In all of Jesus’ teaching no idea is more important, more central, or more resonant than the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is also a vital concept in the Scriptures of Israel (which Christians call the Old Testament). By referring to the kingdom, both Jesus and prophets before him focused on God as the king of the universe, the fundamental force behind all that is, and on God’s role in shaping human experience. Jesus embraced this prophetic principle and gave it his own unique meaning.
The promise of the kingdom is that people will finally come to realize divine justice and peace in all that they do. People will put into action with one another the righteousness they see in God. So the kingdom is a matter of vision, of perceiving God at work both in the present and in the future, but it is also a matter of ethics. Jesus made the kingdom of God the center of his preaching as well as of his activity, and it remains the pivot of Christian theology.
Whether in present experience or in hope for the future, the kingdom of God was celebrated in ancient Israel in five ways, all closely related. The book of Psalms clearly reflects this celebration of the kingdom, and Jesus also taught that the kingdom could be known in these ways. Because the kingdom is a power within human beings, and not an entity alien to them, to understand it requires more than a simple definition. Instead, both the psalms and Jesus referred to the kingdom according to how its force could be perceived and how that force would shape all human life.
First, the kingdom of God is behind the whole of created life, the creativity that makes life possible, but at the same time it is beyond the immediate comprehension of any living thing. For that reason, the psalms portray the kingdom as so near as to seem present in time and tangible and yet ultimate and distant from the point of view of what its full disclosure will be like:
Say among the nations, “The Lord is king!
The world is firmly established;
it shall never be moved.
He will judge the peoples with equity.” (Ps. 96:10)
All peoples are finally to know, when God judges, the truth that is even now celebrated and sung by some people. Those who sing, the group that joins in order to recite this psalm, recognize now, not just in the future, that “the world is firmly established; it shall never be moved.” The wonderful order of the universe invites the psalmic community to rejoice in God’s power in the present and to anticipate his full revelation in the future.
Second, just as the kingdom cannot be contained by time, it being a reality both in the present and the future, so also it is transcendent in space. The usual setting of Israel’s praise is in the temple, where the psalms typically were sung, but every part of the creation will come to acknowledge what is known there:
All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord,
and all your faithful shall bless you.
They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom,
and tell of your power,
to make known to all people your mighty deeds,
and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.
Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
and your dominion endures throughout all generations. (Ps. 145:10, 13)
All creatures are to give thanks to the Lord, but it is his faithful in particular who are said to bless him. What is rehearsed in the temple, the “might of the awesome deeds” of God, is to be acknowledged by humanity as a whole (Ps. 145:6).
Third, the kingdom is an insistent force of justice that will ultimately prevail. The kingdom is ever righteous, but it attains to a consummation:
Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers;
seek out their wickedness until you find none.
The Lord is king forever and ever;
the nations shall perish from his land. (Ps. 10:15–16)
The punishment of the wicked is the dark side of the blessing of the poor; the vindication of the meek, the fatherless, and the oppressed (Ps. 10:17–18) requires a reversal in the fortunes of those who do evil in order to be realized.
Fourth, human entry into the kingdom depends on what people do. Psalm 24 poses and answers a question that is central to the religion of Israel as reflected in the biblical tradition:
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
And who shall stand in his holy place?
Those who have clean hands and pure hearts,
who do not lift up their souls to what is false,
and do not swear deceitfully. (vv. 3–4)
The point is that purity is effected by one’s ethical behavior as well as by the practices of purification (such as bathing and abstention from sexual intercourse) that conventionally were requisites for ascending the mount of the temple.
Fifth, Ps. 47 evokes how the recognition of God is to radiate from Zion when it identifies “the people of the God of Abraham” as “the princes of the peoples”:
The princes of the peoples gather as the people of the God of Abraham.
For the shields of the earth belong to God;
he is highly exalted. (v. 9)
Israel is the nucleus of the larger group of those who recognize the God of Abraham. From its center, the power of the kingdom is to radiate outward to include within its recognition peoples beyond the usual range of Israel.
Jesus articulated all five of these ways of seeing God’s kingdom because he understood that they conveyed the mystery of the kingdom. He taught his disciples to pray to God, “Your kingdom come” (Matt. 6:10; Luke 11:2), because he hoped for it to be fully present to all people. In Aramaic, he really said that the kingdom “will” come; he was not merely wishing for it to come. In the same way that God’s presence can be sensed now, he taught, his followers should also welcome its coming in the future.
