life with him as “a conversational relationship with God.”
So the second book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, explains how disciples or students of Jesus can effectively interact with the grace and spirit of God to access fully the provisions and character intended for us in the gift of eternal life.
This third book, then, presents discipleship to Jesus as the very heart of the gospel. The really good news for humanity is that Jesus is now taking students in the master class of life. The eternal life that begins with confidence in Jesus is a life in his present kingdom, now on earth and available to all.
“I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?” And, she added, “What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?”
John Maynard Keynes, who was perhaps an even more profound social observer than economist, remarks at the end of his best-known book that “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”3
The major problem with the invitation now is precisely overfamiliarity. Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity—unsuspected unfamiliarity, and then contempt. People think they have heard the invitation. They think they have accepted it—or rejected it. But they have not.
God’s desire for us is that we should live in him. He sends among us the Way to himself. That shows what, in his heart of hearts, God is really like—indeed, what reality is really like. In its deepest nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love.
But intelligent, effectual entry into this life is currently obstructed by clouds of well-intentioned misinformation. The “gospels” that predominate where he is most frequently invoked speak only of preparing to die or else of correcting social practices and conditions. These are both, obviously, matters of great importance. Who would deny it? But neither one touches the quick of individual existence or taps the depths of the reality of Christ.
If I had to choose, I would rather have a car that runs than good insurance on one that doesn’t. Can I not have both?
I think we finally have to say that Jesus’ enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity.
In other words, if he were to come today he could very well do what you do. He could very well live in your apartment or house, hold down your job, have your education and life prospects, and live within your family, surroundings, and time. None of this would be the least hindrance to the eternal kind of life that was his by nature and becomes available to us through him. Our human life, it turns out, is not destroyed by God’s life but is fulfilled in it and in it alone.
The obviously well kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows. But the divine is not pushy. As Huston Smith remarks, “Just as science has found the power of the sun itself to be locked in the atom, so religion proclaims the glory of the eternal to be reflected in the simplest elements of time: a leaf, a door, an unturned stone.”11 It is, of course, reflected as well in complicated entities, such as galaxies, music, mathematics, and persons.
To be ordinary is to be only “more of the same.” The human being screams against this from its every pore.
Egotism is pathological self-obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count. It is a form of acute selfconsciousness and can be prevented and healed only by the experience of being adequately loved. It is, indeed, a desperate response to frustration of the need we all have to count for something and be held to be irreplaceable, without price.
Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being.
Our hunger for significance is a signal of who we are and why we are here, and it also is the basis of humanity’s enduring response to Jesus.
But they were only responding to the striking availability of God to meet present human need through the actions of Jesus. He simply was the good news about the kingdom. He still is.
Some time later, toward the midpoint of his years in public ministry, Jesus reflected on a remarkable change that had occurred when his cousin, the Baptizer, passed the torch of God’s word on to him.
But since John, Jesus continued, we no longer “stand on proprieties.” “The Kingdom of the Heavens is subjected to violence and violent people take it by force” (Matt. 11:12). That is, the rule of God, now present in the person of Jesus himself, submits to approaches that were previously not possible. Personal need and confidence in Jesus permits any person to blunder right into God’s realm. And once in, they have an astonishing new status: “Those least in the Kingdom of the Heavens are greater than John.”
We must not overlook the connection between faith and love. The woman saw Jesus and recognized who he was and who dwelt in him. That vision was her faith. She knew he was forgiving and accepting her before he ever said, “Your sins are forgiven.” She knew because she had seen a goodness in him that could only be God, and it broke her heart with gratitude and love.
When he announced that the “governance” or rule of God had become available to human beings, he was primarily referring to what he could do for people, God acting with him. But he was also offering to communicate this same “rule of God” to others who would receive and learn it from him. He was himself the evidence for the truth of his announcement about the availability of God’s kingdom, or governance, to ordinary human existence.
“Already during Jesus’ earthly activity,” Hans Küng has pointed out, “the decision for or against the rule of God hung together with the decision for or against himself” (italics mine). The presence of Jesus upon earth, both before and after his death and resurrection, means that God’s rule is here now. “In this sense,” Küng continues, “the immediate expectation… [of the kingdom]…has been fulfilled” (italics mine).12
So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out.” Rather, “The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to ‘inject’ His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.”
To gain deeper understanding of our eternal kind of life in God’s present kingdom, we must be sure to understand what a kingdom is. Every last one of us has a “kingdom”—or a “queendom,” or a “government”—a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens. Here is a truth that reaches into the deepest part of what it is to be a person.
Our “kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom. And our having the say over something is precisely what places it within our kingdom. In creating human beings God made them to rule, to reign, to have dominion in a limited sphere. Only so can they be persons.
