The Gospel of Jesus

We humans, we love to order things. We lay out our patterns, shape, and trim and weed and water, to make the miracles of the universe, present at every hand, all around us, fit into our ideas of what is decent and seemly. We do it with plants. We do it with the events of our own lives, to make for ourselves a personal history. We do it with the people we encounter. We do it with the deepest knowings of our souls, shaping and forming our encounters with the universe and with ourselves and with the dimly perceived presence which seeks us in everything, fitting the working of our inner lives into an ordered structure: a religion; a gospel.

I look at the church and at what we teach and wonder, sometimes, what Jesus would make of it all.

In Mark's Gospel we have a record of Jesus' first appearance as a teacher in his own right, away from the now unknown influences which formed him. And we have a record of his first proclamation: Repent and believe the Gospel, which raises for us the question of what this Gospel was. Unfortunately, he is not at all clear on this point, and neither is the writer of Mark's Gospel, who assumed, I think, that his readers would know. We do know, however, what Jesus' Gospel was not: "Jesus has died for your sins", because, obviously, at this point he had not.

So we read further, and see in Mark and in all the four Gospels, Jesus' reluctance to explicitly state his message, and his dependence instead on suggestion, metaphor and story.

It seems that Jesus' Gospel was about the Kingdom of God, and again, Jesus is so imprecise about what, exactly, the Kingdom of God is, that the Church has been arguing the toss on this one for 2,000 years now. But again, we know what the Kingdom is not. It is not something we enter when we die. It is not something we have to strive to establish: Jesus tells us that it is amongst us; it is already here; it is at hand (that is, as far away as our own hand).

I think that The Kingdom of God is the perception of the universe as it really is. It is the miraculous reality which is there, hidden behind our incessant ordering. And the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveals to us the nature of reality: that the universe is purposed, meaningful and beneficent. That it lives by the pattern of death and resurrection. That is is formed in, and exists by love. Living in the Kingdom means living with that reality.Which we would do if only we could get out of our own way and see what is always present.

Think again, said Jesus. Metanoiete: have a new mind. See differently The Kingdom is nearer to you than you are to yourself.

Comments

Joy said…

Totally agree. Well said.

3 August 2018 at 23:09

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