by Reza Aslan
Neither did Jesus present the Kingdom of God as some distant future kingdom to be established at the end of time. When Jesus said, “the Kingdom of God has drawn near” (Mark 1:15) or “the Kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:21), he was pointing to God’s saving action in his present age, at his present time. True, Jesus spoke of wars and uprisings, earthquakes and famine, false messiahs and prophets who would presage the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth (Mark 13:5–37). But far from auguring some future apocalypse, Jesus’s words were in reality a perfectly apt description of the era in which he lived: an era of wars, famines, and false messiahs. In fact, Jesus seemed to expect the Kingdom of God to be established at any moment: “I tell you, there are those here who will not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1).
If the Kingdom of God is neither purely celestial nor wholly eschatological, then what Jesus was proposing must have been a physical and present kingdom: a real kingdom, with an actual king that was about to be established on earth. That is certainly how the Jews would have understood it. Jesus’s particular conception of the Kingdom of God may have been distinctive and somewhat unique, but its connotations would not have been unfamiliar to his audience. Jesus was merely reiterating what the zealots had been preaching for years. Simply put, the Kingdom of God was shorthand for the idea of God as the sole sovereign, the one and only king, not just over Israel, but over all the world. “Everything in heaven and earth belongs to you,” the Bible states of God. “Yours is the kingdom … You rule over everything” (1 Chronicles 29:11–12; see also Numbers 23:21; Deuteronomy 33:5). In fact, the concept of the sole sovereignty of God lay behind the message of all the great prophets of old. Elijah, Elisha, Micah, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah—these men vowed that God would deliver the Jews from bondage and liberate Israel from foreign rule if only they refused to serve any earthly master or bow to any king save the one and only king of the universe. That same belief formed the foundation of nearly every Jewish resistance movement, from the Maccabees who threw off the yoke of Seleucid rule in 164 B.C.E., after the mad Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes demanded that the Jews worship him like a god, to the radicals and revolutionaries who resisted the Roman occupation—the bandits, the Sicarii, the zealots, and the martyrs at Masada—all the way to the last of the great failed messiahs, Simon son of Kochba, whose rebellion in 132 C.E. invoked the exact phrase “Kingdom of God” as a call for freedom from foreign rule.
Jesus’s view of the sole sovereignty of God was not all that different from the view of the prophets, bandits, zealots, and messiahs who came before and after him, as evidenced by his answer to the question about paying tribute to Caesar. Actually, his view of God’s reign was not so different from that of his master, John the Baptist, from whom he likely picked up the phrase “Kingdom of God.” What made Jesus’s interpretation of the Kingdom of God different from John’s, however, was his agreement with the zealots that God’s reign required not just an internal transformation toward justice and righteousness, but a complete reversal of the present political, religious, and economic system. “Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are hungry, for you shall be fed. Blessed are you who mourn, for you shall soon be laughing” (Luke 6:20–21).
These abiding words of the Beatitudes are, more than anything else, a promise of impending deliverance from subservience and foreign rule. They predict a radically new world order wherein the meek inherit the earth, the sick are healed, the weak become strong, the hungry are fed, and the poor are made rich. In the Kingdom of God, wealth will be redistributed and debts canceled. “The first shall be last and the last shall be first” (Matthew 5:3–12 | Luke 6:20–24).
But that also means that when the Kingdom of God is established on earth, the rich will be made poor, the strong will become weak, and the powerful will be displaced by the powerless. “How hard it will be for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23). The Kingdom of God is not some utopian fantasy wherein God vindicates the poor and the dispossessed. It is a chilling new reality in which God’s wrath rains down upon the rich, the strong, and the powerful. “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger. Woe to you laughing now, for soon you will mourn” (Luke 6:24–25).
