It is still the most shattering event in history.
For more than two billion Christians, the birth of Jesus is the story of one person, at once fully human and fully divine, entering the world. He put a face to a God who was, before Jesus arrived, incorporeal, beyond human senses and human comprehension. In the words of the apostle Paul, God “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.” Jesus changed all that.
But Christians also believe that the incarnation ushered into the world not just a person but what in the New Testament is called “the kingdom of God.” This can be understood as the sphere of God’s rule, according to the New Testament theologian Richard Bauckham. Luke, the “beloved physician” who wrote one of the four gospels and the book of Acts, told about Jesus traveling through cities and villages “proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God.” Jesus wasn’t talking about ruling a country or a continent; instead, he would live and rule in the hearts of his believers, who would work to realize his will on earth as it is in heaven.
This can also get a bit confusing. Jesus, when he stood accused before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate — who viewed him as a political threat — told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” If it were, Jesus said, his servants would fight to prevent his arrest. “But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” So what are we to make of a kingdom, in this case the kingdom of God, that is in this world but not of this world, that is here but not from here?
Jesus, whose earthly presence was based on a different ethic, was contrasting earthly kingdoms, which prize and monopolize power and control, with God’s kingdom, which esteems the opposite: humility, mercy, meekness and purity of heart. God’s kingdom is not advanced or maintained by the use of violence, intimidation or coercion. It is not a power paradigm. Nor is honor accorded on the basis of worldly status. For Jesus, true greatness was defined as radical servanthood.
This approach was not just surprising but revolutionary, in ways we cannot fully appreciate because we have lived with the influence of Christianity for more than 2,000 years. But what happened with Jesus’ arrival in the first third of the first century was a “transvaluation of all values,” to use a phrase written by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Both Nietzsche and Jesus represented an inversion of many conventional societal values, of how people understood morality and ethics. But what Nietzsche had in mind and what Jesus had in mind were polar opposites. The will to power is not the Jesus way; loving your enemies and washing the feet of others is.
Nietzsche was a complicated thinker, more nuanced than he is sometimes portrayed. He thought more highly of Jesus than of Christianity, which he considered to be life-denying. Nietzsche was contemptuous of Christianity for elevating humility and meekness, compassion and self-sacrifice, while undermining strength, pride, power and self-actualization. In his book “Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography,” the German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski writes, “In Nietzsche’s view, the Christian morality of charity, humility and obedience signified a victory for ‘slave morality.’ ” Mr. Safranski notes that Nietzsche, while greatly admiring the power of Christianity to set values, “was not grateful to it, because its consideration for the weak and the morality of evening things out impeded the progress and development of a higher stage of mankind.”
No figure in human history stood more against this kind of “master morality” than Jesus. He sided with the weak and the despised. The purpose of Jesus’ kingdom of God was to put right what’s gone wrong in the world. Kingdom work is restorative work; it is concrete, practical — based on a value system of service and love that is sacrificial, capacious and radically inclusive.
“The kingdom is about how God wants things to be here and now,” according to the New Testament theologian N.T. Wright. Both Jesus and his disciples believed that the church should be the main instrument through which God’s will on earth comes to pass. And for Christians there is a special duty, rooted in hundreds of verses in the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, to care for those whom the world often overlooks or discards: the poor, the weak, the outcasts. It is to them most of all to whom the kingdom of God belongs.
This is what is meant by one of the most compelling and seemingly inexplicable lines of the New Testament, in the Beatitudes, when Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” In writing about the miracles of Jesus, the historian Garry Wills says that they are “targeted to teach lessons about the heavenly reign he brings with him, and one of the main lessons is that people should not be separated into classes of the clean and unclean, the worthy and the unworthy, the respectable and the unrespectable.” The explosive growth of the early church was because it embodied this ethic.
What makes this “compassion ethic” all the more powerful is that, for Christians, it is authoritative rather than subjective. The moral teachings of Jesus, the way he modeled loving others, are compelling not because they are countercultural, though they are, but because they are intrinsic. What God attributes worth to is something we ought to attribute worth to. That applies to moral truths and human beings, including, and maybe especially, those whom Jesus called “the least of these.”
But too often in history — and certainly in the here and now — Christians, despite claiming Jesus as their cornerstone, have acted in ways that are contrary to his teachings and, just as crucially, to his sensibilities.
What Pope Francis said in an interview a dozen years ago is even more true today. “The Church,” he said, “sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules.” Francis, who died in April, compared the church, when it’s functioning well, to a “field hospital after battle.” If a person is seriously injured, he said, “you have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.”
That same year, in a daily homily, Pope Francis warned of the dangers of following a “moralistic” ideology. If a Christian becomes a “disciple of ideology,” he said, “he has lost the faith.” The knowledge of Jesus is “transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge.”
That is the very opposite of what Paul meant when he wrote in II Corinthians that God reconciled us “through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” In far too many cases those who most often honor Jesus with their lips are most distant from his heart. A ministry of reconciliation has given way to a ministry of retribution. That’s not true everywhere, of course. My own life has been blessed in immeasurable ways by those who lives align, even if imperfectly, with who Jesus was and what he taught. But for much of the world a “ministry of reconciliation” is the farthest thing that they associate with Christians or Christianity. Rather than healing wounds, many Christians have taken up the business of inflicting them.
In the context of the kingdom of God, there is a theological concept that has come to be known as “already but not yet.” It refers to the belief that God’s kingdom has been inaugurated by the coming of Jesus but has yet to reach its full expression. The 20th-century French theologian Oscar Cullmann, in explaining this concept, analogized to D-Day, which was the decisive victory in World War II, and VE-Day, which was the final victory in the war. After D-Day the outcome was set, but the conflict was not yet over.
God’s kingdom, then, is both present and future. God has entered into the world but doesn’t yet rule it. Right now there is, at best, a partial reign. Certain things have been done while other things have been left undone.
It’s not entirely clear, at least to me, why God would wait to realize his rule in full, why healing and restoration would happen in increments, even as I accept that it is not for me to know. What we do know is that in a parable, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed. The point he was making is that out of something small and seemingly insignificant something vast, transformative and strong enough to provide refuge can come. Whether the mustard seed grows into the largest of all garden plants, as the parable says, rests in part on whether “kingdom values” occupy a central place in the lives of those who claim to be disciples of Jesus.
It’s entirely reasonable for those outside the Christian faith to ask those within it what the upside is. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it was only because Jesus became like us that we can become like him. But becoming like him — or at least trying to become like him — comes at a cost. Self-sacrifice isn’t easy. Worldly power is alluring. Loving your enemy is hard. So is taking up one’s cross daily. Even for those of us who feel like we go through the motions more than we like to admit, there are easier paths to take.
David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher, said in an interview that “the Christian religion as a dogmatic and institutional reality is to me secondary and marginal to my faith.” Mr. Hart described himself as a thoroughly secular man, with no natural aptitude for religious sentiment. So why does he persist in believing?
Because, Mr. Hart says: “The figure of Christ is infinitely compelling. You cannot fit him easily into the normal chronicles of human history as much as you try. There really is an uncanny difference that comes about through his presence in history that exceeds normal historical events.” Mr. Hart says he finds the resurrection entirely convincing, which explains “the perdurance of a religion that should have dissolved after the death of its founder had it followed the pattern of all other such messianic movements.”
“I think that it’s correct to point to Jesus of Nazareth and say this really is the presence of God in time,” Mr. Hart said.
If that is true, giving one’s love and allegiance to the son of a carpenter born in manger might make some sense after all.
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”.
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