9. The Last Things: The Kingdom Of God
9 THE LAST THINGS: THE KINGDOM OF GOD
The Bible is a story. It is the story of all things, from the beginning to the end. It is a faithful account of the Creation, the making of all things. It is also a narrative of the Fall, which alienated our world from its Creator. It is a recital of God’s redeeming work and of that consummation he has promised.
We are now approaching a discussion of the ‘last things’ – death, resurrection, immortality, the end of the world and final judgment – what is technically called ‘eschatology’. This term is derived from the Greek word eschatos which means the end. Theologians love to throw around words like eschatology, perhaps to remind us of their scholarship and erudition. So just in case you might want to sound a little more learned in your next conversation, I offer this one quite freely – for what it’s worth!
There is nothing more significant and decisive for moulding and defining our way of understanding than the story that we tell of ourselves. It is pivotal. Europe has been defined and characterised by its own story which has made it distinct from Asia. But, of course, the account that Europeans have given of themselves over these past two hundred years has not been the story of the Bible, but rather of what we have chosen to call ‘progress’. This doctrine of ‘progress’, which has its origins in the eighteenth century, has shaped our thinking from the middle of the eighteen century until the First World War. To a large extent, we are still immersed in it. We find it difficult to view this cult of progress with detachment and often fail to shake our minds out of it and to recognise that it is a very recent story. It is a story culturally unknown in many parts of the world, and it is certainly not the story the Bible tells.
It is this reverence of ‘progress’ which causes us to think automatically that the things and events of earlier times are crude, primitive and less developed. We habitually and mechanically believe that the things of the present and future are, and always will be, more refined and better developed. We unconsciously think that everything old fashioned and out of date is by definition inferior. This whole mode of thinking is expressed in words like progress, development, evolution, growth and so forth. We have been conditioned into thinking of our story in those terms, as a continuous upward movement. C. S. Lewis aptly termed this phenomenon ‘chronological snobbery’ – that anything modern or recent is always better than something ancient.
At the same time, there is another, older story which still persists in the back of our minds. This is about how things were somehow much better in the past. It is a story told especially by old people, but a very familiar story. This is also an ancient story which suggests the idea of a golden age in the past. Human history is felt to be a journey of descent from that golden age to the present.
In society today much depends upon the relative importance between the old and the young. In most traditional societies the old are supposed to be wise and their point of view is respected. But with the rise of the doctrine of progress in the eighteenth century, as a direct result of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, a conscious movement arose throughout Europe to take the education of the young out of the hands of parents and churches. A system of government-controlled state education was developed that inculcated into successive generations a different view of the world. The whole idea that education should be the responsibility of the government is a very recent concept and is one of the implications of that new doctrine of progress.
Behind both these stories there is a still more ancient one, perhaps the most popular, which combines the idea of progress with that of a golden age in the past. And that is to see life and nature as a circle, a continuous and inexorable wheel, where things rise, develop, mature, decay and finally fall. It is, of course, a natural way of understanding ourselves because it is what we always see in the natural world around us. Plants and animals, everything in the natural world, is seen to go through a changing cycle. There is a time for renewal and growth, then of maturity leading to decay. But then another cycle begins, so that we have the feeling that we are moving, but in fact we are going nowhere because ultimately we are part of this great turning wheel of nature.
The most rigorous development of this worldview is found in Indian thought with the fundamental concept of reincarnation. None of the great religious movements – Buddhism, Sikhism, the modern religious movements in India – has questioned the idea of reincarnation. The different schools of thought in Hinduism represent different proposals for escaping from this endless, meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth. Escaping from this appalling and terrible prospect – of ceaseless birth and rebirth, where in each incarnation we are compelled to suffer the consequences of the deeds of our previous life – forms the background of all Indian religion.
One of the extraordinary ironies of today is that significant numbers of people in the Western world are trying to revive belief in the idea of reincarnation. They would thus imprison themselves on that eternal wheel from which Indian religion has spent all its energies in trying to escape. It is one of the stark illustrations of the fact that if the story of the Bible no longer guides and directs us, we shall return inevitably to Asia and become, again, simply the western end of Asia.
But, of course, the story we have told over the past two hundred years, the way of understanding our history as a chronicle of progress and development, has this one fatal flaw: we shall not be around at the end. However much we might think of history in terms of a glorious future for the human race, one thing is quite certain – we shall not be there. This has inevitably resulted in the separation of our vision of the future of society from that of our personal future.
