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The incarnation of God in Christ Jesus was tangible evidence of the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, an arrival of the most radical sort. God’s appearance in Christ was historically organic, expressed in a specific season of human history, in a particular geography with deliberate ethnic imprimatur. Yet the coming of this transcendent kingdom and its definitive Sovereign was also historically dynamic. It encompassed long seasons of prophetic anticipation, was revealed in Christ’s personhood through sometimes confusing parables and numinous miracles, and pointed to an eschatological realization.
The coming of God in Christ was certainly an act of grace and mercy without equal on the part of a holy and loving God. That does not, however, mitigate the fact that it was also an enormous provocation designed to serve notice to all of creation that the Creator was wholly committed to redemption and re-creation. When taken at face value, the message of Christ’s life, teaching, and ministry brings the world face to face with the eternal kingdom of love. It is this kingdom, and the worship of this kingdom’s Sovereign, that require our attention in these pages.
Scripture is clear that the sovereignty of God’s reign in Christ extends to the fullest reaches of life and existence. No realm of creation is exempt—including the political arena. The apostle Paul signaled this truth when he wrote that Christ “is the image of the invisible God” and “in him all things in heaven and earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him” (emphasis mine).1 In Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” and he “is the head of every ruler and authority” and “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them” (emphasis mine).2 Again, Paul wrote regarding “the immeasurable greatness of [God’s] power for us who believe.” This is the very power that worked in Christ who is not only resurrected from the dead but has ascended to God’s right hand in the heavenly places. It is the glorious Father who “has put all things under [Christ’s] feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”3 The obvious force of God’s sovereignty invested in Christ is a bold statement of God’s political initiative.
To say such things about anyone cuts against the grain of the world’s self-affirming confidence in its own ways and wisdom. For those things to be said of Jesus Christ as identified in the biblical narrative is an offense of even greater magnitude. Jesus of Nazareth claimed not only to be the Son of God, but also claimed to be one with God. The sting of such boldness cost Jesus Christ his human life. The dare to risk, however, creates the tension by which the gospel wounds the world for the sake of the world’s healing. So it is that it could be said that “Jesus Christ was the supreme divine intrusion into the world’s settled arrangements.”4
Kingdom was not an unfamiliar concept among first century Jews. They were certainly well-steeped in the triumph and tragedy of their own national existence. The nation’s encounters with a multitude of other kingdoms and empires were the essence of lore. The practice of remembrance recalled an exodus of massive proportions: a departure from life in one oppressive kingdom, only to encounter numerous others on their way to a land promised by the God of Jacob, and a home for the descendants of Joseph who were the great nation of promise to Abram. The cumulative reality for ancient Israel was one of struggle for identity and independence. Their current status, as underlings in the powerful and ever-present Roman imperium, was a daily reminder of a unique ethnic and religious heritage to which they could give only partial expression. Their place in the world was not entirely their own.
Into this environment of incomplete dominion came John, the one known as the baptizer, proclaiming the nearness of the kingdom of heaven. His message was not original. Isaiah had predicted that a proclaimer would come, one who would precede a promised Messiah. The kingdom to be established by this Messiah would be an eternal one, for which failure was not a possibility. Accustomed to less successful ventures in creating and sustaining dominion, the kings and people of Judah looked forward to a kingdom without fail. Some seven hundred years or so later the post-Isaiah Israelites who encountered John’s message were still hoping for Messiah, though with a skewed character. Since the commencement of Roman rule six decades earlier, Jewish expectations for Messiah had taken a decidedly nationalistic turn with nearly unqualified inclination to a worldly means-to-an-end. Those expectations quite missed the point of the prophet’s inimitable message.
The people who heard John’s statements and responded to his plea for repentance and baptism were yet clueless about the true nearness of heaven’s kingdom. The baptizer’s message made it clear he himself was not the promised one of Israel. There was another coming that would transcend John’s own identity as messenger. John’s audience was witnessing the arrival of the kingdom, if they would but discern its manifestation among them. The arrival of the long-awaited Messiah was shocking, not because of its force but for its lack of force in worldly terms.
