Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (19 page)

Obviously, Jesus is not telling the leper he has just healed to buy two birds, two
lambs, a ewe, a strip of cedarwood, a spool of crimson yarn, a sprig of hyssop, a
bushel of flour, and a jar of oil and to give them all to the priest as an offering
to God. He is telling him to present himself to the priest,
having already been cleansed
. This is a direct challenge not only to the priest’s authority, but to the Temple
itself. Jesus did not only heal the leper, he purified him, making him eligible to
appear at the Temple as a true Israelite. And he did so for free, as a gift from God—without
tithe, without sacrifice—thus seizing for himself the powers granted solely to the
priesthood to deem a man worthy of entering the presence of God.

Such a blatant attack on the legitimacy of the Temple could be scorned and discounted
so long as Jesus remains ensconced in the backwoods of Galilee. But once he and his
disciples leave their base in Capernaum and begin slowly making their way to Jerusalem,
healing the sick and casting out demons along the way, Jesus’s collision with the
priestly authorities, and the Roman Empire that supports them, becomes inevitable.
Soon, the authorities in Jerusalem will no longer be able to ignore this itinerant
exorcist and
miracle worker. The closer he draws to the Holy City, the more urgent the need to
silence him will become. For it is not just Jesus’s miraculous actions that they fear;
it is the simple yet incredibly dangerous message conveyed through them: the Kingdom
of God is at hand.

May Your Kingdom Come

“To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God?” Jesus asked. It is like a mighty king
who, having prepared a grand wedding banquet for his son, sends forth his servants
to the four corners of the kingdom to invite his honored guests to the joyous occasion.

“Tell my guests I have readied the banquet,” the king instructs his servants. “The
oxen and cattle have been fattened and butchered. Everything is prepared. Come to
the wedding festivities.”

The servants go out to spread the king’s tidings. Yet one by one the honored guests
decline the invitation. “I have recently purchased a piece of land,” one says. “I
must tend to it. Please accept my regrets.”

“I have bought five yoke of oxen and I must test them out,” says another. “Please
accept my regrets.”

“I myself just got married,” says a third. “I cannot come.”

When the servants return, they inform the king that none of his guests have accepted
the invitation, that some of those invited not only refused to attend the celebration,
they seized the king’s servants, mistreated them, even killed them.

In a rage the king orders the servants to search the streets and
back alleys of the kingdom, to gather everyone they can find—young and old, poor and
weak, the lame, the crippled, the blind, the outcast—and to bring them all to the
banquet.

The servants do so, and the feast commences. But in the midst of the celebrations
the king notices a guest who was not invited; he is not wearing the wedding clothes.

“How did you get in here?” the king asks the stranger.

The man has no answer.

“Tie him hand and foot!” the king commands. “Throw him out into the darkness, where
there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many will be invited, but few are
chosen.”

As for those guests who refused to come to the wedding, the ones who seized and killed
his servants—the king unleashes his army to drive them out of their homes, to slaughter
them like sheep, and burn their cities to the ground.

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 22:1–4 | Luke 14:16–24).

Of this there can be no doubt: the central theme and unifying message of Jesus’s brief
three-year ministry was the promise of the Kingdom of God. Practically everything
Jesus said or did in the gospels served the function of publicly proclaiming the Kingdom’s
coming. It was the very first thing he preached about after separating from John the
Baptist: “Repent, the Kingdom of God is near” (Mark 1:15). It was the core of the
Lord’s prayer, which John taught to Jesus and Jesus in turn taught to his disciples:
“Our Father, who is in heaven, holy is your name. May your Kingdom come …” (Matthew
6:9–13 | Luke 11:1–2). It was what Jesus’s followers were told to strive for above
all else—“Seek first the Kingdom of God, and God’s justice, then all these things
shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33 | Luke 12:31)—for only by forsaking everything
and everyone for the Kingdom of God would they have any hope of entering it (Matthew
10:37–39 | Luke 14:25–27).

Jesus spoke so often, and so abstractly, about the Kingdom of God that it is difficult
to know whether he himself had a unified
conception of it. The phrase, along with its Matthaean equivalent “Kingdom of Heaven,”
hardly appears in the New Testament outside of the gospels. Although numerous passages
in the Hebrew Scriptures describe God as king and sole sovereign, the exact phrase
“Kingdom of God” appears only in the apocryphal text
The Wisdom of Solomon
(10:10), in which God’s kingdom is envisioned as physically situated in heaven, the
place where God’s throne sits, where the angelic court sees to his every demand, and
where his will is done always and without fail.

Yet the Kingdom of God in Jesus’s teachings is not a celestial kingdom existing on
a cosmic plane. Those who claim otherwise often point to a single unreliable passage
in the gospel of John in which Jesus allegedly tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of
this world” (John 18:36). Not only is this the sole passage in the gospels where Jesus
makes such a claim, it is an imprecise translation of the original Greek. The phrase
ouk estin ek tou kosmou
is perhaps better translated as “not part of this order/system [of government].”
Even if one accepts the historicity of the passage (and very few scholars do), Jesus
was not claiming that the Kingdom of God is unearthly; he was saying it is unlike
any kingdom or government on earth.

Neither did Jesus present the Kingdom of God as some distant future kingdom to be
established at the end of time. When Jesus said, “the Kingdom of God has drawn near”
(Mark 1:15) or “the Kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:21), he was pointing
to God’s saving action in his present age, at his present time. True, Jesus spoke
of wars and uprisings, earthquakes and famine, false messiahs and prophets who would
presage the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth (Mark 13:5–37). But far from
auguring some future apocalypse, Jesus’s words were in reality a perfectly apt description
of the era in which he lived: an era of wars, famines, and false messiahs. In fact,
Jesus seemed to expect the Kingdom of God to be established at any moment: “I tell
you, there are those here who will not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom
of God come with power” (Mark 9:1).