That is the root of the privatisation of religion about which we often complain. If for the sake of argument the real meaning of history were to be realised in the year 20,000, when we shall not be alive, then we have to ask about the goal of personal history, and that then becomes a separate issue. It becomes the idea of a personal survival of death, because one has dropped out of the history of the world. So we have this dividing of these two eschatologies – the public and the private – and there seems to be no way of bringing them together because inevitably one has dropped out of the story of the world before it has been completed.
What is unique about the eschatology of the Bible – the vision of the end which we have in Revelation, the last book of the Bible – is that it draws together and unites the public and private. It is the holy city into which the kings of the earth bring their glory. It is therefore the consummation of the whole history of civilisation, because the literal meaning of the one civilisation is the making of a city. It is all these things, but it is also the consummation of every personal life. It is the place where the tears will be wiped from each and every eye and where we shall be with God and see him face to face.
How is it that the Bible is able to bring together that which we have split asunder in our telling of the story? The answer is that since it was sin and death that created the split, it is sin and death that separates us from the human story before it reaches its end. It is only because the Bible tells the story of how sin and death have been conquered that it can give us an eschatology which includes both the public and private. To put it very crudely and bluntly, we see that the end does not come as the result of a smooth and upward progress, but only after judgment and catastrophe: the fire of judgment that burns everything. In other words, only after the cross comes the resurrection.
Consider the biblical understanding of the end. Take a look at it as a whole. If we examine the Old Testament we know that its great central theme is that the Lord reigns. The Lord who delivered us out of slavery in Egypt is the Lord of heaven and earth and in the end all nations and all peoples will acknowledge him. But overwhelmingly, the Old Testament sees the end as something which is in this world. It is a picture of a renewed world. ‘Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low’ (Isaiah 40:4); ‘The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat … and a little child will lead them’ (Isaiah 11:6); ‘Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no-one will make them afraid’ (Micah 4:4). All these pictures in the Old Testament of the promised end are pictures in this world. It is true that there are hints of something beyond death, not strongly developed but nevertheless present.
The events of the Maccabean wars seems to have made the decisive difference. In the struggle to overcome the appalling tyranny of the pagan rule of the Greek emperors, thousands of loyal Jews were slain because they faithfully and courageously refused to break the Sabbath by fighting on that day. It became impossible to believe that all these unfortunate people who perished in faith should be excluded from the consummation for which they had fought and died. It is therefore in this inter-testamental period that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead came to occupy a key place in Jewish thinking. But as we know from the New Testament, not all Jews accepted this.
The Sadducees declined to accept the doctrine of resurrection because they had made a cosy and comfortable concordat with the ruling power and were prepared to let things go on as they were. The doctrine of resurrection was most decidedly a revolutionary and subversive doctrine because it implied that things, as they stood, were not the last word. We know that on this issue Jesus sided decisively with the Pharisees and against the Sadducees, and taught the resurrection of the body.
At the time of Jesus himself the Holy Land had for centuries past been desecrated by pagan armies, the Temple desecrated, the Law flouted, the rule of God denied and his people subjugated to the humiliation of slavery. It was a time of smouldering fomentation beneath the surface, always leading to the question: ‘How long do we have to wait before God intervenes to fulfil his promises?’
We know from the Gospels that Jesus in his own person knew himself to be the presence of the rule and kingdom of God. The central message he brought to the world was that the rule of God was at hand. The hour had come. The crucial moment of judgment and redemption had arrived.
It is clear that to begin with Jesus sought to summon the people of Israel as a whole to recognise the presence of this hour of judgment. They were urged to recognise the signs of the times and to fulfil the vocation for which God had called them: to be the suffering servant who manifested the glory of the kingdom of God. When Israel rejected this call, Jesus in a multitude of parables and teachings, warned that the absolute destruction of Israel was imminent. Here one thinks in particular of the parable of the tenants (Matthew 21:33– 46). And with that destruction would come the crisis for the world. It is clear, however, that Jesus knew that in the end it was he himself, and he alone, who could and would fulfil the calling of Israel. That fulfilment would take place as he alone heeded God’s call to be his servant, to suffer and to bear the sin of the world. He accordingly began to teach his disciples that he must suffer and die, but would rise again. And as we know, this is what actually happened.
But things did not turn out exactly as devout Jews thought they would. The resurrection of Jesus was not the end of history. The disciples at first thought it ought to be. They asked him, ‘Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’ (Acts 1:6). They wanted to know if they were to have the kingdom then and there. If not, what was the meaning and point of all these things that had happened?
But Jesus told them they would have to wait. The day of final judgment was in the hands of the Father. But there would be a space, an interval of time between the resurrection of Jesus and the final end. There would be a time for the gospel to be disseminated throughout all nations, a time to repent and prepare for the day of judgment. How long that time would be the Father alone knew.
