THE REIGN OF GOD
The first words of Jesus are few and simple, very much like those of John, “The time is accomplished; the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the Gospel.”
Bare words, incomprehensible to moderns by their very sobriety. To understand them and to understand the difference between the message of John and the message of Jesus, they need to be translated into our language, filled again with their eternally living meaning.
“The time has come!” The time for which men have been waiting, which they have prophesied and announced. John said that a King would come ready to found the new Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. The King has come and announces that the doors of the Kingdom are open. He is the guide, the path, the hand, before being King in all the splendor of His celestial glory.
When Jesus says “The time is accomplished,” he does not refer to the exact date, to the fact that it was the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius. The time of Jesus is now and always is eternity. The moment of His appearance, the moment of His death, the moment of His return, the moment of His perfect triumph, has not yet arrived, not even yet! And yet, at every moment the time is accomplished, every hour is the fullness of time, on condition that the workers are ready. Every day is His; His era is not written down in numbers: there is no chronology in eternity. Every time a man tries to enter into the Kingdom, confirms the Kingdom by believing, enriches the Kingdom, consolidates, defends, proclaims its perpetual sanctity and its perpetual rightness in opposition to all the inferior kingdoms (inferior because they are human, not divine, earthly not heavenly) then always the time is accomplished. This time is called the epoch of Jesus, the Christian era, the New Covenant. Not quite two thousand years divides us from that time; not quite two days, because for God, and for men of understanding, a thousand years are as a day. The time is ripe; even to-day we are in the fullness of time. Jesus calls us even now. The second day has not yet expired, the foundations of the Kingdom are scarcely begun. We who live to-day, this year, in this century (and we shall not always be alive, and we shall perhaps not see the end of this year, and certainly we shall not see the end of this century), we, I say, the living, can take part in this Kingdom, enter into it, live in it, enjoy it. The Kingdom is not the worn-out fancy of a poor Jew nearly twenty centuries ago; it is not an archaism, a dead memory, a bygone frenzy. The Kingdom is of to-day, of to-morrow, of always; a reality of the future always just-realized, alive, actual, ours; a work started a short time ago, a work to which every one is free to put his hand to take it up, to carry it on. The word seems old, the message dim with antiquity repeated by the echoes of two thousand years, but the Kingdom—as a fact, true, accomplished—is new, young, born yesterday, still to grow, to flower, to prosper. Jesus threw the seed into the earth, but the seed has scarcely germinated in two thousand years passed like a stormy winter, in the space of sixty human generations. Is it perhaps possible that our own time after the flood of blood is the divine and longed-for period?
What this Kingdom is, we shall learn page by page in the words of Jesus; but we must not imagine it as a new Paradise of Delight, as a wearisome Arcady of beatitude, as an immense choir singing Hosannahs with their feet on the clouds and their heads among the stars.
Christ describes the Kingdom of God as opposed to the Kingdom of Satan, as the antithesis of the Kingdom of Earth. The Kingdom of Satan is the Kingdom of evil, of deceit, of cruelty, of pride, the Kingdom of baseness. Therefore the Kingdom of God means the Kingdom of good, of sincerity, of love, of humility, the Kingdom of the lofty.
The Kingdom of Earth is the Kingdom of matter and of flesh, the Kingdom of gold, hatred, avarice, sensuality, the Kingdom of all things loved by evil and distraught men. The Kingdom of Heaven is to be the opposite of this: the Kingdom of the spirit and of the soul, the Kingdom of renunciation and of purity; the Kingdom of all things valued by men who know the worthlessness of everything else in comparison. God is Father and Goodness; Heaven is above the earth, hence it is the spirit. Heaven is God’s home. The spirit is the dominion of goodness. All that crawls on the earth, grubs in the earth, takes pleasure in matter—that is bestiality; all that lives with upraised eyes, desiring Heaven, wishing to live forever in Heaven—that is Holiness. Most men are beasts. It is Christ’s will that these beasts become saints. This is the simple and ever-living meaning of the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Kingdom of God is of men and for men. The Kingdom of Heaven is in us. Begin at once: it is our work, for our happiness in this life on this earth. It depends on our will, on our response given or withheld. Become perfect and the Kingdom will extend even on earth. The Kingdom of God will be founded among men.
It is true that Jesus added “repent,” but the old word has been distorted from its true and magnificent meaning. The word of Mark—μετανοειτε—should not be translated “repent”; μετανοια means rather the changing of the mind, the transformation of the soul. Metamorphosis is a change of form; “metanoia,” a changing of the spirit. It ought rather to be translated “conversion,” that is, the renewing of the inner life of man. The idea of “repentance” is only an illustration of Christ’s command.
As one of the conditions of the arrival of the Kingdom and at the same time as the very substance of the new order, Jesus demands complete conversion, a revolution of life and of the common values of life, a transmutation of feelings, of opinions, of intentions. This He called, speaking to Nicodemus, “the second birth.” Little by little He was to explain in what way this total transformation of the ordinary human soul is to be effected. All His life was devoted to this teaching and to setting the example. But in the meantime, He contented Himself with adding one conclusion, “Believe in the Gospel.”
By “Gospel” men nowadays mean usually the book where the quadruple story of Jesus is printed; but Jesus neither wrote books nor thought of volumes. By “Gospel” He meant, according to the plain and sweet meaning of the word, “good tidings.” Jesus is a messenger (in Greek “angel”) who brings good tidings: He brings the cheerful message that the sick will be cured, that the blind will see, the poor will be enriched with imperishable riches, that the sad will rejoice, that sinners will be pardoned, the unclean purified, that the imperfect can become perfect, that animals can become saints, and saints become angels, like unto God.
If this Kingdom is to come, if everybody is to prepare himself for its coming, we must believe in the message, believe that the Kingdom is possible and near. If there is no faith in this promise, no one will do what must be done to fulfill the promise. Only the certainty of the truth of this good tidings, only the conviction that the Kingdom is not the lie of an adventurer or the hallucination of an obsessed zealot; only the certainty of the sincerity and validity of the message can arouse men to put their hands to the great work of its foundation.
With those few words, obscure to the majority of men, Jesus began His teaching. The fullness of time, the need to begin at once! The coming of the Kingdom, victory of spirit over matter; of good over bad, of the saint over the beast. “Metanoia”—the total transformation of the soul. The Gospel—the cheerful assurance that all this is true and eternally possible.