If the Kingdom of God is neither purely celestial nor wholly eschatological, then
what Jesus was proposing must have been a physical and present kingdom: a
real
kingdom, with an
actual
king that was about to be established on earth. That is certainly how the Jews would
have understood it. Jesus’s particular conception of the Kingdom of God may have been
distinctive and somewhat unique, but its connotations would not have been unfamiliar
to his audience. Jesus was merely reiterating what the zealots had been preaching
for years. Simply put, the Kingdom of God was shorthand for the idea of God as the
sole sovereign, the one and only king, not just over Israel, but over all the world.
“Everything in heaven and earth belongs to you,” the Bible states of God. “Yours is
the kingdom … You rule over everything” (1 Chronicles 29:11–12; see also Numbers 23:21;
Deuteronomy 33:5). In fact, the concept of the sole sovereignty of God lay behind
the message of all the great prophets of old. Elijah, Elisha, Micah, Amos, Isaiah,
Jeremiah—these men vowed that God would deliver the Jews from bondage and liberate
Israel from foreign rule if only they refused to serve any earthly master or bow to
any king save the one and only king of the universe. That same belief formed the foundation
of nearly every Jewish resistance movement, from the Maccabees who threw off the yoke
of Seleucid rule in 164
B.C.E
., after the mad Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes demanded that the Jews worship him
like a god, to the radicals and revolutionaries who resisted the Roman occupation—the
bandits, the Sicarii, the zealots, and the martyrs at Masada—all the way to the last
of the great failed messiahs, Simon son of Kochba, whose rebellion in 132
C.E
. invoked the exact phrase “Kingdom of God” as a call for freedom from foreign rule.

Jesus’s view of the sole sovereignty of God was not all that different from the view
of the prophets, bandits, zealots, and messiahs who came before and after him, as
evidenced by his answer to the question about paying tribute to Caesar. Actually,
his view of God’s reign was not so different from that of his master, John the Baptist,
from whom he likely picked up the phrase “Kingdom of God.” What made Jesus’s interpretation
of the Kingdom of God different from John’s, however, was his agreement with the zealots
that God’s reign required not just an internal transformation toward justice and righteousness,
but a complete reversal of the present political, religious, and economic system.
“Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who
are hungry, for you shall be fed. Blessed are you who mourn, for you shall soon be
laughing” (Luke 6:20–21).

These abiding words of the Beatitudes are, more than anything else, a promise of impending
deliverance from subservience and foreign rule. They predict a radically new world
order wherein the meek inherit the earth, the sick are healed, the weak become strong,
the hungry are fed, and the poor are made rich. In the Kingdom of God, wealth will
be redistributed and debts canceled. “The first shall be last and the last shall be
first” (Matthew 5:3–12 | Luke 6:20–24).

But that also means that when the Kingdom of God is established on earth, the rich
will be made poor, the strong will become weak, and the powerful will be displaced
by the powerless. “How hard it will be for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God!”
(Mark 10:23). The Kingdom of God is not some utopian fantasy wherein God vindicates
the poor and the dispossessed. It is a chilling new reality in which God’s wrath rains
down upon the rich, the strong, and the powerful. “Woe to you who are rich, for you
have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger. Woe
to you laughing now, for soon you will mourn” (Luke 6:24–25).

The implications of Jesus’s words are clear: The Kingdom of God is about to be established
on earth; God is on the verge of restoring Israel to glory. But God’s restoration
cannot happen without the destruction of the present order. God’s rule cannot be established
without the annihilation of the present leaders. Saying “the Kingdom of God is at
hand,” therefore, is akin to saying the
end of the Roman Empire is at hand. It means God is going to replace Caesar as ruler
of the land. The Temple priests, the wealthy Jewish aristocracy, the Herodian elite,
and the heathen usurper in distant Rome—all of these were about to feel the wrath
of God.

The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution, plain and simple. And what revolution,
especially one fought against an empire whose armies had ravaged the land set aside
by God for his chosen people, could be free of violence and bloodshed? If the Kingdom
of God is not an ethereal fantasy, how else could it be established upon a land occupied
by a massive imperial presence except through the use of force? The prophets, bandits,
zealots, and messiahs of Jesus’s time all knew this, which is why they did not hesitate
to employ violence in trying to establish God’s rule on earth. The question is, did
Jesus feel the same? Did he agree with his fellow messiahs Hezekiah the bandit chief,
Judas the Galilean, Menahem, Simon son of Giora, Simon son of Kochba, and the rest,
that violence was necessary to bring about the rule of God on earth? Did he follow
the zealot doctrine that the land had to be forcibly cleansed of all foreign elements
just as God had demanded in the scriptures?

There may be no more important question than this for those trying to pry the historical
Jesus away from the Christian Christ. The common depiction of Jesus as an inveterate
peacemaker who “loved his enemies” and “turned the other cheek” has been built mostly
on his portrayal as an apolitical preacher with no interest in or, for that matter,
knowledge of the politically turbulent world in which he lived. That picture of Jesus
has already been shown to be a complete fabrication. The Jesus of history had a far
more complex attitude toward violence. There is no evidence that Jesus himself openly
advocated violent actions. But he was certainly no pacifist. “Do not think that I
have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword”
(Matthew 10:34 | Luke 12:51).