Jesus Christ’s own declarations regarding the kingdom of God were as numerous as they were enigmatic. Christ was constantly and pointedly drawing attention to the kingdom of God. No doubt the expectations of his hearers were culturally formed. Their hope for a warrior-king, much in the model of David, was deep-set and constantly nurtured. These expectations were clearly evident as Jesus approached Jerusalem days before his execution as the people shouted, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!”5 To be sure, Jesus’ own lineage was traceable to mighty king David. Yet Jesus clearly proclaimed the kingdom of heaven—that of his Father God—not the rule of David. The misunderstanding represented by this praiseful acclamation was telling. Their hope was in the true Messiah, yet their goals were inconsistent with his aims of faithfulness to his Father’s will.
This much they knew: freedom would come at a price. All that was lacking was someone willing to accept the mantle of leading the uprising, one surely to signal a return to sovereignty over their own affairs. This person would also assume enormous risk, a dare most were generally unwilling to take. Was it not the word of the Lord God through the prophets that Messiah would come? Jesus Christ resisted the efforts of the Jews to cast him into their agenda, steadfastly preferring the agenda of his Father’s kingdom.
It would be unwise to overlook the second Testament’s focus on the kingdom of God. The term kingdom appears more than 160 times in the New Testament. It is understood to refer to a realm in which a particular king reigns. It is inclusive of the authority and sovereignty exercised by and fully vested in the ruler. A majority of the uses of three Greek forms6 are credited to Jesus Christ in referring to his Father’s kingdom, identified interchangeably as the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. The terms are also used by Luke, Paul, John, and the writer of the book of Hebrews. The language reveals clear pronouncements about the impending arrival, present reality, and future fulfillment of God’s kingdom.
The kingdom of heaven was declared to be imminent in the words of John the baptizer, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” and of Jesus himself, “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’”7 In other instances, the original language delivers news of the kingdom as being present. Jesus persistently spoke of the kingdom as a present reality: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” and “the kingdom of God is among you” and “My kingdom is not from this world.”8 In the first instance, Jesus is teaching about blessedness among those who seek and live humbly. Jesus offers the second in response to the Pharisees’ inquiry about the arrival of this kingdom. The third comes in response to Pilate’s question about Jesus’ kingship. While there was a sense in which the kingdom was in existence before their very eyes, Jesus’ audiences were many times either unable or unwilling to see it. The kingdom of God was not new, yet it was newly near.
Jesus’ encounter with the chief priests and elders in the temple is instructive as well. At the conclusion of a parable regarding wicked tenants—itself a pointed accusation of the elders and priests—Jesus declares, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”9 The suggestion here is that something cannot be taken away unless it is first available to the persons from whom it is to be taken.
The biblical narrative indicates that on the Passover night prior to Jesus’ arrest, he blessed bread and cup, encouraging his disciples to eat and drink with new understanding of what it means to be in covenant with God. He then astounded them by saying he would drink the fruit of the vine with them next in the kingdom of his Father—and not until then.10 Here Jesus invests the kingdom with a discernible futurity, a promise of fulfillment those present in that gathering could scarcely comprehend in that moment.
Jesus’ life, ministry, and teachings were, among many things, political. The politicality represented in Christ is an accurate reflection of the reign of God, and the politics of this reign are distinct from all worldly politics. If, indeed, all things were created through Christ and for Christ, then the most direct path into the kingdom of heaven is through Christ himself. God’s reign in Christ is the kingdom of God.
