CHAPTER 13
The Kingdom of God in the Life of the World
Lesslie Newbigin
Lesslie Newbigin was an internationally esteemed British theologian, missionary, pastor, apologist, and ecumenical statesman. After serving years as a village evangelist in India and then as a bishop of the Church of South India, he returned to England to serve as a professor and pastor. Among his many books are The Open Secret: an Introduction to the Theology of Mission, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, and The Gospel in a pluralist Society.
From Signs amid the rubble: The purposes of God in human history, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Used by permission.
When the risen Jesus said to the apostles, “As the Father sent Me, so I send you,” and showed them His hands and His side, He was identifying the mission upon which He sent them with the way of the cross (John 20:19–23). And that way was—in one aspect—the way of total protest against the established powers.
To announce the imminence of the kingdom, to announce that God’s reign of justice is about to break into the world, is necessarily to be on a collision course with the presently reigning powers. But this breaking in of God’s reign does not take the form of a successful political movement to remove the reigning powers and replace them with rulers who will faithfully execute God’s justice. It takes the form of a shameful and humiliating defeat, which, however, in the event of the resurrection is interpreted to chosen witnesses as the decisive victory of God’s kingdom. He reigns from the tree. So, as the apostle says, the principalities and powers have been unmasked, and their pretensions to wisdom shown to be false; they have been disarmed, but they have not been destroyed. They still exist and still have a function, but one which is authorized and therefore limited by the justice of God manifested in Jesus.
To accept this sending—this mission defined by the scars of the passion—must mean that the missionary church will continue that protest against or unmasking of the hypocrisy, cruelty, and greed that infects the exercise of all political power. Yet, at the same time, the missionary church will accept the fact that the visible end of that road is a cross. Only beyond the cross, beyond all earthly programs, beyond death, will that victory of the justice of God be made manifest.
Unless the radical otherworldliness of the gospel message is acknowledged, the real role of the church in politics will be hopelessly compromised. Instead of a movement of radical protest, suffering, and hope, there will merely be a naive and ineffectual utopianism. The reign of God, which is the subject of the gospel message, is not the end product of political development; every attempt to confuse the two results in disappointment and disillusionment.
One can make the point very simply (perhaps crudely) by considering the Beatitudes. Why are those who are poor, oppressed, persecuted, hungry, and meek called happy? Simply because it is they who, in the new age, will be rich, free, and joyful. Most of them will still be poor and hungry, oppressed and tearful for all their earthly lives. They are happy because something infinitely good is promised to them in the new world. This is an unpopular doctrine—”pie in the sky when you die.” However, the point is that this otherworldliness is what the teaching of Jesus clearly seems to imply.
What, then, is its relation to the mission of the church in the world? Not quietism. Not passive submission to the rule of injustice and greed and hypocrisy. The earthly ministry of Jesus is the sufficient refutation of such a conclusion. Or it ought to be—for it must be confessed that the church has often preached quietism, in the times when churchmen were in the seats of power.
Jesus, according to the Apostle John, was manifested to destroy the works of the devil, not to submit to them. His whole ministry is portrayed in the Gospels as a mighty onslaught on the works of the devil—whether these took the form of sickness and demon possession among the people, or of hypocrisy, cruelty, and hardheartedness among the rulers. And His whole ministry is interpreted as the breaking in of the reign of God into the life of the world, to release those whom Satan has bound.
To quote the title of a famous book, His was “the faith that rebels.” No sick person brought to Jesus was ever told to accept his sickness as God’s will. Jesus was always moved to act—moved, it seems, both by pity and by anger, because Satan had so grievously oppressed God’s children. Right to the very end, His hand is stretched out to heal. Even on the cross, He speaks the word that brings release to a dying murderer. And yet, as the mocking spectator said, He who saved others could not, or did not, save Himself. At the end—but only at the end—there is a cry of submission: “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”
The ultimate sign of the kingdom in the life of this world is the cross
The coming of the kingdom lies in His Father’s hands, on the other side of death and defeat. The earthly ministry of Jesus is not the launching of a movement that will gradually transform the world into the kingdom of God. It is, rather, a showing forth, within the confines of the present age, of the reality which constitutes the age to come—the reality of God’s reign.
And so when the risen Jesus says to His disciples, “As the Father sent Me, so I send you,” and shows them His hands and His side, He is commissioning them to continue what He came to do: to embody and to announce, within the limits of the present age, subject as it is to sin and death, the reality of the new age, of God’s reign of justice and mercy.
With that commissioning goes also the empowering of the Holy Spirit—so that, by the same Spirit whose anointing enabled Jesus to do works of healing and deliverance, the church could likewise be empowered. But the outcome will not be a successful program for the progressive transformation of this present world into the new world.
“He showed them His hands and His side.” The breaking into history of the kingly power of God will indeed create happenings which challenge the powers that oppress and dehumanize, which unmask the pretensions of principalities and powers. Yet the ultimate sign of the kingdom in the life of this world is the cross—the cross of Him who in the resurrection is manifested as Lord over all powers, even the power of death. 