How would you describe a color to someone who had been blind since birth?
[This would make a great moment to walk down into the congregation and turn your “audience” into “participants,” or you can continue on probing the question yourself.]
What can you say about “blue” or “red” or “green” to someone who has no concept of color, of bright, light, or dark?
Well, you would almost have to use examples from the sense the blind person did have - touch, scent, sound, taste.
Blue is “cold” compared to a “hot” red.
Green is smooth and sweet, while yellow is sharp and pungent.
Purple has the depth of a bruise.
Orange may not rhyme with anything, but is feels like the sun on your face on a warm day.
Explaining the impossible to the unknowing describes much of the mission and message of Jesus.
How could he communicate the vastness of divine love to individual human hearts?
How could he present the fullness of time to a world parsed into days, hours, minutes, seconds? How could he reveal the unity of all creation to warring nations, cracked communities, and fractured families?
To get his message across Jesus clothed the utterly unique work of God through Christ in language that seemed deceptively familiar. Jesus’ preaching and teaching was all about “the kingdom of God.” The first-century world understood the concept of “kingship” all too well. The nations of the world were ruled by kings, and kings were absolute authority figures with unquestioned control over their subjects. The Old Testament refers to the kingship of God more than any other divine quality. Israel was God’s first kingdom, but in an eschatological future all the nations would recognize God’s ruling status and bow down before him.
So when Jesus spoke of the “kingdom of God’ his audience, especially the Torah-learned Jews, thought they knew what he was talking about.
Surprise. They didn’t.
Jesus was not talking about establishing a place with borders, a kind of divine fiefdom. The kingdom of God wasn’t a political polis or an eschatological, pie-in-the-sky, far-and-away dreamscape.
In fact, the kingdom of God didn’t even depend upon a stern, large-and-in-charge “king” for its existence. Even though Jesus spent most of his days describing the kingdom of God, he had little to say about God as “king.” Instead Jesus spoke of a God as “Abba,” a God who loved, who longed for his children, who offered redemption and forgiveness. When Jesus prayed it was not to a divine king, but to a divine Father, “Abba,” “Papa,” or even more familiarly, “Daddy.”
This is the “good news” of the “gospel.” Jesus offered a new vision of God, a God who desires a relationship with the world. The “king” of a “kingdom” was nothing new to his first-century listeners. The “king” as the divine God was old hat too. Every Caesar declared himself divine and worthy of worship.
No, the new message of Jesus’ “kingdom of God” was this: God’s kingdom was NOT ruled by any potentate or political powerhouse. The “kingdom of God” was something entirely different from any kingdom people had ever seen or heard or experienced before.
No wonder some two thousand years later we are still confused about it.
"Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you." So says Jesus in Matthew 6:33. You can’t get more blunt than that: “seek first the kingdom.” But here’s the problem: Jesus never defined the kingdom. Jesus never gave us a clear and concise definition of what he meant by "the kingdom of God." But Jesus did define the identity of those who entered it and lived in its reality.
Here are four things to remember about the identity of those living in the kingdom. Here are four key features of someone living a kingdom identity.
Kingdom people are known for
1) Crossing the line more than staying in line
2) “ReJesused” lives
3) Lifting a cross more than climbing a ladder
4) Bearing the cross more than wearing a cross
First, a kingdom identity is one where you are less prone to stay in line than to cross the line.
One of our big problems is that we still think of Jesus’ “kingdom” as a place. Yes, we know it’s a heavenly zone but in our minds it is still a “place” with defined parameters. And because a “place” we can’t see, a “place” still in the future, not yet realized in this world. This puts Jesus’ “kingdom” into the realm of the hoped-for, looked-for end-times, not the here and now.
As G. Elton Ladd first reminded us, and many other biblical scholars since, there is an already-not yet quality to the kingdom. The kingdom is something that already is conceived, but not yet consummated. And those who exhibit kingdom living have an already-but-not-yet quality to their lives. Kingdom people live the future in the present. Kingdom people live the not yet in the here and now. Kingdom people are constantly blowing past barriers and barricades, crossing over lines, even into enemy territory, to get to the future when around us people are shouting, “Stand back. Stay behind the lines. Don’t go there! Stay in line.”
Second, people with a kingdom identity have reJesused their lives. This is the phrase of Alan Hirsch and Mike Frost in their wonderful new book, ReJesus (Hendrickson, 2009). To a church that has become big on the historical Jesus, small on the living Christ, these authors contend that the essence of the life of Christian faith is “the conspiracy of little Jesuses” (Hirsch’s phrase). “People observing us ought to be able to discern the elements of Jesus’ way in our ways. If they cannot find authentic signals of the historical Jesus through the life of his people, then as far as we are concerned they have the full right to question our legitimacy” (80).
Remember how Jesus began his public ministry? By announcing “the kingdom of God has come near.” In other words, the kingdom has already appeared right in front of you! And what appeared right before those four sweaty, salt-encrusted fishermen?