Jesus Christ was, indeed, the full embodiment of this new kingdom. In fact, some early church fathers referred to Jesus as autobasileia—the “Kingdom in himself.” By extending the force of Paul’s descriptions of Christ in his epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, that very assertion is appropriate: “For [Christ] is the King of the heavens, and as He is absolute Wisdom and absolute Righteousness and absolute Truth, is He not so also absolute Kingdom? . . . if you enquire into the meaning of the words, ‘Theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’ you may say that Christ is theirs in so far as He is absolute Kingdom.”11
Such striking language is evident in contemporaneous thought as well, given expression from another quarter of the Christian faith: “Jesus himself is the Kingdom; the Kingdom is not a thing, it is not a geographical dominion like worldly kingdoms. It is a person; it is he. On this interpretation, the term ‘Kingdom of God’ is itself a veiled Christology. By the way in which he speaks of the Kingdom of God, Jesus leads men to realize the overwhelming fact that in him God himself is present among them, that he is God’s presence.”12
To be sure, Jesus Christ lived among humankind in a specific time and place. Yet the primary context in which he did what he did and said what he said was not a Jewish society struggling to survive under first-century Roman rule. The primary context of his birth, every encounter, conversation, miracle, and even his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension was the kingdom of God. Christ literally inaugurated life in this new kingdom in his very self. Hence for Christ’s followers to be in Christ and to obey the commands of Christ is to be in the kingdom.
The incarnation of God in Christ revealed the kingdom of God to the world. What is difficult to accept, however, is that the purpose of the incarnation was not to prove the kingdom of God was relevant to the world. If that was truly the purpose of the incarnation, one could argue that the incarnation was a failure. Isaiah’s prophecy regarding Messiah became all too tragically true; the One who would be “despised and rejected” and “oppressed, and . . . afflicted . . . like a lamb that is led to the slaughter” 13 was not even welcomed by those of his own ethnic heritage.14
During his earthly life Jesus Christ was questioned regularly, often by persons allied with groups attempting to catch him in some heretical or treasonous act. He had a propensity for responding to them in ways that curtailed their capacity to entrap him. At every turn, Jesus was faithfully representing the perspective of the reign of God. It was clear that by God’s presence in Christ, God’s reign was breaking into the world, yet it was not of the world. Jesus’ responses were rarely intended to confuse, yet they continually confounded the world’s ways. His answers constantly challenged the assumptions of the inquisitors. He also challenged their presumptions about their prerogative in deciding what was right and what was true.
In his gospel narrative, Matthew records a monumental conversation, one between Jesus and a group of Pharisees.15 A scribe asked Jesus, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” They were seeking to test Jesus. It did not occur to them that they, like so many others, were offering Christ the opportunity to speak truth almost beyond their willingness (if not their ability) to understand. The first commandment, Jesus replied, is “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” This is a response the inquisitors could have even predicted. Jesus’ reference to the opening statement of the Shema16 was likely a pleasing sound to their ears. Christ answered their question, succinctly and directly. Yet his response was only beginning. He continued: “The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” As predictable as the first portion of Jesus’ response was, this auxiliary dictum likely caught them unprepared.
These high-minded experts in the law were unaccustomed to such testing. Jesus’ statement likening the love of people to the love of God transcended their long-held traditionalism. Their devotion to the Decalogue and the practice of their own well-established rules were legendary. Respect for another person and that person’s possessions, family, and life was far from a strange notion. Yet the notion of esteeming another person on the same level as oneself made for an interesting juxtaposition with Jewish and even Roman social customs that maintained distinctions between persons of privilege and those outcast by virtue of economic, gender, health, or ethnic status.
Jesus makes yet another astounding claim—that all of the prophets and law are bound up in these two commandments.17 The law and prophets constituted the Hebrew Scriptures, an enormous body of highly regarded and historically momentous teaching. By likening the two commandments and saying that all other prophetic and ruling principles were summed up in them, Jesus pointedly drew the inquisitors to the locus of God’s reign. This is the grand liturgy of the kingdom of God: God is to be loved first and foremost with every fiber of our being and every moment of life, and treating people with dignity and care is like unto honoring God. Here Jesus laid a necessary foundation for faithfulness in worship according to the eternal kingdom of heaven.
What must become clear to the church is that faithfulness to God in worship in affect “establish[es] a world” and “worship makes available to us a different world than the one we normally inhabit.”18 As will be noted below, the church’s worship in various times and places became more focused on managing life in this world with its own “settled arrangements” rather than encountering God’s coming reign—present now, yet coming to its fullness. “Church,” when it is faithful however, “is where we worship God by enacting and proclaiming a different set of values, a different understanding of reality.”19
Jesus’ contemporaries were confused regarding his refusal to participate in their grand schemes for gaining worldly sovereignty. That same temptation has confronted Christ’s followers in every moment of the church’s history. The challenge for Christ’s followers is that participating in the in-breaking of this new kingdom not only seeks different meaning and ends to those of the world but also requires discernment regarding ways and means to those ends. As evidenced by Jesus Christ himself, the ways of the kingdom of heaven will at times conflict with the ways of the world’s established practices.
