Читать книгу The Kingdom of God - John Bright - Страница 8

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK BEGINS THE STORY OF JESUS’ MINISTRY WITH THESE SIGNIFICANT WORDS: “JESUS CAME INTO GALILEE, PREACHING the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’ ” (1:14-15). Mark thus makes it plain that the burden of Jesus’ preaching was to announce the Kingdom of God; that was the central thing with which he was concerned. A reading of the teachings of Jesus as they are found in the Gospels only serves to bear this statement out. Everywhere the Kingdom of God is on his lips, and it is always a matter of desperate importance. What is it like? It is like a sower who goes forth to sow; it is like a costly pearl; it is like a mustard seed. How does one enter? One sells all that he has and gives to the poor; one becomes as a little child. Is it a matter of importance? Indeed it is! It would be better to mutilate yourself and enter maimed than not to get in at all. So paramount, in fact, was the notion of the Kingdom of God in the mind of Jesus that one can scarcely grasp his meaning at all without some understanding of it.

But for all his repeated mention of the Kingdom of God, Jesus never once paused to define it. Nor did any hearer ever interrupt him to ask, “Master, what do these words ‘Kingdom of God,’ which you use so often, mean?” On the contrary, Jesus used the term as if assured it would be understood, and indeed it was. The Kingdom of God lay within the vocabulary of every Jew. It was something they understood and longed for desperately. To us, on the contrary, it is a strange term, and it is necessary that we give it content if we are to comprehend it. We must ask where that notion came from and what it meant to Jesus and those to whom he spoke.

It is at once apparent that the idea is broader than the term, and we must look for the idea where the term is not present. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to learn that outside of the Gospels the expression “Kingdom of God” is not very common in the New Testament, while in the Old Testament it does not occur at all. But the concept is by no means confined to the New Testament. While it underwent, as we shall see, a radical mutation on the lips of Jesus, it had a long history and is, in one form or another, ubiquitous in both Old Testament and New. It involves the whole notion of the rule of God over his people, and particularly the vindication of that rule and people in glory at the end of history. That was the Kingdom which the Jews awaited.

Now the Jews looked in particular for a Redeemer, or Messiah, who should establish the Kingdom of God victoriously. And since the New Testament declared that Jesus was that Messiah who had come to set up his Kingdom, we are at once driven back into the Old Testament to consider the messianic hope of Israel. We think particularly of Isaiah, who gave the hope of the coming Prince of the line of David its classic form. There leap to mind the words so often read as the Christmas lesson: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; . . . and his name will be called ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’ ” (Isa. 9:6). But since the expectation of the coming redemption is expressed repeatedly in the Old Testament in passages which make no explicit mention of the Messiah,¹ it is clear that we have to do with a subject as wide as the entire eschatological hope of Israel. For the hope of Israel was the hope of the coming Kingdom of God.

But we cannot consider that hope in a vacuum, as it were, by an analysis of the various passages that express it. That hope had its roots in Israel’s faith and in Israel’s history, and we must attempt to trace them. This is not idle antiquarian curiosity, as a moment’s reflection would show. Isaiah, for example, although he gave the hope of the Messiah Prince its definitive formulation, and although we may declare that he was surely inspired of God to do so, clearly did not shape his idea out of the blue. Revelation, here as always, was organic to the life of the people, and its shape was hammered out of tragic experience. Before there could have been the hope for a Prince of David’s line, there had to be—David. Before the hope of a messianic Kingdom there had to be—the Kingdom of Israel. In short, before Israel’s hope of the Kingdom of God could assume such a form, she had first to build a kingdom on this earth. We shall therefore have to go back and consider the rise of the Davidic state and those ideas which it released into the Hebrew soul.

The Davidic state would, however, be a very poor place to begin, for it created neither Israel’s faith nor the notion of the Kingdom of God. True it powerfully shaped and colored both for all time to come, but Israel’s faith had already assumed its normative form long before David was born. The idea of the rule of God over his people was already there. Indeed, the Davidic state was itself no little limited by that idea, and there were some, as we shall see, who even felt that it was in fundamental contradiction to it. So we are driven back into that earliest and formative period of Israel’s history in which both people and religion took shape. There, in the heritage of Moses himself, we shall find the beginnings of her hope of the Kingdom of God. For this was no idea picked up along the way by cultural borrowing, nor was it the creation of the monarchy and its institutions, nor yet the outgrowth of the frustration of national ambition, however much all these factors may have colored it. On the contrary, it is linked with Israel’s whole notion of herself as the chosen people of God, and this in turn was woven into the texture of her faith from the beginning. Only so can its tenacity and its tremendous creative power, both in Old Testament and New, be explained.

We have opened a subject as wide as the Old Testament faith itself, and one to which we shall find it difficult to do justice in so brief a compass. But we have no course but to essay it. There is no other way.