What did Jesus mean by the “Kingdom of God”? [Peace and the Bible #13]

Ted Grimsrud—February 5, 2024

I believe that one important indicator that Jesus had a “political” agenda (as I have discussed in my previous two blog posts, “Peaceable politics and the story of Jesus” and “Did Jesus have a political philosophy?”) is simply his prominent use of the term “kingdom of God” (or its equivalent in Matthew’s gospel, “kingdom of heaven”). This seems actually to be a complicated metaphor—it’s not obvious exactly what Jesus meant. But that “kingdom” has political connotations cannot be questioned. As a simple definition of “kingdom,” we may say it is a stable community of people that is led by a queen- or king-like ruler. In whatever sense Jesus had in mind of “community” and “ruler,” he did have in mind some sort of political entity.

I have long been ambivalent about our using the “kingdom of God” metaphor today. It seems hopelessly archaic, not to mention patriarchal. It breathes of a world of domination and hierarchies. Yet, Jesus—as I understand him—opposes patriarchy, domination and hierarchies. Is there a better way to understand his metaphor, then? I think so, though I am still not fully comfortable making the term a regular part of the faith language. But rather than simply dismissing the metaphor, I think we would be well served to try to figure out what Jesus himself meant by it. What was he trying to convey? May we affirm his intent even if we seek to find more contemporary language to articulate it? To work at answering these questions, let’s look at the biblical history of the notion of the “kingdom of God.”

The failed territorial kingdom of the Old Testament

The initial picture of the kingdom of God in the Old Testament is of Abraham’s descendants, a community of freed slaves who God led out of Egypt. After the exodus from slavery, God provides the people with a set of laws (Torah) that calls for a social order that in many ways would be an alternative type of politics in contrast to the domination-style politics of the Egyptian empire. The liberation was led by Moses, whose role was to be a kind of extemporaneous prophet, not a permanent king-like leader and not a military leader sitting atop a permanent war-making machine. God is presented as the true king of the people; that is what makes the community an expression of the “kingdom of God.”

In time, the people are provided a homeland. From the start, this is a complicated reality. The story presents the entry of the Hebrews into the land of Canaan as an opportunity to embody Torah, to be an alternative to the unjust power politics of the surrounding nations. God gives them victory in Canaan and, as with the exodus, the role of the human beings is most of all to trust in God. There is no human king. There is no permanent military. Power and wealth are decentralized. If what results is a “kingdom” it is an expression of the “kingdom of God.”

At the same time, taking the land required conquering those who already lived there. The lack of realism of the story may be seen in the sense that such violence would not itself corrupt the community. Once they are in control of the land, they appear to have the stability and the clarity to establish a community that follows Torah’s sense of shalom. They are a unique kind of kingdom, with God as their king, not an elite class of human beings. Nonetheless, establishing a territorial kingdom that involved domination over a specific territory—even if God is their king with the egalitarian implications of such an arrangement—means that in a hostile world, arrangements will have to be made to protect the borders and to resist potential enemies.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that to sustain a territorial kingdom would cause all kinds of complications for the Hebrews. The most obvious complication, and the one emphasized in the story the Bible tells, is that an elite class will emerge. This elite class, called the “elders” in 1 Samuel, demands that God give them a human king. In a dramatic account in 1 Samuel 8, we read of this demand and God’s response: To install a human king will mean a return to the social dynamics of Egypt. A power elite who will take and take from the people. There seems to a contradiction between being a “kingdom of God” that places faithfulness to Torah at the center or being a “kingdom like the nations” with a hierarchy topped by a human power elite. Undeterred, the elders still insist on a human king, and God gives them one. Perhaps the contradiction can be overcome.

At this point, the Hebrews have established a territorial kingdom very much like the surrounding nations—which is what the elders wanted. The story tells of Israel’s greatest king, David, who seems to have potential to actually provide godly leadership—not seeking his own wealth and remaining deferential to Torah. However, at a key moment David turns away. He desires another man’s wife and arranges for that man to be killed; adultery and murder present themselves in short succession. As the story continues, we see a progression toward the very concerns that the book of Deuteronomy, in chapter 17, had expressed when it outlined what could have been a just approach to human kingship that would help the people maintain their loyalty to Torah even as a territorial kingdom. Deuteronomy makes several demands of the would-be king: Do not gather wives, horses and chariots, and extreme wealth. The king was also explicitly commanded to continue to keep Torah central—to have a kingdom where the ways of justice and not the ways of domination would be central.

