Revd Roland Barnes, pastoral leader of the C-inW Bro Moelwyn Ministry Area, reflects on the relationship between the Kingdom of Heaven and the world we live in.
Jesus proclaims God's Kingdom to the crowds
Great to read people’s various comments in response to Ian’s article and subsequent writings. Whether we agree with each other or not, it is so important to “talk.” Sharing thoughts and opinions and having them challenged is such a healthy thing to do. So thanks to everyone who has added their “penny’s worth.”
Parables of the Kingdom
I don’t know about you, but I have read and re-read Jesus’ numerous parables about “The Kingdom of God” (eg Mark 4. 21 – 34) and am still none the wiser.
“This is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like,” Jesus declares, “A seed planted, which grows and then is harvested.”
Ah!, what has that got to do with the Kingdom of Heaven, what does it tell us about the K of H?
Do we humans instigate the Kingdom by what we sow, how we live our lives? So, live the right way and good things come to us. Live the wrong way, sow wrong seed, and reap the bad consequences? Cause and effect.
That's a nice easy interpretation, very black and white. Problem is, in the real world, the world of science, flesh and blood; its never that simple. None of us is an island, we are all subject to the pressures and actions of things around us. So I can live a Godly, blameless life, but tomorrow I can be knocked down by a car, knifed in the local park, or find that I have been diagnosed with an incurable cancer. Where’s the cause and effect there?
These things are largely out of my control. Where is the Kingdom of Heaven in all this, what is the Kingdom of Heaven. On a personal level, it can’t be just cause and effect – sow the seed – harvest the crop.
I feel a bit like Jesus’ followers : (Mt. 13. 13)
“Though seeing, I do not see,
Though hearing , I do not hear, or do not understand.”
We create our history
Perhaps Jesus is talking about much broader things, than just our small individual lives. Perhaps Jesus is thinking on a cosmic scale, history through the millennia?
Collectively as human societies, human culture, we sow seeds – we collectively make decisions, we create our history, step by step. The past - history - makes us who we are today; and each new generation that comes along, (especially those rebellious teenagers!) challenge us to move in different directions. They keep sowing fresh seeds. And God is there, tickling our consciences, - should we follow wise paths or foolish paths?
Are we sowing good seed today for the future of humankind, for the future of our planet; the Kingdom of Heaven even?
2024: election year
There are elections being held across the world this year. If I’m being honest with you, I despair of humanity. Planet Earth groans with the hurt we are doing to it, yet what do we argue over – tax cuts, immigration and our own individual standards of living. Earth is bursting at the seams with human overcrowding, and what do the politicians give us as a panacea for our problems. “Growth, growth and even more growth!” I feel sad for our dear home, our planet earth. I feel sad for our grandchildren who are going to have to live with the results of our generation’s irresponsibility. We have not sown good seed. It should be our duty to leave the world in a better state than when we inherited it.
The Kingdom of Heaven – a seed planted which grows and is then harvested. Perhaps our political manifestoes ought to reflect that; rather than the human selfishness which totally dominates our political thinking today.
P.S. Don’t blame the politicians, we get the politicians we deserve, the politicians we vote for, the political scene that we create.
11 comments:
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Maybe my mother's report of her transcendent experience is the best description I have ever heard. She told me "I saw Heaven. And it was just the same world, same garden, same people- but all seen through the eyes of Love. "
Roland writes, “This is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like,” Jesus declares, “A seed planted, which grows and then is harvested.” I am sorry but, to me, these words could have been spoken by any of the Prosperity Bible Televangelists such as Ken Copeland who is reported to have collected those seeds (tithes) to build a nett personal worth of $750 million.
Regarding the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, Mark tells us in chapter 4, starting at verse 33, "With many similar parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as much as they could understand. 34 He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything." No - there is something wrong here. Jesus explains to the public in riddles which he explains only to his close associates. No - I can't help thinking that the line "But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything" was made-up by the gospel writer who couldn't understand Jesus' descriptions of the Kingdom of Heaven any more than we can.
I think Jesus used the image of the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven to describe the way that our personal relationship with God has a large aspect of placing our lives under his direction, or ‘rule’, or 'kingship'.
But the image has a social aspect as well as a personal and individual aspect: God’s Kingdom is an image of an alternative society made up of all the people who have placed their lives under God’s rule. For this reason Christians should regard everything Jesus said about 'The Kingdom of God' as the standard by which the Church community always has to measure itself.
By ‘alternative society’ I also mean that when Jesus talked about God’s Reign he intended to draw a contrast between the ‘kingdom’ of this world, in which people’s lives and relationships are governed by greed, violence, sensuality and indeed by the devil (Jesus also talked about ‘the Kingdom of Satan’) and the whole other potential reality which takes shape when people allow their lives and relationships to be governed by God and his attitudes and values.
I know that in the days of Liberation Theology in Latin America God’s Kingdom became a powerful motivating ideal for Catholic communities who saw themselves resisting the evils of military dictatorship: they had a strong sense of the contrast between God’s Reign and the ‘worldly’ reign of violence and torture etc. presided over by their governments. I don’t think they were wrong to interpret ‘the Kingdom of God’ as an image with these sorts of political implications. It’s not just a personal, individual, interior reality.
