THE REIGN OF GOD
The first words of Jesus are few and simple, very much like those of John, "The time is accomplished; the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the. Gospel." (Mark 1:15)
Bare words, incomprehensible to modern day people by
their very sobriety. To understand them and to understand the difference
between the message of John and the message of Jesus, they need to be
translated into our language, filled again with their eternally living meaning.
"The time
has come!" The time for which men
have been waiting, which they have prophesied and announced. John said that a
King would come ready to found the new Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. The King
has come and announces that the doors of the Kingdom are open. He is the
guide, the path, the hand, before being King in all the splendor of His
celestial glory.
When Jesus says "The
time is accomplished," he does not refer to the exact date, to the
fact that it was the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius. The time of
Jesus is now and always is eternity. The moment of His appearance, the moment
of His death, the moment of His return, the moment of His perfect triumph, has
not yet arrived, not even yet! And yet, at every moment the time is
accomplished, every hour is the fullness of time, on condition that the workers
are ready. Every day is His; His era is not written down in numbers: there
is no chronology in eternity. Every time a man tries to enter into the Kingdom,
confirms the Kingdom by believing, enriches the Kingdom, consolidates, defends,
proclaims its perpetual sanctity and its perpetual rightness in opposition to
all the inferior kingdoms (inferior because they are human, not divine, earthly
not heavenly) then always the time is accomplished. This time is called the
epoch of Jesus, the Christian era, and the New Covenant. At this point two
thousand years divides us from that time;
not quite two days, because for God, and for men of understanding, a thousand
years are as a day. The time is ripe; even today we are in the fullness of
time. Jesus calls us even now. The second day has not yet expired, the
foundations of the Kingdom are scarcely begun. We who live today, this year, in
this century (and we shall not always be alive, and we shall perhaps not see
the end of this year, and certainly we shall not see the end of this century),
we, I say, the living, can take part in this Kingdom, enter into it, live in
it, enjoy it. The Kingdom is not the worn-out fancy of a poor Jew of twenty
centuries ago; it is not an archaism, a dead memory, a bygone frenzy. The
Kingdom is of today, of tomorrow, of always; a reality of the future always
just-realized, alive, actual, ours; a work started a short time ago, a work to
which everyone is free to put his hand to take it up, to carry it on. The word
seems old, the message dim with antiquity repeated by the echoes of two
thousand years, but the Kingdom—as a fact, true, accomplished—is new, young,
born yesterday, still to grow, to flower, to prosper. Jesus threw the seed
into the earth, but the seed has scarcely germinated in two thousand years
passed like a stormy winter, in the space of sixty-five human generations. Is
it perhaps possible that our own time after the flood of blood is the divine
and longed-for period?
What this Kingdom is, we shall learn page by page in the
words of Jesus; but we must not imagine it as a new Paradise of Delight, as a
wearisome Arcady of beatitude, as an immense choir singing Hosannas with their
feet on the clouds and their heads among the stars.
Christ describes the Kingdom of God as opposed to the
Kingdom of Satan, as the antithesis of the Kingdom of Earth. The Kingdom of
Satan is the Kingdom of evil, of deceit, of cruelty, of pride, the Kingdom of
baseness. Therefore the Kingdom of God means the Kingdom of good, of sincerity,
of love, of humility, the Kingdom of the lofty.
The Kingdom of Earth is the Kingdom of matter and of
flesh, the Kingdom of gold, hatred, avarice, sensuality, the Kingdom of all
things loved by evil and distraught men. The Kingdom of Heaven is to be the
opposite of this: the Kingdom of the spirit and of the soul, the Kingdom of
renunciation and of purity; the Kingdom of all things valued by men who know
the worthlessness of everything else in comparison. God is Father and Goodness;
Heaven is above the earth, hence it is the spirit. Heaven is God's home. The
spirit is the dominion of goodness. All that crawls on the earth, grubs in the
earth, takes pleasure in matter—that is bestiality; all that lives with
upraised eyes, desiring Heaven, wishing to live forever in Heaven—that is Holiness.
Most men are beasts. It is Christ's will that these beasts become saints. This
is the simple and ever-living meaning of the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of
Heaven.
The Kingdom of God is of men and for men. The Kingdom of
Heaven is in us. Begin at once: it is our work, for our happiness in this life
on this earth. It depends on our will, on our response given or withheld.
Become perfect and the Kingdom will extend even on earth. The Kingdom of God
will be founded among men.
It is true that Jesus added "repent," but the
old word has been distorted from its true and magnificent meaning. The word of
Mark—epistrejw epistrepho ep-ee-stref'-o—should not be translated "repent"; epistrejw epistrepho ep-ee-stref'-o means rather the
changing of the mind, the transformation of the soul. Metamorphosis is a change
of form; "metanoew metanoeo met-an-o-eh'-o
a changing of the spirit. It ought
rather to be translated "conversion," that is, the renewing of the
inner life of man. The idea of "repentance" is only an illustration
of Christ's command.
As one of the conditions of the arrival of the Kingdom
and at the same time as the very substance of the new order, Jesus demands
complete conversion, a revolution of life and of the common values of life, a
transmutation of feelings, of opinions, of intentions. This He called, speaking
to Nicodemus, "the second birth." Little by little He was to explain
in what way this total transformation of the ordinary human soul is to be
effected. All His life was devoted to this teaching and to setting the example.
But in the meantime, He contented Himself with adding one conclusion,
"Believe in the Gospel."
By "Gospel" men nowadays mean usually the book
where the quadruple story of Jesus is printed; but Jesus neither wrote books
nor thought of volumes. By "Gospel" He meant, according to the plain
and sweet meaning of the word, "good tidings." Jesus is a messenger
(in Greek "angel") who brings good tidings: He brings the cheerful
message that the sick will be cured, that the blind will see, the poor will be
enriched with imperishable riches, that the sad will rejoice, that sinners will
be pardoned, the unclean purified, that the imperfect can become perfect, that barbarians
can become saints, and saints become above angels, like unto God.
If this Kingdom is to come, if everybody is to prepare
himself for its coming, we must believe in the message, believe that the
Kingdom is possible and near. If there is no faith in this promise, no one will
do what must be done to fulfill the promise. Only the certainty of the truth of
this good tidings, only the conviction that the Kingdom is not the lie of an
adventurer or the hallucination of an obsessed zealot; only the certainty of
the sincerity and validity of the message can arouse men to put their hands to
the great work of its foundation.
With those few words, obscure to the majority of men,
Jesus began His teaching. The fullness of time, the need to begin at once! The
coming of the Kingdom, victory of spirit over matter; of good over bad, of the
saint over the beast. "metanoew
metanoeo met-an-o-eh'-o "—the
total transformation of the soul. The Gospel—the cheerful assurance that all
this is true and eternally possible.
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