The books of 1 and 2 Kings contain a litany of accounts of the various kings who disregarded the ways of Torah and did precisely what Deuteronomy had forbidden. Near the end, we learn that things were so bad that for many generations, Torah was completely forgotten. The territorial kingdom of the Hebrew people was far from being an expression of the kingdom of God. However, the story also tells us that God did not forget about God’s people and their vocation to bless all the families of the earth. God regularly sent prophets to challenge the community. The prophets both critiqued the community’s injustices and idolatries and reminded the people of the possibility of a return.

As the injustices and idolatries mount, God inspires Judah’s king Josiah to be attentive when someone discovers the old law books in the temple. Josiah is impressed by the written Torah and takes drastic steps to turn the kingdom back to the way of Torah. As it turns out, his efforts are too little too late. Not long after Josiah’s death, the kingdom of Judah is destroyed by the Babylonian Empire. However, the presence of Torah provides the bases for sustaining the community’s sense of peoplehood and vocation, the bases for being a non-territorial expression of the kingdom of God.

Peoplehood without a territorial kingdom

The territorial kingdom ended. The biblical story that follows down to and including the ministry of Jesus does not point toward a divinely approved effort to reclaim such a kingdom. In fact, the strategy of trying to use a territorial kingdom as the context for fulfilling the people of God’s vocation (i.e., to bless all the families of the earth) seems to be rejected. Whatever the kingdom of God might have to do with, never again would it be tightly linked with a human territorial kingdom.

Questions and hopes for human kings and territorial kingdoms remained present, though, in the tradition. There was never a clear consensus about what the kingdom of God would have to do with. When we get to the story of Jesus, set in the first century, Common Era, we encounter a ferment of hope and desire in his broader community. One strand of expectation seems to have been that Israel would again be led by a king like David, the greatest of the territorial kingdom’s kings. The term “Christ” (or “Messiah”), which literally meant “king,” gained currency as the label for this new David. A synonym for “Christ” was the phrase “son of David.”

The gospels set Jesus ministry in the context of these kinds of expectations. When he began preaching, doing miracles of healing and exorcism, confronting the religious and political leaders, organizing a community of his followers, and generally creating a furor, he was soon associated with the hoped-for Messiah. Jesus seems to have embraced that identity. He called together a coterie of followers, with a group of twelve at its center. This group of twelve echoes ancient Israel’s structure of twelve tribes. However, Jesus early on distanced himself from the associations of the Messiah with a territorial kingdom and with the kind of power politics that King David and his successors followed.

The gospels tell us that at the moment of transition, when Jesus embraced his vocation to be God’s emissary and to bear costly witness to the ways of God, he spent 40 days on retreat and encountered severe temptations. These temptations boiled down to the issue of what kind of kingdom politics Jesus would embody as the Christ. Would he be a new David in the sense of leading a violent revolution and following the path the kings of old followed in seeking to be like the nations? Or would it be something totally different—the embodiment of the heart of Torah to which the prophets witnessed (care for the vulnerable, reject power politics, refuse to contribute to social stratification by gathering horses and chariots and great wealth) without requiring the necessarily coercive establishment and sustenance of a territorial kingdom?

These questions cut right to the heart of the political sensibility that Jesus’s message meant to provoke—which is to say, to the very heart of his mission. On the one hand, he did embrace the promise that his people would be the channel to bless all the families of the earth; he reaffirmed that the people have a vocation that dated back to Abraham. His was a call to transform life on earth, a task to which the metaphor “kingdom of God” speaks directly. On the other hand, he emphasized that this task required a notion of the political that recognized that territorial kingdoms could not be at the center. Territorial kingdoms require practices and values that inevitably undermine the core message of blessing that Jesus’s embrace of the heart of Torah and the prophets emphasized.

