in his own life and program of miraculous healings, and best grasped through metaphors of secrecy, simplicity and subversion. The kingdom, Jesus said, is not like a conquering army but like a mustard seed that inexorably consumes the garden (Luke 13:19). It is like the yeast or leaven that invisibly causes bread to rise (Matt 13:38). It is like a pearl of great price hidden in a field so that only the passionate seeker will find it (Matt 13:46).
In first-century Palestine, anyone talking about “the kingdom” was, by this fact alone, treading on perilous political ground. Caesar Augustus had already staked out Rome’s exclusive claim to kingdom vocabulary, and the cult of the emperor brooked no rivals. Caesar was, according to one public inscription, “the beginning of all things”; “god manifest”; the “savior” of the world who “has fulfilled all the hopes of earlier times”; the one whose birthday “has been for the whole world the beginning of the good news (euangelion).”27 We should not be surprised, then, that Jesus encoded his kingdom politics in parables, metaphors, riddles, and cryptic sayings that did not explicitly defy Roman rule. But for those who had ears to hear, mustard seeds and pearls of great price were the rhetoric of a revolution. Jesus—the true Savior of the world—was calling for his followers to embody YHWH’s actual kingdom of compassion and justice as over and against Lord Caesar’s blasphemous parody. He was telling them to incarnate God’s reign in history by building a new kind of community—a countercultural “polis on a hill” (Matt 5:14)—that would stand in nonviolent but subversive opposition to all those forces responsible for grinding down the poor, the weak, the ritually unclean and sinners of every kind.
The fact that Jesus calls for his followers to incarnate or embody God’s kingdom as a social reality in the present does not contradict but defines and animates Christian hope in the Parousia as a future event in space-time. According to John Dominic Crossan, Jesus proclaimed a sapiential as opposed to apocalyptic eschatology. Sapientia is the Latin word for “wisdom,” and according to Crossan Jesus offered human beings “the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and dominion are evidently present . . . rather than a hope of life for the future” (my emphasis).28 But the Jesus of the New Testament—the only Jesus we know29—offers his disciples both a Way of living that manifests God’s kingdom in the midst of the present reality and a hope for the future that invests this Way with its power and meaning. It is precisely because of their confidence in the Parousia that believers are free to live out the dangerous and demanding politics of the Gospel. Conversely, it is only the social witness of believers that manifests Jesus’s life and lordship over history to a watching world. Absent such a witness, Martin Luther King Jr. saw, there can be no authentic Advent hope. “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”30
“The Favorable Year of the Lord”: Economic Justice
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’s first action at the start of his public ministry is to enter the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth and read from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor . . . to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18–19). Only real debt-cancellation would have come as real good news for real poor people, Ched Meyers points out.31 When Jesus claims the “favorable year of the Lord” as central to his vocation he is therefore not assuming a “spiritual” as opposed to a political messianic role. He is, rather, directly alluding to a powerful vision of social justice contained in the Law of Moses that had been systematically suppressed and evaded by Israel’s ruling elites for hundred of years, an economic ethic that would have come as welcome news indeed to the impoverished and exploited peasant masses of Galilee and Judea.
The “favorable year of the Lord” in Luke-Isaiah, Andre Trocmé and John Yoder show, is the Sabbath year or year of Jubilee commanded by God in the Hebrew Bible (particularly in Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15).32 Every seventh year, according to the Covenant, Israel was to enact a program of radical debt forgiveness, and in the fiftieth year land redistribution to benefit the poor. Among God’s people, there was to be a systematic leveling of wealth on a regular basis and dismantling of what we would today describe as oppressive financial and banking institutions designed to maximize profits for creditors. Jesus does not attempt to instate these Jubilee commandments in a rigid or programmatic way, but he does reclaim the basic principles, metaphors and imagery of the Sabbath Jubilee for his followers.33 He has more to say in the Gospels about issues of wealth and poverty than any other topic—and his message remains as challenging for those of us who live in affluent countries today as it was for the wealthy Herodians and Sadducees in first-century Palestine.
Against the assumptions of laissez-faire capitalism—which posits a world of unlimited human needs, individualism, and competitive rivalry for scarce resources—Jesus declares that we are stewards rather than owners of property, that God’s creation is abundant and our earthly needs limited, and that God’s liberation of Israel from slavery is normative for how we should treat the poor among us. His warnings against capital accumulation and “Lord Mammon” are unrelentingly severe (Matt 6:16–24; Mark 10:23–25). He tells his followers to live lives of dangerous generosity, giving and expecting nothing in return (Luke 6:30). He tells them to forgive each other’s debts (Matt 6:12), to not worry about their own material needs but to live out a lifestyle of trust and simplicity (6:25–34; 10:9–10). And he instructs them to actively pursue justice (23:23). Material care for the poor, the oppressed and the hungry, Jesus declares, is the primary mark of discipleship—and the only question at the final judgment (25:31–40).
Jesus’s radical economic teachings were epitomized among his early followers in the practice of “breaking bread,” which was not originally merely a rite of sacral liturgy or mystical symbolism but an actual meal embodying Jesus’s ethic of sharing in ordinary day-to-day existence.34 When the Holy Spirit is poured out at Pentecost in the book of Acts, the practical result is that believers voluntarily redistribute their property. “And all those who believed were together, and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need . . . breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart” (Acts 2:44–46). The Apostle Paul also emphasizes the socio-political nature of the Lord’s meal, delivering a blistering rebuke to those upper-class Corinthians who excluded poor believers from their table fellowship and sated their own stomachs while other members of the community went hungry (1 Cor 11:18–22).
“You Are All One in Christ”: Equality in the Body of Believers
We can begin to see, then, why Jesus’s message had such an electrifying effect on the impoverished and socially marginalized peasants of first-century Palestine who flocked to hear him speak—and why he so frightened and angered those guardians of public “order” for whom divisions of wealth and class were a useful rather than an oppressive reality. But Jesus challenged not only structures of economic injustice and inequality in first-century Palestine. He challenged patterns of social inequality, hierarchy and domination of every kind. In his treatment of women, of children, of Romans, of the ritually unclean and sinners of every stripe, Jesus repeatedly and provocatively overturned deeply ingrained cultural and religious assumptions about who was “first” and “last,” “above” and “below” in the eyes of God.
There is no place in God’s in-breaking kingdom, it turns out, for “great men” or “rulers” who “lord it over” others through the exercise of political or religious authority. Such, Jesus tells his disciples, is the way of the “Gentiles,” i.e., the pagan unbelievers and Romans occupiers. But among his followers, Jesus declares, “whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave” (Matt 20:25–28; Mark 10:43). Jesus goes so far as to command his followers to avoid using honorific titles of any kind, including the title of “leader.”
