What was Jesus’ divine purpose on Earth? The most fully textured account in the gospels is that Jesus came to proclaim the good news that the Kingdom of God is at hand, an event which also demanded repentance from his people. In its starkest form, this is contained in a single four point sermon by Jesus in Mark:
The time is fulfilled.
The Kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent.
Believe in the Good News.
Notice that this doesn’t say anything about our souls or any eternal heaven or hell. I believe that there is some kind of eternal existence, whose ultimate fulfillment is foreshadowed by Jesus own resurrection. But I find that I agree with a long list of contemporary writers (N.T. Wright, Dallas Willard, Rob Bell) who argue that it is a mistake to characterize Jesus mission primarily as a ticket-punching exercise as to which “souls” do or do not go to heaven with Jesus or to a South-Park hell populated by Hitler and Saddam Hussein.
Doug and I will be writing a lot here about the Kingdom of Heaven. But I think that there is also an opposite danger in identifying the Kingdom of Heaven as purely a code for social interaction. In ways that we will discuss, Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of Heaven must return to the personal. That is to say, it is also possible to go too far in the direction that Jesus’ message is simply a roadmap for nice behavior. Through somewhat different paths Doug and I over the past weeks have both come to a similar point: even if the Kingdom of Heaven represents a world in which justice for widows and orphan is realized, if we simply have a world in which a lot of people help widows and orphans, we do not necessarily have the Kingdom. (See Doug’s post on Summer Lovin’ below). To put it another way, kingdom behavior is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Kingdom itself. We must return to what happens to people to complete the story. The Kingdom of Heaven requires a transformation of individuals. But what does this mean? More to come.
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