Jesus’ belief that the kingdom is transcendent, capable of displacing other powers, comes through clearly in one of his most famous sayings: “If it is by the spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you” (Matt. 12:28; cf. Luke 11:20). For Jesus, exorcism was not an esoteric or magical practice but a matter of confronting evil with the power of divine justice. He typically called demons “unclean spirits.” For Jesus, people taken on their own were as clean as God had made Adam and Eve. If a person became unclean or impure, it was not because of contact with exterior objects. Instead, impurity was a disturbance in one’s own spirit, the “unclean spirit” that made a person want to be impure. To his mind, uncleanness arrived not from material contagion but rather from the disturbed desire that people conceive to pollute and do harm to themselves. Uncleanness had to be dealt with in the inward, spiritual personality of those afflicted. Jesus believed that God’s Spirit was a far more vital force than the unclean spirits that disturbed humanity. Against demonic infection a greater, countercontagion could prevail, the positive energy of God’s purity.
Entry into the kingdom is also the dominant image in Jesus’ famous statement about wealth: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25; cf. Matt. 19:24; Luke 18:25). This dedication to justice, the third dimension of the kingdom, leads on naturally to the fourth: Jesus needed to cope with the issue of defilement as one member of Israel (with a certain set of practices) met with another member of Israel (with another set of practices). To deal with that question, a single aphorism of Jesus was precisely designed: “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile” (Mark 7:15). Finally, in the course of Jesus’ occupation of the temple, Mark has Jesus articulate the dimension of the kingdom’s radiance: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17).
In Jesus’ teaching, the five coordinates of the kingdom become the dynamics of the kingdom, the ways in which God is active with his people. Because God as kingdom is active, response to him is active, not only cognitive. The kingdom of God is a matter of performing the hopeful dynamics of God’s revelation to his people. For that reason, Jesus’ teaching was not merely a matter of making statements, however carefully crafted and remembered. He also engaged in characteristic activities, a conscious performance of the kingdom, which invited Israel to enter into the reality that he also portrayed in words. Once experience and activity are taken to be the terms of reference of the kingdom, what one does is also an instrument of its revelation, an aspect of its radiance. Jesus’ awareness of that caused him to act as programmatically as he spoke, to make of his total activity a parable of the kingdom.
One of the most profound challenges of Jesus’ teaching as a whole is that the kingdom of God is not merely for him to perform, but also for all who perceive it. Both the perception of the kingdom and the imperative to act on one’s perception are developed by a type of speech well known within Judaism at the time of Jesus: the parable. The Hebrew term rendered by Greek parabolē and English “parable” is māšāl, which basically refers to a comparison. For that reason, the genre as a whole is an exploration of metaphorical possibilities, as is evidenced, for example, in the book of Proverbs (which in Hebrew is called mišlê, illustrating that the term māšāl has a wider sense than any single term in English conveys).
The book of Ezekiel represents the wide range of meaning involved. In the name of the Lord, the prophet says, “There is nothing for you in parabling [mōšlîm] this parable [māšāl]: ‘The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth stand on edge’ ” (Ezek. 18:2 [translation mine]). Evidently, there is no requirement of a strong narrative element within the metaphorical image for the “parable” to stand as such. Its gist is transparent, and that is precisely what the prophet is objecting to and refuting. Yet within the same book a parable is developed in such an elaborate way that it may be styled an allegory (complete with explanation) in which the fate of Israel between Babylon and Egypt is addressed by comparison to two eagles and a sprig of cedar (Ezek. 17). It is fortunate the chapter includes interpretation because this particular parable (translated as “allegory” at 17:2 in the NRSV) is complicated, opaque, and unrealistic. Nathan’s parable of the ewe lamb in 2 Sam. 12:1–15 is a more successful development of narrative allegory and interpretation, and it is not in the least surprising that David got the point of the parable, because a certain didacticism is evident here (as in the narrative parable in Ezek. 17).
Jesus was known as a master of the parable genre in its full extent, from simple adage to complicated, sometimes even surreal, narrative. For that reason, it is only to be expected that the parabolic tradition will have been the outcome of considerable embellishment during the course of transmission. The interest here is not in attribution but in the depth and range of the development of the genre.
Taxed with the charge that his exorcisms were performed by the power of Satan, Jesus replied with the observation that no kingdom or home divided against itself can stand (Matt. 12:24–25; Mark 3:22–25; Luke 11:15–17). That double maxim is devastating enough to have lived on within proverbial tradition of many languages (with a meaning usually unrelated to its original context), but the Gospels also add a parable with a narrative element: the comparison with attempting to rob a strong man’s house (Matt. 12:29; Mark 3:27; developed more fully in Luke 11:21–22). Such examples instance not only the range of the genre but also the ease with which one sort of parable might be associated with another. (For that reason, unlike some recent treatments, no hard-and-fast distinction is suggested here between simple, embellished, and narrative parables; a single māšāl can easily participate in several features of the genre overall.) The narrative element that was perennially an option within the genre is exploited, complete with an interpretation of the allegory in the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:3–8, 18–23; Mark 4:3–8, 13–20; Luke 8:5–8, 11–15). Although no less didactic than the parable in Ezek. 17, here a certain vivid mastery is instanced.
