Kingdom Decoded

There seem to be two Jesuses in the gospels. The first is the unconditional-love-Jesus who accepts and sits with anyone who will sit with him, regardless of moral or social standing. This is the Jesus who says: Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Then there’s another Jesus, a turn-or-burn-Jesus who sets performance criteria between us and God’s love. He’s the one saying: Unless your righteousness exceeds that of your religious lawyers, there is no way you will enter the kingdom of heaven. Will the real Jesus please stand up? Is God’s love unconditionally free or a reward for acceptable behavior? Seems it can’t be both, yet the contradiction stands. And therein lies the source of our religious dissociative identity disorder, the reason it is so hard for us to shake our existential fears of condemnation. But a contradiction is only impassable within a certain context. Change the context, evaporate the contradiction. Jesus presents all his teaching within the context of the kingdom of heaven. If we misunderstand kingdom’s context, we misunderstand Jesus, and the contradiction stands. As Jesus tirelessly illustrates, the kingdom of heaven, malkhuta d’ashmaya, is not a future politically sovereign Israel, as his first followers believed, or future heaven of the afterlife, as we typically believe today. It’s the quality of life right herenow, reflecting a person’s experience of the connection of all life to God and each other. The context of a future kingdom, creates a permanent if/then contingency, as if our performance determines God’s decision to admit us. But in the herenow context of Jesus’ kingdom, everything resolves, yet both Jesuses stand. God loves and accepts unconditionally, but our “sinful” beliefs and behavior are those that create separation, not from God, but from the experience of oneness herenow, the only context in which kingdom exists. Kingdom is never closed, never withheld—always now, always available. God doesn’t admit us or not. God is eternally open. God’s presence is kingdom itself. We admit ourselves whenever we’re ready to experience it.