Jesus came saying, in effect, by his life, teachings, and ministry, that the way the world operates—its cultures, societies, nations, and values—is irrelevant to the reign of God. Christ came to call people to participate in the irrupting reign of God, which has a vastly different tenor to it than worldly structures or entities. Much of the mystery of the kingdom of heaven is “that it is rooted in a new reality, a new social order, a new way of doing things.”20 Yet it is not enough that God’s reign defines a distinct reality. The divinity-in-humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ is a signal this new reign must be lived, even if at immense risk.
Liturgy and Kingdomness
The dynamic fusion of love of God and love of people as outlined by Jesus invests liturgical exigency in the participation of God’s people in the continuing in-breaking of the kingdom of heaven. It is essential to grasp the deep implications of what is perhaps one of the most misunderstood yet meaningful and necessary words to understanding worship—the word liturgy. The word derives its meaning from the Greek leitourgia, a word commonly found originally in the official idiolect of Greek city-states; it described service rendered by individuals or groups “on behalf of the political community.”21 Like the use of the term ekklesia (which has similar heritage), the use of such a term from the broader culture indicates the perception of the Christians that their faith community had political connotations.
Liturgy is certainly the work of the people of God in worship. Described in that phrase, liturgy exists as a functional characteristic of communal worship. It is service rendered to God by all participants through various acts and elements of worship in a communal setting. Yet the term has lost much of its patina within many free-church traditions. A resistance to the use of any traditional liturgy has itself become a de facto liturgy, with deeply entrenched patterns of various acts and elements. Even further, the exclusive use of the term in reference to corporate worship settings has limited its meaning among many faith communities, representing a formalistic approach to worship largely devoid of worth or vitality.
True liturgy, however, does not limit itself there. The liturgical dynamic has a profound effect upon the communal identity, becoming more than simple function. The whole range of actions form the community since “a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts” (emphasis mine).22 Deeply embedded in the Spirit-life of Christ’s followers is the need to be connected to other Christ-followers. We are incomplete without one another; our common faith is collectively more than our personal devotion. The service of the body is a greater witness than the efforts of any one part by itself.
It finds fulfillment as it extends itself beyond communal gatherings to permeate every dimension of life. In its broadest sense of meaning, we are reminded that even the most simple day-in-day-out events and activities can be invested with kingdom significance. An even more profound expression is derived from the teachings of Eastern Orthodoxy, wherein this work of the people of God in worship becomes the liturgy after the liturgy—as work on behalf of the world. This lies at the heart of this grand liturgy of the kingdom of God: service to the world co-inheres with service to God in worship. The church is ultimately “a leitourgia, a ministry, a calling to act in this world after the fashion of Christ, to bear testimony to Him and His kingdom.”23
There is, then, an incarnational liturgical vibrancy for followers of Christ as agents of God’s kingdom in the world. Without this liturgical agency on behalf of the world, liturgical expression in communal gathering for worship is incomplete. The two do not diverge one from the other; the liturgy lived in the world for the sake of Christ is a fulfillment of the liturgical celebration of God’s supreme worth and eternal redemptive activity.
Practicing the Reign
The fullness of the concept of liturgy must be reclaimed for the sake of wholeness of the gospel. If allowed to regain its fullness, this term can create space within which Christ’s followers can encounter, respond to, and participate in Christ’s claims upon all realms of life and creation. Liturgy can encompass a wide range of practices in which Christ’s followers participate. From its earliest days to the present, the church has nurtured a rich heritage of various practices intended to enliven the faith.
