The Kingdom Of God And Our Global Mission
Repent and Believe the Good News
These final words of Mark’s summary represent the human response to the coming of the kingdom with Jesus. They speak of the kingdom in its relationship to the human condition. As it comes to overthrow the old order, it requires repentance. As it puts in motion the setting in of the new, it is good news to be believed. It is also clear that in Jesus’ own teaching, however, this twofold response takes place in reverse order. That is, one does not repent in order to gain entrance to the kingdom; rather, the kingdom is God’s gift (Luke 12:32), present in Jesus himself, which is the good news that leads to repentance.
Thus Jesus especially announces the kingdom as “good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18), so much so that when the imprisoned John, out of his own uncertainty, inquires about Jesus (after all, Jesus hardly fit the categories set up by John’s preaching!), Jesus once again uses this language from Isaiah 61 as the authentication of his messiahship (Matt 11:5).
But who indeed are “the poor” who are the recipients of the good news of the kingdom?155 For Jesus they clearly include the traditional “poor” (the widows and orphans, who represent all the helpless and defenseless, to whom God has committed himself and his people to plead their cause). His concern for the helpless, found both in his ministry and his parables,156 makes it clear that “the poor” still include such people. But for Jesus they also include that other great class of “poor,” the “sinners” - those who recognize themselves as impoverished of spirit (Matt 5:3) and who stand helpless before God, in need of his mercy. They are thus represented in the prodigal, who “comes to himself” and receives his father’s warm embrace (Luke 15:11-32); in the town “sinner,” who weeps over Jesus’ feet and receives his word of forgiveness (Luke 7:36-50); in the wretched tax-collector, whose gracious acceptance by Jesus leads to his giving back all and more of what he had stolen (Luke 19:1-10). They are those who have been wearied by the heavy yoke of sin and the pharisaic burden of law, who are invited by Jesus to come to him and change yokes, because his yoke is easy and his burden light (Matt 11:28-30).
This is the good news of the kingdom. The year of God’s favor has come. With Jesus there is forgiveness for all; the poor and beggars are summoned to the banquet; the door of the Father’s house stands open; people who work but an hour receive a full day’s pay, because the landowner is generous. God’s rule has become present in Jesus to free people from all the tyrannies of Satan’s rule, to bring “release to the captives” in every imaginable way, including those who have been encumbered by the pharisaic understanding of the law.
Such good news thus leads to repentance. Jesus does not tell Zacchaeus to repent and then he will eat with him; rather his gracious acceptance of Zacchaeus in all his ugliness led to the latter’s repentance. A woman caught in adultery is freely forgiven, and then told to go and sin no more.
Repentance for Jesus is thus not simply remorse. It means to become as a child, to humble oneself and become totally dependent on one’s heavenly Father (Matt 18:4). It means to lose one’s life, and thereby to find it again — because one has been “found” by God himself (Mark 8:35). But it also means to enter into discipleship, to deny one’s very self, to take up a cross — the place of self-sacrifice on behalf of others — and thus to follow Jesus himself (Mark 8:34).
Therefore, the gift of the kingdom means to become a child of the king, who as it turns out is also one’s heavenly Father. Such children are not to worry; the Father has committed himself to their care and provision of needs (Matt 6:25-34). They in turn are to become like the Father and are expected to be his salt and light in the world by living out the life of the future — the kingdom of God itself — in the present age. Thus the ethics of the kingdom are not some new, intensive form of law. They, too, are gift. They reflect the righteousness of the kingdom of God that “goes beyond that of the Pharisees” (Matt 5:20). As God is perfect, so his children are invited to share his likeness in the fallen world as it awaits the final consummation (Matt 5:38). Forgiven, they forgive; recipients of mercy, they show mercy; beneficiaries of abundant grace in every way, they bring others to become beneficiaries as well by showing them abundant grace.
Such is the kingdom of God in the mission and message of Jesus. Though veiled in the weakness and suffering of his own incarnation and subsequent death on the cross, it has come with power — the real thing — in the form of life-changing acceptance and forgiveness, destroying the power of Satan in every way. “I saw Satan fall from heaven,” Jesus says after the Seventy-two return from a mission of casting out demons (Luke 10:18). Satan’s rule is on its way out; its stranglehold on humanity in every form — sin, sickness, oppression, possession, injustice - has received its deathblow in the life and ministry of Jesus, and especially in his death and resurrection. And such is the foundation for the global mission of the church in our own day.