Jesus did. That’s right. The second feature of kingdom living is the awareness that the kingdom of God is not a place. The kingdom of God is a person - the person of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, the Human Being. Jesus IS the kingdom of God. In fact, the early church father Origen (c.185-254) called Jesus “the kingdom in person” or more technically, the “auto-basileia.” (See Origen In Matt.24:7; on Matthew 18:23.)
So where does that put the kingdom of God today? Jesus’ first act in public ministry was to start calling a community of disciples to “follow me.” Jesus’ invitation then was really, “join the kingdom.” And later Jesus promised his disciples that wherever “Two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also.” The kingdom of God is found in the Christbody community, the body of Christ on earth. We enter and inhabit the kingdom of God every time we act to incarnate Christ in the world.
Have you “reJesused” your life? Have you “reJesused” your church?
Third, people with a kingdom identity lift crosses rather than climb ladders. Right here is one of our greatest problems. In the “prosperity gospel” that has gripped so many of our churches, and most of our minds, “conversion” is less a turning toward Christ than a turning toward success or fame or fortune, especially a turning towards self. Just check out best-seller Christianity, which has become ladder-climbing wrapped up as spirituality. A survey of CBA's best-selling books as we began the 21st century found that family and women's topics accounted for nearly half of the titles, with the rest focused mainly on success and the self. Of the top 100 books, just 6 were about the Bible, 4 about Jesus, and 3 about evangelism. The rest of them were about how to climb higher and higher on the ladders of success. "The Christianity of the bestseller lists tends to be personal, private, and interior," writes Gene Edward Veith in World magazine (July 2008), "with little attention to objective theology or to the church."
We have even made conversion primarily about ourselves, a finding of ourselves and a fulfilling of ourselves, a journey of self-discovery rather than a journey of God discovery.
For a kingdom identity, turning towards God is not about us, but about God’s overture of love, without which we are without sufficient motive or power to change and be changed. True “conversion” is to lay hold of Christ, or rather, as Paul corrects himself, to allow Christ to lay hold of us (Philippians 3:12). True “conversion” is directed toward the one to whom we convert, the one to whom we turn. True “conversion” is a life of “fullness” where the “fullness” is Christ, not the highest rung on the ladder. What did Paul say? “We preach success?” No, Paul said, “We preach Christ, and him crucified.”
“Any version of the gospel that substitutes the message of personal success for the cross is a manipulative counterfeit,” writes A. C. Thiselton in his commentary on The First Epistle to the Corinthians.
Fourth, people with a kingdom identity are less known for wearing crosses than bearing crosses. I don’t know about you, but I’m increasingly concerned about our preference for the cross as a decoration rather than a devotion and a discipline.
When Jesus called his first disciples, Simon, Andrew, James, and John, he didn’t call them to a life of thoughtful contemplation, days of mystic musing, or holy habitations. Jesus called them into live-action CrossLove missions. They had been making their living by catching fish. Now they would make a new life by catching people, by evangelizing a gospel that is more caught than taught.
That’s what it means to lift the cross. “In the cross of Christ I glory,” we sing. The cross is not about death. The cross is about life. The cross is deliverance from what is preventing you from being alive, from being a human being fully alive.
How can the kingdom of God “come near” for this twenty-first century? How do we incarnate Christ in this broken, battered world? Waving the cross of Christ before the near-sighted, self-centered eyes of the world just won’t cut it. As disciples we have to be willing to bear the cross, not just wear the cross. Jesus called his disciples to service, to sacrifice, to being the last, the least, the lowliest. When Jesus promised to make his first disciples “fishers of people” it was a mission that came with fishhooks in thumbs, raw and ripped hands, long days of hard work and the possibility of empty nets.
Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24-25). Life’s “crosses” are not barricades blocking your path to the future but bridges that take you across. The hard things of life make it easier, not harder, for you to be the human God made you to be.
There is an old hymn, “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?” A church in Houston Texas called Grace Community Church has answered that question with a resounding “No.” The senior pastor, Steve Riggle, has invited Houston’s Mayor Bill White to church one Sunday, when the Mayor will be presented with the church’s 2009 gift to the city of Houston: 100,000 volunteer hours of community service which the mayor can deploy in any way he needs. In other words, here is a kingdom people that has said to its city: we are burdened by the needs of our city, and we commit to our city’s betterment and beauty 100,000 hours of our blood, sweat, and tears. If you need us to clean up litter on the roadways, we’ll do it. If you need us to mow the lawns of the city parks, we’ll do it. If you need us to mentor kids in the public schools, we’ll do it. But we are committed to making our city better and more beautiful.
This story I have not been able to verify. But if it is not historically true, it is spiritually true.
There is a story about the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), who is most famous for his “The Thinker.” It seems that one day Rodin noticed a large crucifix that had been discarded in a pile of trash. Although it was terribly marred and defaced, Rodin perceived that it could be restored to its original beauty. Consequently he and some companions carried it to his home.
But the cross was too big for the house. What to do? Rather than return it to the trash heap, Rodin decided to knock out some walls and raise the roof of his house to make room for the cross.
Has the cross of Christ made you knock out some walls and raise the roof of your life? If it has, that’s kingdom living.