Whither the Kingdom?

Undoubtedly, the perennial (and only?) issue of humanity is the issue of the kingdom.

We can imagine a much, much, much better world than the one we currently inhabit. We can imagine a world without poverty, without sickness, a world of kindness and helpfulness, a world of riches, a world of plenty, a world of healing, a world of paradise.

In short, we can all quite well imagine, in our best moments, the kingdom of heaven.

[I pause here to note that I’m currently reading Sarah Ruden’s translation of The Gospels, which I cannot recommend too highly. She notes that the ancient world did not have a conception of “religious” words like “heaven” being a separate category of words from their everyday language. Since the ancients construed of heaven as a place physically located up in the sky — as discussed in my last post — and the Greek word often translated as “heaven,” “ouranois” means both the sky in the physical sense and in the metaphysical sense — she translates the phrase “kingdom of heaven” as “kingdom of the skies.” There is a lot here to unpack which I won’t get into here, but I will continue to use the phrase “kingdom of heaven” until have the opportunity to better explicate my thoughts on the “kingdom of the sky/skies.”]

But where is this heaven and how do we get there?

We have to reeducate ourselves, and I will do it rather poorly here, on the idea of “heaven” as an afterlife — the place where we go to after we die in these mortal bodies, to sit on clouds and play harps — with the idea of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus talks about in the Gospels. I will attempt to unpack it further another time, but it is very clear that Jesus speaks about heaven, hell, and apocalypse as realities for this world — the one that we now inhabit in our physical bodies.

So, we need to set aside the idea that life is some sort of Inception-like plot where we can just jump off buildings to awaken to the higher reality, one of which might be “heaven” and that this might be a reasonable methodology by which we could “get” to heaven. Notions like these are entirely Gnostic and antithetical to the created world.

If the created world and the supernatural notions of “the last things,” are bound up together in one concept, then how can we avoid hell and attain this lovely kingdom of heaven?

The answer seems to lie right in the passage of Peter’s profession of faith in Matthew Chapter 16.

Peter, as I discussed in my previous post, professes the innocence of the victim. He rejects the sacrificial system at Caesarea Philippi, the dead culture and harmonized relations with the world built on the sacrifice of the innocent. Instead, he looks at the future innocent victim before him, and professes him as the anointed one. In response, Jesus says:

“And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” [Matthew 16: 18-19]

As I emphasized in my last post, it is the profession of the innocent victim which inverts the pagan order of sacrifice. It is upon this profession that we can be given the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus does not here emphasize the kingdom of heaven as some distant reality awaiting Peter after death. Instead, he acknowledges our own reality — that we are, all the time, banging on the door of heaven like loud, brash drunkards, trying to get there by any means that we can. Sex, drugs, alcohol, food, rivalry, Instagram, money, fast cars, football, yachts, guns, war, screaming, yelling, clawing, fighting. We cannot deny that we all crave something better than what we currently have. We acknowledge that there is a place of happiness and peace in which we’d desperately like to abide, but no one really seems to have come up with a good solution on how to get there.

But what if it was this simple?

What if that was all it took — professing the innocent victim, overturning the old violent sacrificial order in favor of mercy and non-rivalry?

What if that was the key that opens the door to the kingdom of heaven?