Fergus McGinley January 2024

THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS AMONG YOU
No, not “within you”. That’s the title of the famous philosophical work by Tolstoy, which I haven’t read (try Resurrection, the gripping story of the aristocrat Nekhlyudov who follows his former servant Katyusha to prison in Siberia in remorse for his terrible exploitation of her years before – a book I have read – for a fictional account of Tolstoy’s wonderful philosophy).
It’s also the King James translation of Luke 17:21: “ ….. neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” The Greek word in question, ἐντὸς, or entos, is sometimes translated as, yes, “within”, but in other translations it becomes “among” or “in the midst of”, for example the NIV: “…. the kingdom of God is in your midst.” And Jesus is speaking on this occasion to the Pharisees, so the “you” in question is probably plural.
I thank Dean Drayton for pointing out this critical distinction (Apocalyptic Good News, 2019, page _). Nowhere else in the Gospels, among Jesus’ many prognostications on the kingdom, do we get the impression (if misleading) that the kingdom of God is inside us, that it is an interior state of mind or soul, an individual, personal, private matter. The word itself speaks decisively on the subject: why use “kingdom”, which has an obvious and unambiguous reference to an external state of inter-human relationships, a polity, a form of social organization, when you actually mean an interior state of mind or soul?!
OK, so the kingdom of God is not within you or me but among us – so what? Well, the coming of the kingdom of God (or Heaven), its inauguration by Jesus’ incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension, is the central content of all Jesus’ teaching – it’s what the Good News is good news of! So we’d better get it right what it is: there’s a world of difference between an interior psychological state and a state of human relationships in the world at large. The twain might meet, but they’re not the same thing.
Jesus was speaking now more than 2000 years ago, so here we are now, more than 2000 years later (by my calculation) well and truly in the kingdom of God among us – the kingdom, we’re standing in it! It’s such a cliché – “the kingdom of God is inside me”, “Jesus is in my heart”, “my faith is my personal, private business” and their corollaries – but it is critically false, and critically conceals the real nature of the kingdom, the real nature of the world around us now, 2000 year later.
The twain do meet, of course. When we finally open ourselves up, often only after years of futile self-effort, to the God outside of us, to the healing, transforming Spirit, there is certainly a change in our inner state, in our beliefs, our feelings, in the way we see the world. But this change – the Greek word is metanoia, a 180° turn around in our mindset – immediately and necessarily plays itself out in our behaviour, our actions, our relationships in the world. It is anything but a merely personal, private matter.
Inside of us there is only flesh, blood, bones and grey matter, including a whole lot of selfish, self-preservation instincts carried over from our evolutionary past. We see the consequences of this our natural-born interior state in all the troubles of our world, everything from kids not playing nicely together in the playground to the Russians invading Ukraine and climate change. So thank God the kingdom of God is not within us!
We are never solo, private, personal individuals, self-complete inside our own little head-kingdoms. This is not just the story of the entire evolution of life on earth – all organic life is clearly one – it’s the story of little baby you and me born into the instant community of mum and dad. Our thoughts, our feelings, our entire psychic state is relational. So the kingdom of God is about how you and me, ultimately all human beings and the whole creation to boot, relate to each other, the objective state of the world, now and to come, Amen.