The Kingdom is Near

The Kingdom of God is near.

Repent and believe the good news.

It’s been said that these words of Jesus at the opening of his public ministry are, in many ways, the gospel in miniature. That is, the simple pronouncement with which he began his preaching ministry in Galilee encompasses the whole truth of who Jesus is, what Jesus has done for us and won for us, and finally, it both challenges and begs us to respond with an answering thankful repentance and trust.

But let me add this note: like so many of Jesus’ words and so much of scripture, though straightforward in their honesty and brutal in their simplicity, most of the time, they end up being as missed or dismissed by you and I as they probably were by the majority of the folk long ago who heard them for the first time.

Let me try to unpack both these simple words of our Lord, and what I mean by our tragic neglect and mishearing of them.

The Kingdom of God is near, Jesus said. Occasionally, that phrase is translated as the rule of God is near, meaning God’s sovereign reign and power were being revealed as present and at work in the world. The phrase, kingdom of God, if we stop and think about it, had, on one hand, far more of an immediate reality in the ancient world than what we largely conceive of today. After all, that world was divided into kingdoms and empires, ruled by kings and princes, Caesars and his petty under officials, who commanded armies and ruled with a heavy handedness, general tyranny and oppressive selfishness. While Jews would declare that Yahweh alone was king, the harsh reality of day to day living was that the emperor or his puppet king Herod in Galilee or lieutenant governor in Judea, Pilate, held sway over people’s lives with intrusive taxation and ever present physical ruthlessness.

So when Jesus came announcing that a different kingdom was nigh, the kingdom of God, a kingdom that was imbued with compassion and truth, with healing grace and generosity of mercy, small wonder if the message seemed oddly out of touch with the reality of their work-a-day world of struggle, pain and fear. On the one hand….

Yet on the other hand, maybe we can relate. Maybe we can relate to the feeling that in too much of our lives, God seems far away – not, in truth, because God is far away but rather that we have kept him so distant – so that all the while what we focus on and allow to be so near and looming are the tears and fears, the struggles and worries, the petty tyrants who rule our private worlds and the powers of disappointment and temptation, discouragement and shame that strive to rule our souls. Maybe we can relate to the sense of feeling far too alone and helpless in a seemingly chaotic and misaligned world where the empty, longing, aching void in our hearts seems impossible to fill by whatever must-have goods or fleeting claim of glory or all consuming and utterly insufficient magic potion that the world tells us to pursue.

It was into not just such a world, but it was and still is to human hearts that do know such anguish, such confusion, such yearning, such waiting and wanting, that Jesus’ words were addressed with power and promise. The kingdom of God is near. The kingly rule of a holy love so rich and pure and kind and good and transforming and healing and joyous is real and present, here and now. The original Greek term rarely gets translated with the sort of immediacy and import that it deserves. Eugene Peterson’s The Message reads, “Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here.” The King James version translated it as “The time is fulfilled,” while the scholar J. B. Phillips proposed “The time has come at last – the Kingdom has arrived.” A more literal and homely translation might be, “The kingdom is here; it is breathing down your necks.”

The kingdom of God, we should understand, really was there in Galilee, powerfully present and immediate, in Jesus.

The kingdom of God, in all its loveliness and tenderness, in all its depth of mercy and strength and grace, was there, right there, because it abided in and was being revealed by and would be fulfilled completely in and through Jesus himself. The kingdom of God, with all its unbounded compassion and care for the hurting and the broken, for the sinner and the forsaken, for those the world despised and for those that simply despised and despaired over themselves, … the kingdom with all its redeeming mercy and life-renewing promise and joy-kindling wonder, still abides in and is ever revealed wherever Jesus is, and, friends, good news, Jesus is here, here in the power of the Spirit. As ever he has, still he seeks to draw near to each and every one of us with grace and peace to heal the deepest wounds in our souls and cleanse with such tenderness the grimiest, most shameful parts of our lives we try to hide away even from ourselves. He seeks to touch our minds and lives with a promise so good, a word so true, a presence so holy, that all the noisy distractions, all the terrifying anxieties, all the threatening powers of this world can at last be so diminished by his love and by his grace that they simply no longer frighten, no longer tempt, no longer shame or bother or worry. When the kingdom of God draws near in all its beauty and reality, the kingdoms of this world, with all their false pomposity and posturing and pride, are revealed for the empty trivialities they truly are.

The Kingdom of God is near. It is here. It longs to embrace you, gladden you, grace and free and empower you. Or to put it slightly differently: the arms of God, in all their loving mercy and eternal yearning for you, and widespread in welcome for you. Come and be held.

Unfortunately, most translations convey a different message. Most offer an accurate, literal rendering: Repent and believe the good news, but accordingly miss the real sense of joyous, uncluttered invitation. Perhaps because even in Jesus’ day, the word repent had been so badly mis-emphasized by preachers and religious folk.

Over centuries, the Jewish prophetic tradition voiced the same promise that Jesus offered, that God was still God even in the midst of the mess and muck of the world and despite the suffering and sorrowful consequences the Israelites had brought upon themselves by their sin and rebellion. God was still God, the prophets declared, and God remained absolutely loving and determined in his pursuit of his people, to draw them back to himself.

