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February 18, 2017
Now, in fact, Jesus and his words have never belonged to the categories of dogma or law, and to read them as if they did is simply to miss them. They are essentially subversive of established arrangements and ways of thinking.
The people initially impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.
It is the failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life that explains why, today, we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him how to do what he said was best.
We lead them to profess allegiance to him, or we expect them to, and leave them there, devoting our remaining efforts to “attracting” them to this or that.
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.
More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God.
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.
So the message of and about him is specifically a gospel for our life now, not just for dying. It is about living now as his apprentice in kingdom liv...
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The killing fields of Cambodia come from philosophical discussions in Paris.6
Absurdity reigns, and confusion makes it look good.
Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession is possibly the most important document of the last two centuries for understanding our current plight.
“The faith of the majority of educated people of our day,” Tolstoy observes, “was expressed by the word ‘progress.’
Commercials, catch words, political slogans, and high-flying intellectual rumors clutter our mental and spiritual space. Our minds and bodies pick them up like a dark suit picks up lint.
What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.
“Whosoever will may come.” 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.
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.
Jesus offers himself as God’s doorway into the life that is truly life. Confidence in him leads us today, as in other times, to become his apprentices in eternal living.
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.
Does Jesus only enable me to “make the cut” when I die? Or to know what to protest, or how to vote or agitate and organize? It is good to know that when I die all will be well, but is there any good news for life?
But just think how unlikely it would be that this great world-historical force, Jesus called “Christ,” could have left the depths of moment-to-moment human existence untouched while accomplishing what he has! More likely, we currently do not understand who he is and what he brings.
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 slipped into our world through the backroads and outlying districts of one of the least important places on earth and has allowed his program for human history to unfold ever so slowly through the centuries. He lived for thirty years among socially insignificant members of a negligible nation—though one with a rich tradition of divine covenant and interaction. He grew up in the home of the carpenter for the little Middle-Eastern village of Nazareth. After his father, Joseph, died, he became “the man of the house” and helped his mother raise the rest of the family. He was an ordinary
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He did all this to be with us, to be one of us, to “arrange for the delivery” of his life to us. It must be no simple thing to make it possible for human beings to receive the eternal kind of life.
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.
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.
We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.
exhibiting the rule, or “kingdom,” of God.
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.
Personal need and confidence in Jesus permits any person to blunder right into God’s realm.
Luke 16:16 records Jesus as saying, “The law and the prophets governed until John. But since then the kingdom of God is announced, and everybody is crowding into it.”
“Loved me much!” Simply that, and not the customary proprieties, was now the key of entry into the rule of God.
When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him.
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.
Jesus was, in effect, saying, “Just watch me and see that what I say is true. See for yourself that the rule of God has come among ordinary human beings.”
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”
From the very beginning of his work, those who relied on him had, at his touch, entered the rule, or governance, of God and were receiving its gracious sufficiency.
Jesus’ words and presence gave many of his hearers faith to see that when he acted God also acted, that the governance or “rule” of God came into play and thus was at hand. They were aware of the invisible presence of God acting within the visible reality and action of Jesus, the carpenter rabbi.
Made to Rule
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.
But it is nevertheless true that we are made to “have dominion” within an appropriate domain of reality. This is the core of the likeness or image of God in us and is the basis of the destiny for which we were formed.
We are, all of us, never-ceasing spiritual beings with a unique eternal calling to count for good in God’s great universe.
Our “kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the s...
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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).
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.
But at the same time our fundamental makeup is unchanged. The deepest longings of our heart confirm our original calling.
As we learn through increasing trust to govern our tiny affairs with him, the kingdom he had all along planned for us will be turned over to us, at the appropriate time. “Come you who are under my Father’s blessing and take over the government assigned to you from the beginning” (Matt. 25:34).
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.
