The Banquet of the Kingdom of God

    The other day, the official Gospel reading of the Church dealt with a parable of Jesus about the “kingdom of God.”  Jesus often spoke of that kingdom (often as a banquet!); in fact it is absolutely central to his thinking and the self-perception of his own mission. (Sometimes the phrase used is “kingdom of heaven.”)

   First thing to say is that what we have are stories provided to us by people from the earliest Christian communities of the first century. They purport to provide us with the message of Jesus. It is a message, however, that is already interpreted for the benefit of those communities at a particular time in history when they faced very particular challenges. Obviously they are intended to reflect the sayings of Jesus, his own stories. However, it is much more difficult to trace back from the Gospel text the exact words of Jesus as spoken in a very different context several decades earlier. (We often forget that major distinction.)
    Secondly, we have to get beyond the image of “kingdom.” It too comes from a very particular time in history where the major systems of governance were patriarchal and authoritarian - particularly in the Middle East where Jesus and the first communities lived. By Jesus time, the idea of king had already taken on mythical proportions. However, underlying that word is the notion of a world-order with a “governing principle” that holds it in place. In face of the despotic rulers of the time, Jesus proposed another model, very different.
    Thirdly, we have too often, much too often, transposed the “kingdom of God” into something that we encounter only in the after-life, only once we have “died and gone to heaven.”  This was hardly the case for Jesus. Even though, before Pilate, he said that his reign was not of this world, he did not in any way make that transposition.
    If you read the texts carefully, and if you try to make the stories of the “kingdom” coherent with the entirety of Jesus life and sayings, it becomes clear that the “kingdom of God” (a just world order we might say today -- one with solidarity and compassion at its centre) is present in the here and now. It is in the here and now that we discover this “kingdom of God” dimension of reality and made a fundamental choice for it. Only in the here and now can we encounter it because we live only in the here and now. The here and now is all we have, all we will ever have and it is a banquet, a fullness, an abundance, a magnificent vista.
    Think about it.