The sense of having some degree of control over things is now recognized as a vital factor in both mental and physical health and can make the difference between life and death in those who are seriously ill.15
The human job description (the “creation covenant,” we might call it) found in chapter 1 of Genesis indicates that God assigned to us collectively the rule over all living things on earth, animal and plant. We are responsible before God for life on the earth (vv. 28–30).
However unlikely it may seem from our current viewpoint, God equipped us for this task by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our “rule” only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or coworker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.
Frank Laubach wrote of how, in his personal experiment of moment-by-moment submission to the will of God, the fine texture of his work and life experience was transformed. In January of 1930 he began to cultivate the habit of turning his mind to Christ for one second out of every minute.16 After only four weeks he reported, “I feel simply carried along each hour, doing my part in a plan which is far beyond myself. This sense of cooperation with God in little things is what so astonishes me, for I never have felt it this way before. I need something, and turn round to find it waiting for me. I
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When we submit what and where we are to God, our rule or dominion then increases.
In accord with his original intent, the heavenly Father has in fact prepared an individualized kingdom for every person, from the outset of creation. That may seem impossible to us. But we do have a very weak imagination toward God, and we are confused by our own desires and fears, as well as by gross misinformation. It is a small thing for him.
Now God’s own “kingdom,” or “rule,” is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom.18
The picture there presented must be kept in mind whenever we try to understand his kingdom. Then we will not doubt that that kingdom has existed from the moment of creation and will never end (Ps. 145:13; Dan. 7:14). It cannot be “shaken” (Heb. 12:27f.) and is totally good. It has never been in trouble and never will be. It is not something that human beings produce or, ultimately, can hinder. We do have an invitation to be a part of it, but if we refuse we only hurt ourselves.
Thus, contrary to a popular idea, the kingdom of God is not primarily something that is “in the hearts of men.” That kingdom may be there, and it may govern human beings through their faith and allegiance to Christ. At the present time it governs them only through their hearts, if at all. But his kingdom is not something confined to their hearts or to the “inner” world of human consciousness. It is not some matter of inner attitude or faith that might be totally disconnected from the public, behavioral, visible world. It always pervades and governs the whole of the physical universe—parts of
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Also, God did not start to bring his kingdom, the “kingdom of the heavens” as Jesus often called it, into existence through Jesus’ presence on earth.
So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.”
His intent is for us to learn to mesh our kingdom with the kingdoms of others. Love of neighbor, rightly understood, will make this happen. But we can only love adequately by taking as our primary aim the integration of our rule with God’s. That is why love of neighbor is the second, not the first, commandment and why we are told to seek first the kingdom, or rule, of God.
Only as we find that kingdom and settle into it can we human beings all reign, or rule, together with God. We will then enjoy individualized “reigns” with neither isolation nor conflict. This is the ideal of human existence for which secular idealism vainly strives.
Jesus came among us to show and teach the life for which we were made. He came very gently, opened access to the governance of God with him, and set afoot a conspiracy of freedom in truth among human beings. Having overcome death he remains among us. By relying on his word and presence we are enabled to reintegrate the little realm that makes up our life into the infinite rule of God. And that is the eternal kind of life. Caught up in his active rule, our deeds become an element in God’s eternal history. They are what God and we do together, making us part of his life and him a part of ours.
Without God we cannot, without us God will not.
We have noted how he entered human history through the life of an ordinary family. But then, as God’s flash point in reigniting eternal life among us, he inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds—deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.
In the course of human events there are always plenty of things that are on the horizon of possibility but do not come about or that come about later. And there certainly is a dimension of still future realization of God’s rule. But the term eggiken—usually translated as “is at hand” or “has drawn nigh” in such passages as Matt. 3:2; 4:17; 10:7; Mark 1:15; and Luke 10:9, 11—is a verb form indicating a past and completed action. It is best translated simply “has come.”20
The reality of God’s rule, and all of the instrumentalities it involves, is present in action and available with and through the person of Jesus. That is Jesus’ gospel.
That it is not of, or not derived from, this world or “here” does not mean that it is not real or that it is not in this world (John 18:36). It is, as Jesus said, constantly in the midst of human life (Luke 17:21; cf. Deut. 7:21). Indeed, it means that it is more real and more present than any human arrangement could ever possibly be.
Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God’s rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule. We must reemphasize this point also.
One thing that may mislead us about the meaning of “at hand” in Jesus’ basic message is the fact that other “kingdoms” are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. They too are “at hand.” That is the human condition. Persons other than God, such as you or I, are still allowed on earth to have a “say” that is contrary to his will.
To be sure, that kingdom has been here as long as we humans have been here, and longer. But it has been available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Anointed, only from the time he became a public figure.
Do Jesus and his Father hear Buddhists when they call upon them? They hear anyone who calls upon them. “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18). There is no distinction between “Jew and Greek,” between those who have “it”—however humans may define “it”—and those who do not, “for the same one is Lord of all, abounding in riches to all who call upon him” (Rom. 10:12).
