BLOG 1/2/18. WHAT IN THE WORLD IS: THE PREACHING OF THE KINGDOM?

So, the New Year is upon us.  That being so, let me inaugurate it by tampering with your thinking a bit. I’ve long been an advocate of the centrality of the theme of: the gospel of the kingdom of God in the New Testament documents. Then, also, I am continually amazed at how little this is understood, and also about the disconnect between its centrality and the actual praxis of the church. Ready for this? What constitutes the preaching/proclaiming of the kingdom of God … and, whose responsibility is it?

First off, this anticipation of God’s invasion of the world with a messianic age, a New Creation, was deeply seated in the psyche of the Hebrew community of the first century, even though it was hardly comprehended. There was the promise given to Abraham about his seed becoming a blessing to all the earth, then there was the promise to David that his throne would be established forever. These promises seemed so dim in the cultural turmoil of Jesus birth, yet it was the angel’s word to Mary that the baby in her womb would sit on the throne of his father David, and of his kingdom there would be no end.

Skip down a few decades and, as Mark records it, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying that the kingdom of God is at hand. How did he do that? Or, take his entry into public life as recorded in Luke. After his forty-day sojourn in the wilderness, he came to his home town, and was honored by being asked to read the scripture for the day, which was the Messianic prophecy from Isaiah, about the Spirit of God being upon the Messiah to bring good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, etc. … and then announcing to the shocked synagogue folk that the prophecy was now fulfilled in himself.

Or, Matthew begins his description of Jesus going about proclaiming the gospel of the Kingdom. Now then, dear friends, it would seem that such a clear focus on the message and intent of Jesus would be determinative of our understanding of the message. And, as if that were not enough, Matthew ends his account by Jesus teaching that “when this gospel of the kingdom shall have been preached in all the earth, then would the Lord come.”

How is that accomplished. Jesus commissioned his followers to, also, be proclaimers of this message. How were they to do that. It is a bit tantalizing to note that Mark tells of Jesus coming on to the scene proclaiming this, but then right away gives the account of several different healings. So, the proclamation was not just in spoken words, but in the works of the kingdom. Matthew, likewise, has Jesus announcing that the long-awaited Messianic moment has come in himself, but when a crowd follows to find out what it is all about, Jesus seats them on the hillside and gives them the guidelines for a radical different way of life and behavior, which good works would cause men to know and glorify God.

Somehow, then, proclaiming the gospel is not just the spoken word, the communicating of the data of the life and teachings of Jesus … but the praxis, the living-out of his teachings in the totality of life. Jesus hob-nobbed with publicans and sinners, initiated a conversation with a village’s shady-lady at the well by asking her to help him with a drink of water. Invited himself into the hospitality of the scandalous tax-collector Zacchaeus. Let me underscore my point here: proclaiming is the task given to every one of us who claims to be a follower of Christ, but it involves our total lifestyle of love and good works. In Paul’s description of the believer’s whole armor, the gospel of peace is on our feet, i.e., it is the doing the lifestyle of God’s peace/kingdom that incite curiosity and inquiry for which we are then to give answer to those who are curious.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven.”  We are to be the practitioners of God’s New Creation which he inaugurated at his coming and which is not dynamically present. May love and good works typify all our lives as this new year unfolds. That’s what preaching is all about.