The disciples were taught to understand that they had been entrusted with the secret of the resurrection, that the death of Jesus was not the defeat of God’s kingdom. On the contrary it was the victory. So this delay of the final judgment was to allow time for the gospel to be preached to all nations and to give them time to repent. As to the length of the delay, it was not for them to know. Jesus said, ‘No-one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father’ (Matthew 24:36).
What Jesus says of that momentous day is both that it is immediate and yet its timing is uncertain. There are parables and sayings of Jesus which suggest the end is imminent. Others stress the need for patience – there is no certain day.
Time and again, Jesus makes use of the image of the watchman. His job is to stay awake and alert throughout the night, and for hour after hour nothing might happen. But suddenly the decisive moment arrives when the master appears and all have to be ready immediately. So it is this combination of alertness and patience which corresponds to the fact that the final day is immediate, and yet at the same time we do not know when it will be.
Many modern New Testament scholars have looked only at those sayings of Jesus which speak of the immediacy and have then concluded that since two thousand years have passed, Jesus was simply mistaken. But this is the result of reading only half of the evidence. Indeed, it is extraordinary to me that contemporary New Testament scholars talk almost unanimously in this way. This is despite the fact that it is impossible to understand why the early church continued to spread the words and sayings of Jesus when they supposedly already knew or suspected that he was fundamentally mistaken.
What does the gospel teach us of the understanding of the end? I think it is summed up most beautifully in that verse at the beginning of the first letter of Peter: ‘Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade – kept in heaven for you’ (1 Peter 1:3–4). Those words are a wonderful summary of what has been accomplished.
There is a sense of hope which is not simply expressed as the desire for something in the future, which may or may not occur, but which we very much want to happen. It is not hope in that weak and vague sense which we so often use, but hope in the sense of absolute confidence: eagerly awaiting something that is assured, even though we do not know the day of its coming. In the words of the letter to the Hebrews, it is a hope that is ‘an anchor for the soul’ (Hebrews 6:19). It is unshakeable in its solidity. That is what we have been given. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pledge that death and sin have been conquered. We know that the end is the victory of God in Jesus Christ.
We must understand the future in a different way. Our contemporary model of understanding the future has been around for the past two centuries or so. It attempts to paint a picture of a solid future, a future of hoped for continuing progress, rather than to suggest that we are peering into an essentially unknown future. But whatever the skills and technological wizardry of our computer-aided forecasters, all that we really know is that we do not know the future. It can always be a total surprise. What we look forward to in the Christian vocabulary is not ‘future’ but ‘advent’: that someone is coming to meet us. The horizon of our acting and thinking is thus not some unknown future, some utopia in perhaps the thirtieth or fortieth century. Its perspective is not my own personal survival, but the coming of Jesus. That is what we look forward to, that is the model, that is our horizon.
What do we envisage when we look to the future? What vista of an imagined future lies before us? Without doubt the answer is that momentous image of Jesus coming as the bearer of God’s final victory and judgment. This means that our actions are not, so to speak, to be understood as creating or building the kingdom of God, as people used to say a few decades ago. It is not that our actions directly fulfil God’s purpose for history as a whole. We know that our actions are ambivalent, confused and contradictory, and that even our good intentions often lead to results quite different from what was intended. No, the meaning of our actions should be understood essentially as ‘acted prayers’ for the kingdom. We pray, ‘Your kingdom come.’ But our actions are simply those prayers put into action, and they are offered to God to make of them what he will in his own providential design.
None of the geometrical patterns that I mentioned at the beginning is a satisfactory model. There is the cyclical pattern to which I have referred, and by contrast some theologians have suggested that the biblical pattern is linear. But if I may say so, this is not right. If it was truly a linear pattern then we would certainly have no part in the final victory of God’s purpose. It really is not something that can be described in geometrical terms, but only personal terms. There is no direct road from the here and now to the kingdom of God. The path winds down into the valley, reaching into the depths of desolation that Jesus alone knew. Only from out of those depths – of the crucified, humiliated and defeated Jesus – does God raise up the new creation.
The resurrection of Jesus, from the degradation and defeat of the grave, is the pledge that out of the ruins of all that we bring about in history, God will raise a new creation. ‘A new heaven and a new earth … for the old order of things has passed away’ (Revelation 21:1, 4). There is no straight line. If you want a geometrical pattern, it goes right down. And only then, when God raises it up, does it reach its climax.
Basically, I am saying that geometrical patterns will not work. It is a personal relationship. Our actions are to be understood as acted prayers for the kingdom. We offer not just prayer but action. We offer ourselves to God. And because there is only one perfect sacrifice, that of Jesus on the cross, it follows that those actions which will be accepted, honoured and raised up by God, will be those we undertake for the sake, and as members of, the body of Christ – acted prayers through Jesus Christ our Lord. That is the model we must adopt in order to understand the relationship between our actions now and their connection to the end of all things.