The implications of Jesus’s words are clear: The Kingdom of God is about to be established on earth; God is on the verge of restoring Israel to glory. But God’s restoration cannot happen without the destruction of the present order. God’s rule cannot be established without the annihilation of the present leaders. Saying “the Kingdom of God is at hand,” therefore, is akin to saying the end of the Roman Empire is at hand. It means God is going to replace Caesar as ruler of the land. The Temple priests, the wealthy Jewish aristocracy, the Herodian elite, and the heathen usurper in distant Rome—all of these were about to feel the wrath of God.
The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution, plain and simple. And what revolution, especially one fought against an empire whose armies had ravaged the land set aside by God for his chosen people, could be free of violence and bloodshed? If the Kingdom of God is not an ethereal fantasy, how else could it be established upon a land occupied by a massive imperial presence except through the use of force? The prophets, bandits, zealots, and messiahs of Jesus’s time all knew this, which is why they did not hesitate to employ violence in trying to establish God’s rule on earth. The question is, did Jesus feel the same? Did he agree with his fellow messiahs Hezekiah the bandit chief, Judas the Galilean, Menahem, Simon son of Giora, Simon son of Kochba, and the rest, that violence was necessary to bring about the rule of God on earth? Did he follow the zealot doctrine that the land had to be forcibly cleansed of all foreign elements just as God had demanded in the scriptures?
There may be no more important question than this for those trying to pry the historical Jesus away from the Christian Christ. The common depiction of Jesus as an inveterate peacemaker who “loved his enemies” and “turned the other cheek” has been built mostly on his portrayal as an apolitical preacher with no interest in or, for that matter, knowledge of the politically turbulent world in which he lived. That picture of Jesus has already been shown to be a complete fabrication. The Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence. There is no evidence that Jesus himself openly advocated violent actions. But he was certainly no pacifist. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword” (Matthew 10:34 | Luke 12:51).
After the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem, the early Christian church tried desperately to distance Jesus from the zealous nationalism that had led to that awful war. As a result, statements such as “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” were deliberately cleansed of their Jewish context and transformed into abstract ethical principles that all peoples could abide regardless of their ethnic, cultural, or religious persuasions.
Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose sight of this fundamental fact: Jesus of Nazareth was first and finally a Jew. As a Jew, Jesus was concerned exclusively with the fate of his fellow Jews. Israel was all that mattered to Jesus. He insisted that his mission was “solely to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24) and commanded his disciples to share the good news with none but their fellow Jews: “Go nowhere near the gentiles and do not enter the city of the Samaritans” (Matthew 10:5–6). Whenever he himself encountered gentiles, he always kept them at a distance and often healed them reluctantly. As he explained to the Syrophoenician woman who came to him seeking help for her daughter, “Let the children [by which Jesus means Israel] be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs [by which he means gentiles like her]” (Mark 7:27).
When it came to the heart and soul of the Jewish faith—the Law of Moses—Jesus was adamant that his mission was not to abol
ish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). That law made a clear distinction between relations among Jews and relations between Jews and foreigners. The oft-repeated commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” was originally given strictly in the context of internal relations within Israel. The verse in question reads: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). To the Israelites, as well as to Jesus’s community in first-century Palestine, “neighbor” meant one’s fellow Jews. With regard to the treatment of foreigners and outsiders, oppressors and occupiers, however, the Torah could not be clearer: “You shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them and their gods. They shall not live in your land” (Exodus 23:31–33).
For those who view Jesus as the literally begotten son of God, Jesus’s Jewishness is immaterial. If Christ is divine, then he stands above any particular law or custom. But for those seeking the simple Jewish peasant and charismatic preacher who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago, there is nothing more important than this one undeniable truth: the same God whom the Bible calls “a man of war” (Exodus 15:3), the God who repeatedly commands the wholesale slaughter of every foreign man, woman, and child who occupies the land of the Jews, the “blood-spattered God” of Abraham, and Moses, and Jacob, and Joshua (Isaiah 63:3), the God who “shatters the heads of his enemies,” bids his warriors to bathe their feet in their blood and leave their corpses to be eaten by dogs (Psalms 68:21–23)—that is the only God that Jesus knew and the sole God he worshipped.
