If your one of those people that have been trying understand Jesus and what he was all about, and you keep finding as you navigate the gospels in the midst of the blind, the lame, the sick, the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, the homeless and the broken...you find Jesus talking about, and revealing the Kingdom of God. It's unavoidable...Jesus is consumed by it.
Scot McKnight in his recent book, ONE.LIFE ; Jesus Calls We Follow he says this...
The Best word for Jesus' dream is that he wanted it to go viral. Jesus launched his Kingdom Dream at a wedding with friends and family. He didn't march into Jerusalem on a white horse or sail off to Rome to topple the powers that be. Instead, he set up shop at an ordinary house at an ordinary event, and he launched the kingdom dream with ordinary people.
When Jesus launched his justice vision, he summoned the sick and the blind and the wounded and oppressed. When he called his followers to root everything they do in love, he was speaking to the ordinary relationships of ordinary life. When he launched his "community" vision, he chose to so at ordinary tables in ordinary homes. When he showed what it was like to live in and pursue peace, Jesus didn't eneter into the halls of laws in Jerusalem or reshape the law books in Rome...no, he just began living that way and asked ordinary people to join him.
Ever since Jesus, though, the church has been tempted by another way: the way of power, the way of might, the way of violence, the way of coercion. There is another tempteation as well, which is to bottle or package Jesus' kingdom dream into an institutional organization that can perpetuate his kingdom vision. But those ways don't work. The kingdom dream will not be realized by power and might and violence and coercion. That way ruins the dream. And the kingdom can't be contained in an institution or reduced to an organization.
No, Jesus wanted his kingdom to go viral. He wanted you and me and ordinary folks like us to launch the kingdom dream in our lives. One day at a time. In ordinary ways. With ordinary people.
Why do you think we are so tempted to capture the vision of Jesus in an institution, as if it can be contained? Why do you think we are tempted so easily to coercion and force?
There is part of me that wants to call Prof. Scot McKnight's ONE.LIFE a manifesto for christian living, but that sort of sounds to in your face...I see this as much more humble. Scot McKnight writes out of a depth of experience, as a follower, a pastor, a teacher, and writer...its not a arm chair quarterback that has never been in the game.
The start of every chapter opens with an interlude where he re-boots the readers hard drive in order to synch it with the Kingdom imagination, and dream of Jesus. He encourages the reader to climb out of the rut of mere religion...to where you catually live in the reality of the Kingdom. What does it look like to follow Jesus? Find out what it means to embrace the vision of God's Kingdom in way that not only awakens your finest dreams...but changes the neighborhood, and world around you.
What I liked most about this book is it's simplicity...so many theologians, and academics tend to write at a level even Jesus couldn't understand. But Scot writes a level everyone can understand, and you sense his passion throughout the book. The book is 15 chapters in which he weaves the vision of Jesus' Kingdom into very aspect of your life, every nook and cranny.
In the end you discover what Jesus was so passionate about, a dream filled with such incredible redemptive imagination in which new creation is a reality...it is as Jesus prayed, " Your Kingdom come on earth, as in heaven." The reality is. if we dare dream, if we dare imagine...and if we dared live. It can happen now!
He ( Jesus ) isn't asking you to commit to a system or an idea or an ideal. He isn't asking you to throw yourself into a religion or a logical system. First and foremost, and without this the whole thing crumbles into a deconstructed myth, he wants you to commit yourself unreservedly to him.
if you give yourself to Jesus, he transforms your talents and your dreams and your abilities and yor mind and your job and your grades and the realtionships to the ones you love and your money and he converts them into kingdom explorations and kingdom challenges. When you give your life to Jesus, your life becomes kingdom life. But the kingdom life only happens when you give yourself to Jesus, and that means also his kingdom dream and to those who are in the kingdom dream already. (p.118-119 )
Christianity that saves my soul, Christianity that makes my inner filament glow, and Christianity that is personal spirituality is not the full kingdom Jesus announced. Christianity that is only about me and for me and concerns me – and in which I spend my time assessing how I am growing in my personal relationship with God – lacks central society-focus of Jesus. That form of Christianity is not kingdom (Scot McKnight, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow p. 34).
Scot McKnight blogs here...at Jesus Creed.
