The President of the United States, George W. Bush is in trouble. At a rate that is increasingly disturbing to the president, the American people are losing confidence in his administration. Most particularly they are reacting against his administration of the four-year-old war with Iraq. They are much more opposed to the way he has administered the war than they are opposed either to the president or to the war.

On the other hand, the war would have never come about were it not for the detestable way that Saddam Hussein, for more than two decades, administered the internal affairs of Iraq.

Governmental administrations are judged in a variety of ways: the personality of the chief governmental officer, the accomplishments of their administration, or as in the two widely different administrations above, by the manner in which they conducted their administration, the way they led or ruled.
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In the 21st Century, many of us live in nations that have no king, want no king, and are turned off by the very idea of having a supreme ruler with the power to single-handedly rule according to his own dictates. Thus, the idea of the Kingdom of God does not resonate with many of us.

When we are told that, in the Kingdom of God, we are to obey, submit, trust, and surrender our own wishes to the “will” of God, we do not hear this as tidings of “comfort and joy,” as a word of “good news.” We are not about to surrender our all, the all of our “only-one-time, only-one-chance” life, to anyone. It is our life. We find the very idea of submission repugnant.

So when Jesus comes saying, “repent and believe the good news of the Kingdom of God,” these words have little appeal to the heart or mind of 21st Century people. For most of us, there is nothing new about this; we have heard these words and the accompanying story for most of our lives. It is not new, and we see nothing good about “entering” any this or any other kingdom.
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So, what if I make a change in the language, a change that is completely consistent with the language of the New Testament. Drawing on the immediately previous blog for an understanding of “repent” and “believe,” I suggest we take Jesus to be saying: “Change the way you think about, the way you understand everything. Reorient your focus. Change your mind about life.”

“Why,” we ask, “should I give up what I believe to be true and go some other direction?” The answer: “Because God’s way of governing is near, is available. God’s way of ruling is more appealing and attractive than anything we know about. God’s way of ruling–God’s administration, (kingdom)--is good.”

And what is so good about it? For one thing, it takes most of the ways our world is run and turns them on their ear. Someone has called it the “upside-down kingdom”; others say that it is, rather, the “right side up” way of control.

Yes, governance is always about control; it is about the power to control. The Bible claims that the time is coming when Jesus Christ will be made “king of kings and lord of lords, and he shall reign forever and ever.” The time is coming when he shall be put in complete control of all things.

That–exactly that–is the good news. This Jesus, whose story and words we find in the New Testament, will have all things put under his feet. He will be made the supreme administrator and given the power to do what he wants. Why makes this a good word? How can this be good news?

Read, or reread about Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (I suggest, for reading purposes, that you change the traditional order, and read Mark, Luke, Matthew, and then John–just a suggestion). Try as you read to set aside everything you have ever heard or read about Jesus. Try–although none of us can completely do it–to read all this again as if it were the first time you had read it, as if you had never heard anything about it. Then try to imagine a world where this one, Jesus of Nazareth, was in charge of everything. Then you will know why this government, this way of administering human affairs is called, “good.”
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Part of what we are called on to “repent” of--in the 21st Century as it was in the 1st Century–is the old understandings of God’s ways, understandings passed on to us by our society, (and that includes our Christian society). This Jesus Way is not new; it began long ago. On the other hand, it is new, because it has been distorted, perverted, misunderstood, modified, and misrepresented until nowadays it is almost unknown and unrecognizable.

The Jesus Way was born in what we have come to call the “Greco-Roman” world. Judea and Galilee were occupied and ruled by the Romans. The entire Roman Empire, at that time, was, in its language and thought, a Greek world. But the Jesus Way was born a part of that world that was innately Hebraic, formed and filled with the stories and ways of the Hebrew Bible.

The Jesus Movement sprang from this cultural mix. It was relatively pure and simple as it entered the 2nd Century, but then this spring of “living water” began dividing into two different channels–one Greek philosophical, the other the Jesus Way of life--that have commingled, separated, coalesced and divided until by our time they seem to have become inextricable.

This blog is a continuing effort to extricate, as much as possible, the Jesus Way--the kingdom or administration or governance of God--from the theological traditions that have allowed the waters of this spring to become polluted. In the days ahead, we have much more of this to consider.