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Kingdom of God
What
is the kingdom for which Jesus prays? Brought up in Nazareth, Jesus, no doubt,
received instruction in the Hebrew Scripture. In Hebrew Scripture, God is king
and expects to rule his people. God’s disclosure as king, however, became more
remote as the Davidic kingdom faded into history and Roman rule oppressed
God’s chosen. The Oxford Companion explains that this kingdom can be
entered by divine activity, that it is not limited to any temporality, and that
it is a dynamic and unfolding process:
Although, in Jesus’ thinking, the kingdom
“has come near” (Mark 1.15), or has made itself available (Luke 16.16
par.; Matthew 12.28 par.), it was part of his programmatic prayer that the
kingdom’s coming should be sought (Matthew 6.10 par.). .. The kingdom in his
preaching was not merely promised but announced as a divine activity that
demanded repentance and that could be entered into by participating in its
divine force. That stance is represented not only by the programmatic
descriptions of his teaching but also by the parables. Those that involve
images of growth or process (Mark 4.26–29; Matthew 13.24–30; Matthew
13.31–33 par.) particularly insist that the kingdom must not be limited to
any single temporality, be it present or future. Such limitation would betray
the dynamic unfolding such parables are designed to convey. For that
reason, to describe the kingdom in Jesus’ expectation as apocalyptic, in the
sense of an anticipated calendar of divine unveilings in which God’s rule
can be dated, is misleading. The dearth of references to the kingdom in
apocalyptic literature undermines that position, and much of the teaching
attributed to Jesus militates against it (Luke 17.20; Luke 17.21; cf. Matthew
24.36 par.; Acts 1.7, in addition to passages cited above).
Jesus, thus, announced in his life and activity,
this kingdom of God unfolding.
See
Jesus of Nazareth.
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