We’ve been looking at the way the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed was the development of perhaps the central theme of the Old Testament: There would come a time when God would act, fulfilling his promises to give the Jews the land of Israel, to defeat their enemies, and to dwell with them in the Temple — all so that they could keep the Torah and be the light to the nations they were always called to be. Israel was hoping for, and often fighting for, a regime change to improve social, political and economic conditions — things the prophets addressed in their messages.
One text that makes this particularly clear is from the prophet Daniel. It begins by relating the story of how things went wrong and how Israel became exiles in Babylon. The whole book is about what would happen, or have to happen, for things to be made right again. At one point we learn about this when Daniel, a faithful Jew, interprets a dream of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed of a statue of a man whose various parts (head, legs, feet, etc.) were made of various materials. Daniel tells the king that the different parts symbolize different empires or kingdoms that would arise after him (see Dan 2:31-45). With the advantage of 20/20 hindsight, we can see clearly that they are the Medio-Persian empire, then the Egyptians, then the Greeks, and finally the Romans.
But after that, says Daniel, would come what all the Jews were waiting for: “In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall this kingdom be left to another people. It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever; just as you saw that a stone was cut from the mountain not by hands, and that it crushed the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. The great God has informed the king what shall be hereafter. The dream is certain, and its interpretation trustworthy” (Dan 2:44-45).
After all that pagan oppression, Daniel says, would finally come Israel’s time, the revolution that the prophets had foreseen, and the establishment of God’s long-hoped-for promise. This would be, as the text says, the coming of the kingdom of God. Notice that this cannot possibly be a purely spiritual, inward or invisible kingdom, any more than Babylon or Rome were purely spiritual or invisible. It must be, in some sense at least, a historical kingdom just like these.
And this kingdom, then, was exactly what the Jews were expecting at the time of Jesus under the dominion of that fourth kingdom, the Roman empire. So, when Jesus announces that “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15), we have to take this context into consideration.
In Jesus’ day there were different parties offering different answers to what exactly this kingdom would look like, when and how it was coming, whom it would include and whom it would exclude. Daniel and the prophets had told us some basic things, but the specifics were up for debate.
Some, various historical sources tell us, imagined that God would bring in his new regime simply by his own divine power, with the help of his angels and sometimes a messianic figure descending from heaven in a sort of overwhelming apocalyptic invasion.
Others, including some of the Pharisees and those who were sometimes called “zealots” (like Simon the Zealot), imagined that the kingdom would come by more conventional means: Sharpen your swords, gather an army and fight the Romans.
Still others were like the Sadducees and others in power like the Herodians we read about in the Gospels. These were the compromisers — the status quo keepers, those comfortably in league with Rome — who wanted to keep “the kingdom” just the way it was, and themselves in charge.
Already you can probably see that this socio-political context is the background for much of the drama we read about in the Gospels. Next time, we’ll start to discuss how Jesus brought his own kingdom agenda into the fray.
Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St. Paul. He is the author of “We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” published by Ave Maria Press.
