The Present Realm of Death

We can now examine one of the most difficult sayings of the Gospels, presented in somewhat different forms:

"The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it" (Luke 16:16, KJV),

also,

"And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.  For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John" (Matthew 11:12-13).

And we must consider the ensuing verse from Matthew:

"And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come" (11:14).

This "difficult" teaching of Jesus is only difficult if one is intent on seeing the pattern of The Christian Life displayed and explained throughout his ministry.  How can every man press into the kingdom of God, and--though surely the kingdom can suffer violence--how can "the violent take it by force"?  Are not only those who are saved in this life the ones who are given "eternal life" in the kingdom?  How can this be squared with "every man presseth into it?"  And how can the salvation of the kingdom be squared with "the violent take it by force"?

Again, these sayings of Jesus are difficult only if we understand them as ostensibly describing life.  However, the entire thrust of Jesus' ministry presumes that it is too late for humanity to be striving for life.  Jesus' ministry is about us preparing for death.

We prepare for death by earnestly grasping the undeniable realities of our existence, understood chiefly in terms of our moral responsibilities.  We are supposed to do good, and to own up to our not doing good.  No religion and no ministry are necessary for us to realize such things.

However, what we fail to realize, because we are entranced by our experienceable surroundings, is the essential futility of trying to construct experiences--to make lives for ourselves--as though maintenance, growth, and flourishing of our individual or group lives can bespeak a wholesome development of our moral situations.  This is all wrong, and its futility is demonstrated by the repeated pattern of religious enlightenment throughout human experience.

Throughout many cultures, it is routinely part of life to believe that one's religion defines what is right and wrong.  However, what religious figures--at least those of the "great religions" of the world--do is to bring people into recognition of what they already know is right and wrong.  This is the inheritance of Adam and Eve.  The vital contribution of religion is to impress on the believer the scale and timing of the believer's relationship to the ultimate--the believer's relationship to existence writ large and to the timeless ramifications of behavior within that scheme of existence.  This is the legacy of the Garden.

And this is the legacy that Jesus bequeaths to us.  The kingdom of God is a scheme of understanding and belief--real, presumably, in the conceptions of God but scarcely ours to pronounce upon--that relates to us the necessity of subsuming ourselves to the ultimate.  We are citizens of the kingdom when we reckon that our lives mean nothing, even our lives that we might identify with families or nations mean nothing, and that the only "life" is identification with the totality of God's realm.  To truly live is to be spread so thin that our individual lives are unrecognizable.

To truly live is to embrace what the world will call death.  Of course, we will not obtain such self-abnegation on this plane, and the business of people being only more or less good will persist, no matter how emphatically the Gospel is preached.  Add to this the fact that our failed self-abnegation is reflected not merely in moral failings in themselves, but inevitably in moral failings that bring death--more or less, fast or slow--to our fellow creatures, and we have all the necessary elements of the besieged kingdom of heaven that Jesus describes.

So the kingdom is pressed into, and does suffer violence.  The God of the kingdom is perfect, and the template of the kingdom is perfect, but the true mark of the blameless inhabitant of the kingdom would be absolute renunciation of what we call "life," and we are not about to do that.  So we cling to the trappings of our mortal lives, and we entertain endlessly our delusion--disturbed, if we are so blessed, by tremors of conscience--that we can build good, religious lives in the service of the One who demands that we surrender our lives.

And we carry on as we do even as we are surrounded by perpetual evidences that human "life" is really just an arena of death.  Human beings--to say nothing of other sentient creatures--die unnecessarily faster than we can count them, let alone name them.  Our entire conception of ordered society--insofar as we have been able to construct it--culminates in the notion of the sovereign nation, an entity defined by nothing more profound than its contention that it exists as the peer of any other earthly realm, and that it serves its citizens and the world order never more so than when it claims absolute authority within it borders, and cedes to other sovereign nations the right to conduct atrocities within their own borders.  This is the kind of thing we acclaim in the name of "life."

We also accord a measure of authority to that miniature sovereign realm of society, the family.  Embrace "life" as the goal of Jesus' followers, and you embrace a horrid fantasy that has haunted the Western World for two thousand years.  We all know what cruelties have occurred in the name of the Christian Family, yet--like nations turning a blind eye to the misdeeds of their neighbors--we turn routinely away, unwilling to face the costs that responsible behavior will exact.  Only a very few of us will devote what it takes to combat social ills, and that devotion will often cost so much as to make us admit--if we can own up to it--that this brave few effectively give up their lives.

This is the realm of death that is the world, and this is the realm of death that drives Jesus' explanations.  As I quoted above, Jesus' described the besieged kingdom as springing from the time of John the Baptist, about which Jesus said, "And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come."  This "Elijah" was promised by the Book of Malachi "before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:  And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers...." (4:6).

This hopeful promise from Malachi, if one were to wax poetic about it, might be called a "word of life."  Jesus, however, delivers the overpowering "word of death":

"And his disciples asked him, saying, Why then say the scribes that Elias must first come?  And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things.  But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed" (Matthew 17: 10-12).

Only God can truly know why, but John was sent as if he could be a messenger of life to a world of death.  Jesus, however, addressed the matter more forcefully:

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.  For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.  And a man's foes shall be they of his own household" (Matthew 10:34-36).

The kingdom of God rules not over a world of life, nor even over a world of life populated by the spiritually dead (leavened by some estimate of the presence of the "saved".)  The kingdom of God rules over a world of death.  Citizenship in the kingdom of God--even with its promise of eternal life--can only be experienced in the present realm of death.