But that announcement of hope by the prophets also emphasized the need for Israel to repent, to turn away from their willful, stupid and God-rejecting ways and turn back in humility and hope, in trust and obedience, to the Lord and to the ways commanded for them. One need only to turn back to the words of Moses to the people before their entry into the promised land to understand this sense of turning, choosing, deciding that is foundational to this invitation to repentance. In Deuteronomy 30, Moses had recounted all the story of God’s faithfulness, promise and provision to his people from the deliverance from slavery in Egypt right up to the moment where they were about to enter and claim the land destined for them. Moses challenged:

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways and to keep his commands, that you may live and increase in the land God is giving you. This day I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live, and that you may love the Lord your God. For the Lord is your life.

Ever since that time, when the people forgot to love the Lord who loved them, ever since that challenge when Israel decided there were other gods, other things, other powers and lures more enticing and tangible and desirable than loving the God who made them, cared for them, sought after them, ever after, the prophets would call Israel to repent, that is, to turn back to the Lord, and discover that while they had abandoned God, God had never abandoned them. Oh, the Lord may have let them suffer the logical consequences of their decisions, their selfishness, their godlessness, their sin and their folly, but God, the prophets asserted, had never ceased to anguish over his people, had never stopped beckoning for them to turn and return to his arms, his care, and to the presence of their joy.

I said earlier that the word repent, even in Jesus’ day, had been so badly mis-emphasized by preachers and religious folk, that its deeper meaning was often missed. Too often then, and too often still by modern damnation-spouting preachers and hell-warning moralists and self-righteous Pharisees, repentance is made out to be this nearly impossible task of getting oneself cleaned up and made good enough for God’s love. Too often repentance is proclaimed as nothing but endless self-blaming and groveling with the sackcloth and ashes of shame and guilt. Too often the good news that God’s kingdom is here and beckoning has been twisted into bad news that God the judge is coming and God is angry and is especially angry at you and unless you get yourself right, unless you make yourself worthy, unless you somehow make yourself holy and pure and good enough, there is no hope, only heat and heartache, ahead.

As if you and I and this world do not already know enough heartache. As if you and I and this world do not already know the burning reality of shame and hopelessness, guilt and grief and helplessness. As if you and I and this world have not already and too often condemned ourselves as unquestionably unworthy and forever unlovable. It is not more judgment any of us need – it is more redemption and mercy and good news that the God who never abandoned Israel has never abandoned us. In truth, God’s jealous desire to claim us, cure us, hold and heal us in the grandeur of his loving goodness is what led him to send Christ into this world – Christ who arrived in the meanest of conditions, born out of wedlock, born to peasant refugees in a barn; Christ who walked this earth in the midst of a land under military occupation and constant persecution where the very people who should have most recognized the hope of his message and ministry instead rejected him and conspired to crucify him. The God who never abandons but ever loves is the God who sent his Son to die arms spread wide on a cross and then, as our creed asserts, even descended into hell, in declaration that that is how daringly and relentlessly and impossibly far God will go to find us, win us, forgive us, call us, draw us back to his peace, his joy, his love.

But let me add one other essential biblical image here, and that is the story of the prodigal son which we find in the gospel of Luke. In that parable, Jesus paints the picture of the wayward son having wasted not just his resources but his life and his dreams and his joy, and finally, Jesus says, he came not just to a point of desperation but he came to his senses and made the decision to go home and throw himself on his father’s mercy. But long before he ever got to his father’s gateway, the father, who had been waiting and endlessly, longingly, hopefully watching, spies the boy in his raggedness, and throwing all imagined dignity aside, hikes up his robes and goes running full tilt down the road, making himself a veritable laughing stock to his neighbours, and swept his lost son up in an all forgiving and protecting embrace of mercy and grace.

The great and good news for all of us prodigals who have tried to do life on our own, is that repentance means above all coming home, coming home to the all forgiving, all rejoicing, all protecting, all redeeming embrace and welcome of our God and heavenly Father, in all our raggedness and weariness, in all our emptiness and untidiness, in all our “haven’t-been-able-to-fix-ourselves-and-here-we-are-in-our-desperate-failure-and-messy-utter-helplessness”, only to find ourselves being swept up in that holy and utterly extravagant embrace of divine mercy and grace, as the Father weeps over us and calls for the party to get started, for we who were lost are found, and we who were as good as dead are being made alive.

One of my favourite authors said that repentance is not so much a matter of looking backwards all the while beating ourselves up and saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” as it is a looking towards the majesty and depth of love with which God is waiting to embrace us and saying, “Wow! Thanks be to God.”

Friends, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God’s joy and compassion and freedom and love is breathing down our necks; the master, as the Book of Revelation paints it, is knocking, right now, on the door of your life and mine begging to be admitted. Will we open our eyes, our ears, our hearts to that good news and promise, and cast ourselves, in all our desperate longing and need, into his arms?

Let us pray:

Gracious Lord Jesus, you are here, among us, with us. You ever advent among us, asking to be received into our lives that you might cradle us in your love. Holy Saviour, save us afresh. Turn us again to the light of your grace and goodness, and bring alive hope and faith and joy in our souls. For your mercy’s sake. Amen.