There is no reason to consider Jesus’s conception of his neighbors and enemies to have been any more or less expansive than that of any other Jew of his time. His commands to “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” must be read as being directed exclusively at his fellow Jews and meant as a model of peaceful relations exclusively within the Jewish community. The commands have nothing to do with how to treat foreigners and outsiders, especially those savage “plunderers of the world” who occupied God’s land in direct violation of the Law of Moses, which Jesus viewed himself as fulfilling. They shall not live in your land.
In any case, neither the commandment to love one’s enemies nor the plea to turn the other cheek is equivalent to a call for nonviolence or nonresistance. Jesus was not a fool. He understood what every other claimant to the mantle of the messiah understood: God’s sovereignty could not be established except through force. “From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of God has been coming violently, and the violent ones try to snatch it away” (Matthew 11:12 | Luke 16:16).
It was precisely to prepare for the unavoidable consequences of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth that Jesus handpicked his twelve apostles. The Jews of Jesus’s time believed that a day would come when the twelve tribes of Israel would be reconstituted to once again form a single, united nation. The prophets had predicted it: “I shall restore the fortunes of my people, Israel and Judah, says the Lord, and I shall bring them back to the land that I gave their ancestors and they shall take possession of it” (Jeremiah 30:3). By designating the Twelve and promising that they would “sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28 | Luke 22:28–30), Jesus was signaling that the day they had been waiting for, when the Lord of Hosts would “break the yoke from off the neck” of the Jews and “burst their bonds” (Jeremiah 30:8), had arrived. The restoration and renewal of the true nation of Israel, which John the Baptist had preached, was finally at hand. The Kingdom of God was here.
This was a daring and provocative message. For as the prophet Isaiah warned, God would “gather the scattered people of Israel and the dispersed people of Judah” for a single purpose: war. The new, reconstituted Israel will, in the words of the prophet, “raise a signal-banner to the nations,” it will “swoop down on the backs of the Philistines in the west” and “plunder the people of the east.” It will repossess the land God gave the Jews and wipe from it forever the foul stench of foreign occupation (Isaiah 11:11–16).
The designation of the Twelve is, if not a call to war, an admission of its inevitability, which is why Jesus expressly warned them of what was to come: “If anyone wishes to follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). This is not the statement of self-denial it has so often been interpreted as being. The cross is the punishment for sedition, not a symbol of self-abnegation. Jesus was warning the Twelve that their status as the embodiment of the twelve tribes that will reconstitute the nation of Israel and throw off the yoke of occupation would rightly be understood by Rome as treason and thus inevitably lead to crucifixion. It was an admission that Jesus frequently made for himself. Over and over again, Jesus reminded his disciples of what lay ahead for him: rejection, arrest, torture, and execution (Matthew 16:21, 17:22–23, 20:18–19; Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33; Luke 9:22, 44, 18:32–33). It could be argued that the evangelists, who were writing decades after the events they described, knew that Jesus’s story would end on a cross in Golgotha, and so they put these predictions into Jesus’s mouth to prove his prowess as a prophet. But the sheer volume of Jesus’s statements about his inevitable capture and crucifixion indicates that his frequent self-prophecies may be historical. Then again, it does not take a prophet to predict what happens to someone who challenges either the priestly control of the Temple or the Roman occupation of Palestine. The road ahead for Jesus and the Twelve had been made manifest by the many messianic aspirants who came before him. The destination was clear.
That explains why Jesus went to such lengths to hide the truth about the Kingdom of God from all but his disciples. Jesus recognized that the new world order he envisioned was so radical, so dangerous, so revolutionary, that Rome’s only conceivable response to it would be to arrest and execute them all for sedition. He therefore consciously chose to veil the Kingdom of God in abstruse and enigmatic parables that are nearly impossible to understand. “The secret of the Kingdom of God has been given to you to know,” Jesus tells his disciples. “But to outsiders, everything is said in parables so that they may see and not perceive, they may hear and not understand” (Mark 4:11–12).