Jesus’s “Christness”

One of the important insights we can gain if we are attentive to the evolution of the metaphor of the kingdom of God in the Bible is that we will recognize that Jesus’s alternative sense of his “Christness” is not a rejection of the Old Testament’s ultimate notion of kingdom. Jesus sides with the prophets and their interpretation of Torah. He advocates a sense of the kingdom of God in continuity with the Old Testament sense of peoplehood the characterized the peoplehood before they were confined within a territorial kingdom and after that kingdom ended. One way to read the Old Testament story is to see that the story in the end refutes the notion of a territorial kingdom of God. The territorial understanding of the kingdom was tried. It was a terrible failure, but in God’s faithfulness, mediated through Torah, the sense of peoplehood was sustained even amidst that failure.

When Jesus healed, when he preached the gospel, and when he confronted domination, he did in a genuine sense announce a new presence of God’s kingdom in the world. However, I suggest that the “newness” is best understood in terms of a new intensity and a new clarity about the old vision of humane, God-glorifying shalom that was witnessed to by Torah and the prophets. Jesus was a “king” who showed what the anti-Egyptian Empire message of exodus and Torah originally conveyed—and that this message was only viable with a self-conscious affirmation of the non-territorial kingdom of God.

In the midst of the intense ferment of Jesus’s lifetime, his vision had at best a mixed reception. Both in the time following the exodus and the time following the entry into the promised land, God had made clear that the gift of new life brought with it a demand actually to embody that life. Many in the community would not embrace the demand. Likewise, the reception of Jesus’s message was fraught. Some powerfully positive creative and healing consequences emerged. But so, too, did resistance and fearfulness.

The story of early Christianity from the start tells of mixed responses. The book of Acts, Paul’s letters, and the book of Revelation all recount serious conflicts in the early communities of Jesus’s followers. And these conflicts always were a major part of the tradition. In time, tragically, Christian leaders calcified their definitions of true faith and completed the schism from the rest of the Hebrew people and placed formal doctrines at the center of the faith, not the embodiment of Torah. The state came to be the enforcer of doctrinal purity—through use of the sword. The “kingdom of God” again, as with the Old Testament territorial kingdom, came to be linked closely with the coercion and corruption of human nation-states and empires.

Jesus’s sense of the kingdom of God remains centrally relevant to the witness of the prophetic communities (Christian and Jewish) that have continued to embody the shalom that Torah witnessed to—often in tension with territorial kingdoms and institutional Christianity. The political vision Jesus asserted is kingdom-like in that it has to do with social life, and it is oriented around the authoritative message of the gospel and Torah. So, the kingdom of God according to Jesus points toward ways of life that upend what human, territorial kingdoms have tried to establish. No Othering. No domination. No stratification between elite and the poor masses, a stratification enforced by the tools of the state. This upside-down kingdom, though, is not merely an eschatological promise for an otherworldly, atemporal future “heaven.” Rather, it is for life on earth in history and meant for all nations, tribes, peoples, and languages (Revelation 7:9). It is the fulfillment of the promise of blessing for all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3).

A major tension exists at the heart of the kingdom of God metaphor. We can’t avoid the reality that on the one hand, it is linked with empires and nation-states and their coercive methods of exerting control and territorial domination. And on the other hand, it is linked with the non-coercive, love-oriented, non-territorial social entity that Jesus initiated. As a rule, Christians have resolved this tension by giving their states a blank check when it comes to national interests and by marginalizing the political philosophy Jesus articulated and embodied and imagining that his notion of the “kingdom of God” is futuristic and otherworldly. We may see where this “resolution” has gotten us—a corrupt Christianity and self-destructive human territorial kingdoms.

Trying to wrestle with Jesus’s metaphor can help us, though, to see that the power of the gospel may be found in its resilience—the message of love has not been extinguished even with the failures of the Christian tradition. Wrestling with the tension in the “kingdom of God” metaphor might be one way people of faith can help recover the power of the gospel in our world today.

Blog posts in the “Peace and the Bible” series