“Galilean springtime”—if that expression is at all justified, it has a heavy counterweight in the gospels: the disciples’ lack of understanding, the hatred shown by Jesus’ enemies from the very beginning (Mark 3:6), and at the end his helpless, horrible hanging on the cross. We cannot separate Jesus’ end from his message about the reign of God. We must not think that the proclamation of the basileia and the cross are two completely different things that have nothing to do with one another.
Jesus’ death on the cross again modifies his message about the reign of God. Whether it did so for Jesus is something we can leave open at this point. But in any case it did so for the hearers of the Gospel after Good Friday. It was only in Jesus’ death that this message achieved its proper profundity.
Jesus’ death did not revoke his proclamation of the reign of God; it did not put paid to the good news of the beginning. Instead, it demonstrated the reality contained in that proclamation. It definitively revealed the hidden and humbled8 shape of the reign of God. What does that mean? It means that the reign of God does not come without persecution, without sacrifice. Indeed, it does not come without daily dying. It cannot come any other way.
What was contained in Jesus’ preaching from the very beginning was fully illuminated by his death: the reign of God demands a change of rulership that human beings must carry out. It demands letting go and self-surrender. The reign of God does not come without pure receiving, and that receiving is also always an acceptance of suffering. In his passion Jesus was by no means far from the reign of God; instead, the reign of God comes precisely in the “hour” in which Jesus himself can do no more but hands himself over and surrenders to God’s truth. This is the basic thread of John’s gospel. The “hour” of deepest “humiliation” is the hour of his “glorification,” the hour in which the glory of God encompasses Jesus’ whole “work.”
So Jesus’ announcement of the reign of God achieves in his death, once again, a final precision and focus: the concept “reign of God” cannot be used from here on unless at the same time one speaks of Jesus’ surrender even unto death. For Jesus’ disciples this means that they cannot live in the realm where God reigns without obedience to what this reign of God brings with it. And that, in the midst of a resistant society and resistant church, does not happen without suffering, without sacrifice, without passion stories.
Ultimately, Jesus’ death lays bare all human self-glorification and thereby also every superficial and presumptuous notion of the reign of God. God’s realm can happen only where human beings collide with their own limits, where they do not know how to go on, where they hand themselves over and give space to God alone so that God can act. Only there, in the zone of constant dying and rising, the reign of God begins.
Chapter 3
The Reign of God and the People of God
The preceding chapter showed that for Jesus the coming of the reign of God was no longer something in the distant or near future but something that was happening already, now, in the present hour. Rescue, liberation, salvation—for Jesus it had all irrevocably begun. “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the reign of God has come to you” (Luke 11:20). But at the same time Jesus’ disciples are supposed to pray daily: “your kingdom come” (Luke 11:2). For the reign of God has not come everywhere, not by a long sight, because it has not yet been accepted everywhere—not even by the disciples themselves, who according to the gospels were still dreaming about their own reign (Mark 9:34).
We have seen that in today’s biblical scholarship this tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of the reign of God is much emphasized, though with the greatest variety of nuances. There are scarcely any exegetes left who see the reign of God as beginning in an utterly distant future.
But in contrast, another aspect of Jesus’ proclamation is not yet clear in exegesis in general. The explosive power of the reign of God is not only defused by pushing it into the distant future or into a time beyond time. It can also be handed over to impotence by being made homeless. For Jesus the reign of God not only has its own time, it also has its own place in which to be made visible and tangible. That place is the people of God.
To say the same thing in two Greek words: as the reign of God has its kairos, its proper time, it also has its own topos, its place. It is not a u-topia, which means “no place, nowhere.” The island of Utopia invented by the brilliant English Lord Chancellor and humanist Thomas More (1478–1535) to illustrate his critique of society did not exist and he did not mean for it to do so (cf. chap. 21). In contrast, for Jesus the reign of God is, despite all opposition and persecution, an event whose realization begins in history. Therefore it can be grasped and seen: first in Jesus himself but then necessarily also in the eschatological Israel that Jesus is gathering around himself.
So we must not talk only about the time of the reign of God; we must apply the same intensity and clarity to the search for its relationship to the people of God. Is that being adequately pursued? That is the subject of this chapter. Despite a number of brief excursions into the history of theology, this will not lead us away from Jesus but will bring us closer to him.
Is It Addressed to “Humanity”?
In professional exegetical literature there are long chapters and treatments of Jesus’ idea of the reign of God in which the question of time is shoved back and forth. But the explicit question of its place, that is, of the relationship between the reign of God and the people of God, is lacking in many cases, or else it appears only indirectly. This is demonstrated in almost exemplary fashion by Andreas Lindemann in a long article, “Herrschaft Gottes/Reich Gottes” [“Reign of God/Kingdom of God”] in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie.1 Obviously much of what Lindemann writes is quite correct, but nowhere does he reflect on the theological relationship between Jesus’ preaching of the reign of God and Israel. Instead, he speaks emphatically and repeatedly of “human beings” or “people” in general. God pursues the human being. A person’s sins are forgiven. The reign of God has consequences for human behavior; God’s forgiveness must be matched by human forgiveness. Human beings must be responsible before God. God makes demands on people. The inbreaking reign of God establishes new and definitive standards for human action.
A reader cannot entirely avoid the impression that Jesus apparently had nothing to say to Israel in his preaching. Instead, as a citizen of the world, he wanted to address all humanity. His message about the reign of God was directed to all people of good will throughout the world. The fact that it had its beginning and crucial situation in Israel was probably just an accident.
All this is the more strange in that Erich Zenger, in the Old Testament section of the same article, insistently emphasizes the connection between the sovereign rule of God and the people of God, Israel.2 Apparently the connection is still not sufficiently present in New Testament exegesis. Therefore, it seems good at this point to consider at least one Old Testament passage at greater length. Many such texts could be used, but in some of them the dimension of the reign of God is especially prominent.