I’ll make this confession here: I follow Jesus of Nazareth. If you don’t follow him I hope this first season of the Counter Culture will pull back the curtain for you on how Jesus thought and taught.
If you do follow him, then hopefully this will sound familiar:
Jesus was an obscure Jewish rabbi who lived about 2000 years ago. He taught a radically different way of life and recruited a dozen working class fishermen, revolutionaries, and social outcasts to follow him. He claimed he could forgive sins because he was the Messiah from God who came to dwell among humans as a human. A lot of people didn’t like that – especially people in positions of power – so he was murdered for it. But then He came back to life, and appeared to a whole bunch of witnesses. It sounds crazy, but it actually happened. It is as historical as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or Buddha – perhaps more so. There’s more literary and historical evidence that Jesus lived and did what he did than there is for Julius Ceasar.1
More importantly: He’s completely changed my life. I’m a significantly different person because of his influence in my life. A huge part of his teaching was about the Kingdom of God. I don’t think we twenty-first-century Americans have a firm grasp on the definition of “Kingdom.”
The kingdoms we are familiar with are like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – a clearly defined political entity with borders and land and subjects and home to infighting and jockeying for position. By the way, this is exactly how Jesus followers acted – they were convinced that Jesus was going to bring about a new Kingdom for Israel, with land, titles, a military. That he was going to kick the Romans out of Jerusalem. Two of them, James and John, were so convinced that the Kingdom Jesus was talking about would look just like they ones they were used to they went behind the other friends’ backs to get Jesus to give them positions of power in the Kingdom of God.
That stuff is what we’ll call the Kingdom of Men. Paul called it the “elemental things of this world” or, maybe better put: How things work in this broken world.
The Kingdom of God that Jesus is talks about operates completely differently from other kingdoms. Jesus told tons of stories to his guys about how his Kingdom operated, but they just didn’t get it. It’s not bound by national borders. It rejects infighting and political maneuvering. Because in the Kingdom of God, the way up is down. In order to gain power and authority and influence in the Kingdom of God is by serving, by going as low as you can possibly go, and giving everything you have away. In the Kingdom of God if you want to have influence, power, and authority: the way up is down.
In fact, the whole power structure thing is inverted.
In the elemental things of this world, it works like this:
Power comes from position.
With position comes authority.
With authority comes influence.
With influence comes relationships. (maybe… it’s awfully lonely at the top)
In the Kingdom of God, it works like this:
Power comes from relationship.
With relationship comes influence.
With influence comes authority.
With authority comes position. (maybe… who needs a position anyway?)
Which one fits your experience of being a human? Which one speaks to your soul?
I think a defining aspect of humanity is relationships. We don’t do well on our own. We will do almost anything to either fill the void of friendship or numb it so we don’t feel the pain. But we thrive when we have a community of people around us. What’s so amazing about the Kingdom of God is anyone can live this way – young, old, male, female, rich, poor. Especially the poor. This way of living has the most relevance for the poor, disenfranchised, and oppressed.
So… with that in mind… which of these power structures looks right side up?
- Renowned Oxford Classical historian Michael Grant, writes, “If we apply the same criteria that we would apply to other ancient literary sources, the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty.” And Paul Meier writes, “If all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according to the canons of historical research, to conclude that [Jesus’ tomb] was actually empty… And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology that would disprove this statement.” ↩