Two more aspects:
I think Jesus understood God’s Kingdom as a gift which we are invited to respond to. That’s to say, we don’t build the Kingdom, God does, and our role is to ‘enter’ God's Kingdom by responding to his offer.
In this sense ‘the Kingdom’ can be seen as an image of God’s grace, which transforms us and imparts his divine qualities – his holiness - to us. We can read all Jesus’ parables about seeds being planted and taking root and growing as references to God’s grace, how it works and how it influences and changes us.
Second: the Kingdom has a future aspect. God’s reign can never be fully realized in the present world, or in the earthly realm, and we won’t live fully under God’s reign until we pass into the next world. Ultimately, God’s Kingdom won’t be fully established until after Jesus’ second coming and the end of the world as it is at present.
Apart from anything else, human nature, wounded and weakened by sin, will always prevent God's Kingdom from being fully realised in the present world. Despite our best intentions, our sinfulness will always damage or derail our efforts to live under God's reign. Jesus talked about this aspect of God's Kingdom in his parable of the wheat and the tares.
Maybe we should all get together to study The Parables of the Kingdom by the famous biblical scholar C. H. Dodd. After all he was from North Wales (Wrexham)!
Margaret runs a weekly Bible Study and, as it happens, it is on Mark at the moment.
Here are some further thoughts.
One of the comments on Roland's post includes this sentence:
'I can't help thinking that the line "But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything" was made-up by the gospel writer who couldn't understand Jesus' descriptions of the Kingdom of Heaven any more than we can'.
As a matter of fact the gospel writer Mark gives an example of Jesus explaining his parable of the sower to the disciples - Mark 13:18-23. It makes sense to suppose that Jesus explained his parables to the disciples on more than this one occasion.
The parable of the sower uses figurative language to describe the experience of missionary preaching and the various ways that people reject the message - initial shallow enthusiasm which quickly peters out, preoccupation with worldly concerns ('the deceitfulness of wealth') and so on.
Another interpretation is that each of us, individually, at different times, can fall victim to more than one of the motives that Jesus mentions. The parable isn't only referring to the reactions of different groups of people.
Part of the value of Jesus' habit of teaching in parables is that later generations of disciples, the Church community, always has the job of interpreting and explaining their imagery and symbolism.
So, to give another example, the parable of the good Samaritan, on one level, is Jesus' illustration of how to practise love of neighbour. It's his answer to the question 'And who is my neighbour?'
Hundreds of years later Saint Augustine offered another interpretation. He saw the story as an allegory of our salvation through Christ:
'A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, an dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead.
'The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which He deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage.
'The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come. The innkeeper is the Apostle [Saint Paul]. The supererogatory payment is either his counsel of celibacy, or the fact that he worked with his own hands lest he should be a burden to any of the weaker brethren when the Gospel was new, though it was lawful for him “to live by the gospel”'.
At any rate I don't think there's any good reason to believe that the gospel writers 'couldn't understand' Jesus' parables and there's no need for us to be confused either. Prayerful meditation on Scripture and a commitment to be informed by two thousand year's worth of the Church's reflection and teaching will reveal the 'hidden meaning' of the parables to anyone who is willing to engage with them.
Margaret's Bible Study group is very likely an excellent way of doing that.
Thank you, Ian.
In the gospels, it is as you say, descriptively impoverished as to what the Kingdom of Heaven is actually like. However, there are those who are able to see glimpses through their "spiritual eyes" (daydreaming, intuition, visualizations that pop into our minds) and probably no one can be sure. It seems to me, that the earth as God created it is there, but the dimension of the heavenly host is as well, which includes God of course. Instead of things going wrong as in this dimension, I would think that things that are done in heaven do not go wrong and so everything there gets better and better which is experienced as ecstasy. My views, I believe are theoretically or theologically correct, but unprovable. THANKS.
Help!!! I had not realised that I'd added my bank details for people to donate money to me or my church!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hey come on, get real here. All I was doing in my article was trying to explore the meaning of Jesus' words and parables. Please don't accuse me of being a TV evangelist for doing that. I've never asked for a penny off anyone my whole life, and I'm not planning to do so in the future.
It seems to me that most of Jesus' teachings referred to accountability: based on his "return". Like Roland, I also feel bad about our planet: the displacement of wild animals and ruination of their lifestyles and habitats. I also loath the concept that war is legitimate. Like Obama's comment when he refused to apologize to the Japanese "oh that was war". Or "Israel has a right to defend itself", a blanket for covering the appalling human suffering caused. However, that is what Jesus addressed. But one has to understand and accept the spiritual reality and theory underpinning his ministry. This seems to be contentious. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world. He said that he saw Satan.
fall from heaven. Jesus' kingdom was on the other side of physical death, not this side. The Book of Revelation says all things will be made anew: a new heaven and earth if I remember rightly. The crux is "the fall of man". Many people can't understand this or accept it, but unless one makes suppositions from this critical point, the rest ain't gonna make a lot of sense. Humans will ruin this planet. The generations of man will come to an end. This dimension will eventually be no more.
Raymond wrote that
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