What, then, is the Kingdom of God in Jesus’s teachings? It is at once the joyous wedding feast within the king’s royal hall, and the blood-soaked streets outside its walls. It is a treasure hidden in a field; sell all you have and buy that field (Matthew 13:44). It is a pearl tucked inside a shell; sacrifice everything to seek out that shell (Matthew 13:45). It is a mustard seed—the smallest of seeds—buried in soil. One day soon it will bloom into a majestic tree, and birds shall nest in its branches (Matthew 13:31–32). It is a net drawn from the sea, bursting with fish both good and bad; the good shall be kept, the bad discarded (Matthew 13:47). It is a meadow choking with both weeds and wheat. When the reaper comes, he will harvest the wheat. But the weeds he will bundle together and toss into the fire (Matthew 13:24–30). And the reaper is nearly here. God’s will is about to be done on earth, just as it is in heaven. So then, take your hand off the plow and do not look back, let the dead bury the dead, leave behind your husband and your wife, your brothers and sisters and children, and prepare yourself to receive the Kingdom of God. “Already, the ax is laid at the root of the tree.”
Of course, none of Jesus’s obfuscations about the meaning and implications of the Kingdom of God would keep him from being seized and crucified. Jesus’s assertion that the present order was about to be reversed, that the rich and the powerful were going to be made poor and weak, that the twelve tribes of Israel would soon be reconstituted into a single nation and God made once again the sole ruler in Jerusalem—none of these provocative statements would have been well received in the Temple, where the high priest reigned, or the Antonia Fortress, where Rome governed. After all, if the Kingdom of God, as Jesus presented it, was in fact a real, physical kingdom, then did it not require a real, physical king? Was not Jesus claiming for himself that royal
title? He promised a throne for each of his twelve apostles. Did he not have in mind a throne for himself?
Granted, Jesus provided no specifics about the new world order he envisioned (though neither did any other royal claimant of his time). There are no practical programs, no detailed agendas, no specific political or economic recommendations in Jesus’s teachings about the Kingdom of God. He seems to have had no interest at all in laying out how God’s reign on earth would actually function. That was for God alone to determine. But there is no question that Jesus had a clear vision for his own role in the Kingdom of God: “If by the finger of God I cast out demons, then surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”
The presence of the Kingdom of God had empowered Jesus to heal the sick and the demon-possessed. But at the same time, it was Jesus’s healings and exorcisms that were bringing the Kingdom of God to fruition. It was, in other words, a symbiotic relationship. As God’s agent on earth—the one who wielded God’s finger—Jesus himself was ushering in the Kingdom of God and establishing God’s dominion through his miraculous actions. He was, in effect, the Kingdom of God personified. Who else should sit on God’s throne?
No wonder, then, that at the end of his life, when he stood beaten and bruised before Pontius Pilate to answer the charges made against him, Jesus was asked but a single question. It was the only question that mattered, the only question he would have been brought before the Roman governor to answer before being sent off to the cross to receive the standard punishment for all rebels and insurrectionists.
“Are you the King of the Jews?”
Chapter Eleven
Who Do You Say I Am?
Two years have passed, more or less, since Jesus of Nazareth first met John the Baptist at the lip of the Jordan River and followed him into the Judean desert. In that time, Jesus has not only carried on his master’s message about the Kingdom of God; he has expanded it into a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and oppressed—a movement founded upon the promise that God would soon intervene on behalf of the meek and the poor, that he would smite the imperial Roman power just as he smote Pharaoh’s army so long ago and free his Temple from the hands of the hypocrites who controlled it. Jesus’s movement has drawn to him a corps of zealous disciples, twelve of whom have been given the authority to preach his message on their own. In every town and city they enter, in the villages and the countryside, great crowds gather to hear Jesus and his disciples preach, and to take part in the free healings and exorcisms they offer to those who seek their help.