There is that wonderful story of Jeremiah as he lay in prison (Jeremiah 32). One of his relatives came and told him that a piece of family property was up for sale and he ought to buy it. This land was under enemy occupation and the Babylonian armies were about to take and destroy Jerusalem and carry its people into captivity. Nevertheless, Jeremiah paid seventeen shekels of silver for it and then he asked himself the question we have all asked at times in our life, ‘Why did I do such a stupid thing?’ God answered him that in the end the land would be redeemed. Jeremiah took a risk which in relation to his current situation was seemingly absurd. But it was the action that corresponded to what God had promised. In fact it was the model for all our action, then and now.
Even in situations which seem hopeless, when acts of love, forgiveness or kindness seem irrelevant, we still undertake those actions. This is not because we think these acts are going to be immediately effective in some way, but because they correspond to what God has promised. They are therefore realistic actions corresponding to the ultimate reality, and are accordingly acted prayers for the kingdom of God.
I return to my question: What is it we see when we look forward? It is not merely an indefinite and unknowable future, but an advent. He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. He will come again and he will come as Judge. If there is no final judgment, then the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have no meaning. If in the end ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ add up to the same thing then they are meaningless words. Morality is reduced to my personal chosen values. But we cannot eliminate this word ‘judgment’ from our thinking: ‘… he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead’ (Acts 10:42). The reason for that is that he is ‘the light of the world’. St John’s Gospel says, ‘This is the verdict [judgment]: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil’ (John 3:19).
The essential point about light is that in its glare things are seen as they really are, and in the end everything will be seen as it really is. There will in the end be no confusion between right and wrong, between truth and lies. If we sidestep that central element of our faith then the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ become meaningless. When we assert that a thing is wrong, even if everybody denies it, what we are saying is that in the end, in the light of Jesus, it will be seen that it is wrong. Otherwise, the word is devoid of meaning.
When we speak about judgment, we must remember that in all of the parables of Jesus about the last judgment, the emphasis is on surprise. Those who thought that they were in suddenly find themselves out. And those who thought they were always doomed to be outside, find themselves in. ‘So the last will be first, and the first will be last’ (Matthew 20:16). All things are finally in God’s hands and we are warned that judgment, and the time for it, belongs to God alone.
Our creed goes on, ‘I believe in … the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.’ The New Testament says little about what must always be a tantalising mystery of what happens to the believers who die in the faith before the end has come. Where are they and what happens to them? The New Testament is very reticent about it. In the New Testament all the emphasis is on that final victory, the resurrection of the dead, the judgment, the kingdom and the glory and the new heavens and the new earth. But there are hints, especially in that wonderful passage in Hebrews 11 and 12 where they are spoken of as ‘a cloud of witnesses’ (Hebrews 12:1) that surround us, looking to Jesus, with us looking to Jesus and waiting for the day of his glory.
In our Protestant reaction against an excessive concern about those who have died in faith in the Roman Catholic Church, many of us have been insufficiently explicit about this. I think that the communion of the saints, those who have gone before us, are still surrounding us as ‘a cloud of witnesses’ looking to Jesus. I think this despite the fact that we know little of their state and the Scriptures do not say much about them. And we can rejoice in their communion. Remember them, thank God for them, as a regular and important part of our prayers. This has certainly become an increasingly important part of my own prayers.
The Scriptures teach us that the resurrection of the body is the end and not the pagan idea of the immortality of the soul. The scriptural idea of the resurrection of the body is part of the whole vision of new heavens and a new earth, a fresh creation in which all that God had purposed for the creation of the world and his human family is redeemed and consummated in his kingdom.
Finally, the life everlasting. This is the communion in the life of the blessed Trinity for which Jesus prays on the night of his passion, ‘That they may be one, as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity’ (John 17:23). This is the prayer that we are permitted to enter into and in which we may live forever in the glory, the joy and love of the triune God. This is something that passes our understanding and yet continually beckons us as the true goal of our being.
Time and again, the New Testament reminds us that in this interval of time between the resurrection and the second coming, there is given to us a foretaste of that joy: the presence of the Holy Spirit. This is the pledge, the first fruit, the arrabon – to use that ancient word of the kingdom – not the whole reality, but a real taste of that bliss and freedom, and of the glory that belongs to God. These things are given to us so that we may possess in the external world of history the fact of the resurrection, and in the life of our own souls the presence of the Spirit as the double pledge that in the end, God reigns. And to him be the praise.