Kingdom, Culture & Happiness
As Matthew tells it, Jesus’ Gospel had to do with an invasion. He was declaring a siege. And the in-breaking Kingdom wasn’t just concerned with capturing first century Palestine. Its aspiration involved conquering all human reality. That’s what made Jesus so threatening to the political and religious authorities of his time. He wasn’t there with some new spiritual teaching. He was there to take over.
If you were among his first listeners, you would have understood what he was saying immediately. His language ties back to God’s ancient covenant with Israel: with the way God saved them from slavery; revealed the law; provided land; established the Temple; returned them from exile, and so on But, this Covenant had a global scope as well. And if you were among his first listeners you would have known God’s promise to send a King to liberate them from oppression, freeing them, finally, to live as God’s people under God’s rule. From there he was expected to conquer the world – making all of humanity to live under God’s Kingship in justice and peace. That’s what you would have understood from his announcement: “The Kingdom of heaven is at hand: repent.” And you would have understood his not-so-subtle claim to be that King.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century: We’re all too familiar with self-appointed revolutionaries and their pretensions to change the world. In the two millennia between Christ’s revolution and today, we’ve seen countless insurrections, all with their promise finally to establish liberty, equality, sovereignty, justice or whatever value they purport to advance. And if our weary world has learned anything, perhaps it’s to question precisely what good, what improvement, such revolutions are likely to achieve. What exactly do they promise?
In this series, I want to propose that there’s a connection between the Kingdom Jesus is building and the way of life he describes in the Sermon on the Mount. The pattern of life he proposes reveals the constitution of his Kingdom, it tells us what sort of place it is; what kind of people belong to it; what sort of life they lead, both as individuals and as a community. Or you could say that the Sermon on the Mount describes a culture – by which I mean, the set of customs, norms, values and behaviours defining the society of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now you might say that it’s all well and good to call the Sermon on the Mount Jesus’ description of a new kind of culture, that’s fine. But calling describing a culture doesn’t actually tell us what sort of revolution he’s announcing? Neither does it tell us what good he’s promising.
The answer is supplied in the first word of the Sermon: makarīos. Modern translations often render it as ‘blessed,’ or ‘happy’. You know the Beatitudes: Happy, or blessed, are those who…
Now, there’s an important interpretive observation I need to make here: Jesus’ claim isn’t really that God bestows a blessing on those who behave as he teaches. Neither is it that the beatitudes give us a feeling of well-being, gladness or enjoyment – it’s not an emotional thing.
To see the promise of Jesus’ revolution, you need to know that by Jesus’ day makarīos already has a long history – in the same way that today’s revolutionaries use words like: liberty, fraternity or sovereignty. It’s a philosophical idea having to do with the deepest part of us – with what we are as human beings, with our innate capacities for virtue and goodness. To understand what Jesus Kingdom promises you have to see that makarīos relates to the way we live; and weather we perform the practices that actualise our deep potential for being the best version of ourselves we can be.
Being makarīos is being the kind of person you most aspire to be – meeting your potential, realising your capacity to be all you can be – in a moral sense. When you do that, makarīos results. And when you practice the disciplines Jesus lays out until they’re habitual, makarīos becomes the defining condition of your life.
My point is that the promise of Jesus’ revolution is achieved through a new set of practise and behaviours, a pattern of life that results in makarīos - the fulfillment, or life-satisfaction, or flourishing that comes with living precisely as you were designed to live.
And it’s not just for individuals. Like all Kingdoms, Jesus’ Kingdom is a collective, an ekklesia. It’s the group in which we, together, flourish both as individuals, and as a whole community.
So, it’s probably worth thinking carefully about what these practices require and what they mean. That will be our task in the weeks to come.
Yet, as we’ll see, as soon as you subject Jesus’ teaching to close examination, it’s hard to avoid the utter strangeness of what he calls us to. Poverty, mourning, meekness, paying your accuser whatever he demands – not exactly the values we’d think of as constituting the best life possible – forget about transforming the world.
It’s precisely because of this strangeness that I think we need to get clear what Jesus is asking of us when he announces his Kingdom’s arrival. Note how he says it: ‘The Kingdom is here: repent.’ This word, repent, is metanoia in the Greek.
It’s an idea that’s often misunderstood, especially in contemporary spirituality. But it’s an idea we need to get straight if we’re going to understand the manner in which Christ’s Kingdom breaks-in. It’s not apology. It doesn’t mean saying sorry.
To get it, we need a new metaphor. Think: uploading a new operating system onto your computer. It means undergoing a complete change, a full overhaul of our ways of thinking, feeling and acting. When he calls us to join his Kingdom, when he calls us to repent, he’s calling us to precisely this – to abandon our prior values and behaviours and be reprogrammed with the program of the kingdom – with God’s help to put into practice the way of life, the set of concrete behaviors that attain in us the richest human life possible. That’s what the Sermon on the Mount is about.
Jesus’ gospel is about a revolution: a revolution of the heart. There’s no barricades or trumpets, no battles or banners – no storming of the gates. The Kingdom arrives through repentance - through God’s work of making us to live in the way he made us to. And it is manifest in a way of being, in a culture that actualises the potentials God created in us for goodness, gentleness, loving-kindness, mercy, and peacemaking.
It’s this way of life, this set of practices, we’ll be examining over the coming weeks, what they entail and what they mean. We’ll be examining why they constitute such good news. I hope you’ll join me, every Thursday this term.