Practices can be taken to mean “things Christian people do together over time to address fundamental human needs in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the life of the world in Jesus Christ.”24 A partial catalog of such things includes prayer, reading Scripture, silence and mediation, confession, singing and making music, and fasting. Also, the keeping of Sabbath, a simple water bath to signal repentance, and deliverance remembered around bread and cup are biblically robust practices that lay at the heart of the faith. In the manner of Jesus’ prophetic practice, bringing good news to the poor and announcing release to captives and revealing sight to the blind and freeing those who are oppressed sum up the proclamation of God’s lavish kingdom grace.25
Why not list worship in the above litany of practices? Simply this: while worship may appear in many sources as a single practice among others, it would be more accurate for God’s people to understand worship as the sum total of all practices engaged in faithfully. For the purposes of this book, faithful worship among Christ’s followers is defined as an ongoing and recurring response to the person and work of the triune God, expressed as a discipline of coming to agreement with God about who and what is holy and true and right, with the result being the church enacting and embodying the gospel of God’s kingdom for the glory of God and for the sake of the world.26
For Christians, then, practicing the reign of God is living in the reality of the kingdom of God—expressed in Jesus Christ, empowered by Holy Spirit—present now in but not of the world, in full anticipation of fullness of God’s kingdom to come. Worship faithful to this practice of God’s reign is by necessity specific, exclusive, Christologic, cosmic, and eschatological.27
This worship is specific because it is focused on the one true holy triune God identified in God’s Word in the story of ancient Israel and revealed in Jesus Christ as the Word enfleshed. It is exclusive because it gives no quarter to any other gods regardless of their claims of god-hood; idolatry is unequivocally repudiated. It is Christologic because there is no encounter with God apart from Christ; all that is necessary for worship and life comes through him and him alone. It is cosmic because it acknowledges God’s magnificent sovereignty over all creation, to be made whole under the fullness of God’s reign in Christ upon the appearance of the new heaven and new earth.28 It is eschatological because by participating in the reality of God’s kingdom in the present moment in Christ, the church tells the world the story of its ultimate transformation when the return of Christ signals the end of human-formed history and the commencement of the fullness of God’s glorious eternal reign in Christ.
These kingdom-focused worship practices are interwoven into the pages that follow The purpose is to clearly sound the urgency of the demanding yet necessary endeavor of faithfulness in all things—and in particular to the church’s witness through its allegiance, affections, and actions.
1. Col 1:15–16.
2. Col 2:9b, 10b, 15.
3. Eph 1:19–20, 22–23.
4. Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 51.
5. Mark 11:10.
6. The New Testament uses the Greek βασιλεία, βασιλείαν and βασιλείας.
7. Matt 3:2 and 10:7 respectively. In these instances the Greek verb ἤγγικεν is from ἐγγίζω and is rendered to make near or to come near, or most properly has drawn close.
8. In order, Matt 5:10, Luke 17:21b, and John 18.36a. In these examples, the word is is translated from the Greek ἐστί and rendered as are, belong, call, come, or consist; it is in the third person singular present indicative of εἰμί, the verb meaning I am, or exist.
9. Matt 21:43.
10. Matt 26:29, Luke 22:18, and Mark 14:25. In Matt and Mark, the phrase ἕως τῆς ἡμέρας—until the day is the operative qualifier.
11. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew.
12. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 49.
13. Isa 53:3a, 7a.
14. John 1:11.
15. Mark 12:28–34 (also Matt 22:15–22).
16. Deut 6:4–9 contains the opening portion of the Shema, a prayer traditionally used in Jewish worship and personal devotion; it is an affirmation of the singular holiness of the one true God. This prayer would likely have been a familiar refrain to everyone involved in this conversation.
17. Matt 22:40.
18. Lebacqz, Word, Worship, World, & Wonder, 64, 65.
19. Ibid., 65.
20. Kenneson and Street, Selling Out the Church, 153.
21. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 160.
22. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 25.
23. Ibid.
24. Dykstra and Bass, “A Theological Understanding,” 18.
25. Luke 4:16–19; Isa 61:1–2.
26. This definition appeared in a shorter version earlier in Hewell, “Faithful Worship,” 345.
27. Ibid., 345–349.
28. Rev 21:1.