Rabbinic parables offer analogies to those of Jesus. In a parable of Johanan ben Zakkai (b. Šabb. 153a), a king invited his servants to a feast without announcing the hour of the meal. Wise servants attired themselves properly and waited at the door of the king’s palace. Foolish servants expected definite signs of the meal’s preparation and went about their work until they should see them. When the king suddenly summoned the servants, the wise servants enjoyed a fine meal, while the foolish, work-soiled servants were made to stand and watch.
The motif of a festal banquet is central within Jesus’ parables and sayings, and the Matthean parable of the wedding feast (Matt. 22:1–14; cf. Luke 14:16–24) especially invites comparison with that of ben Zakkai. Matthew’s subplot concerning the appropriate wedding garment (22:11–13) provides another point of similarity. Still, the meanings generated by the two parables are distinctive. Where ben Zakkai speaks of servants who either are or are not prudent in their assessment of the king’s capacity, Jesus speaks of guests invited to a feast who respond with extraordinarily bad and finally violent behavior that is answered in kind. Beneath that distinction, of course, there is a thematic similarity. The readiness to accept and act upon the invitation is called for, especially since the king is none other than God. But each parable urges a particular kind of response upon the hearer. Ben Zakkai’s narrative involves dropping normal obligations to await God’s promised banquet, while Jesus’ parable of recalcitrant guests is more fraught in its warning against obstinacy.
Perhaps most important, comparison with rabbinic parables reveals what often has been overlooked: surrealism is possible within the genre, from Ezekiel through Jesus and on to ben Zakkai. Parables are not just lively stories taken from nature; the point often can turn on what is striking, peculiar, or unpredictable. Even in Jesus’ parables of growth, elements of hyperbole are plain. In the narrative of the man, the seed, and the earth (Mark 4:26–29), action is abrupt and unmotivated. The man sleeps for no apparent reason, and he puts in his sickle “immediately”; the seed sprouts in no stated time, and the earth produces “as of itself.” Similarly, mustard seed becomes a “tree” (Matt. 13:31–32; Luke 13:18–19) or makes “big branches” (Mark 4:30–32) without an interval of time being indicated. The point lies in the contrast between beginning and result, miraculous transformation rather than predictable process. The hyperbolic comparison of start and finish is evident also in the parable of the leaven (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20–21). The parables of the hidden treasure and of the pearl (Matt. 13:44–46) are surprising rather than hyperbolic when they concern the discovery of what is valuable, but the reaction of those who find them, in selling everything to acquire them, is exaggerated. In these cases, also, ethical themes are especially conveyed by the least realistic motifs.
Like the prophets, Jesus taught his hearers how to see as well as how to act on the basis of what they saw. Vision—the capacity to perceive God actively at work—is the prophetic foundation of calling people to work with God. In the Judaism of Jesus’ time it was said that every Israelite, every day, took up “the yoke of the kingdom of heaven” (m. Ber. 2.2). The underlying image puts Israelites in the role of beasts of burden, yoked in harness in order to discharge the duties for which they were intended. Then, if they do in fact accept obedience, they prove themselves innocent of the accusation leveled at them by Isaiah: “The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people do not understand” (Isa. 1:3).
The moment of yoking oneself to God’s kingdom was at the time of reciting one of the principal texts of Judaism, the Shema:
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. (Deut. 6:4–7)
When asked about the “first commandment” in the Torah, of course, Jesus cited this one (Mark 12:29–30). In addition, in a famous saying he urged his followers to learn from him, “because my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). The motif of the “easy” (or “good” [Gk. chrēstos]) yoke is a shared metaphor that links Jesus with the rabbinic language that emerged in documents from the second century and later.
But in this case as in others, the sharing of language, when viewed contextually, reveals vital differences. The rabbinic “yoke” connects the Israelite to the Torah; Jesus’ “yoke” links the disciple to God’s kingdom. Profound lines of cleavage, and of controversy, emanate from that distinction. In Jesus’ conception, this divine presence was the force behind the kingdom of God. As he said to Peter, James, and John just before his transfiguration, “There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (Mark 9:1 [cf. Matt. 16:28; Luke 9:27]). In the Jewish tradition of this time, both Moses and Elijah were thought to have been immortal; like Elijah taken up in God’s chariot, Moses too was believed to have gone alive into heaven. This saying of Jesus about those who lived in God’s presence, people such as Moses and Elijah (but also, in Jesus’ view, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), showed the way for humanity as a whole. “The kingdom of God has come with power” expresses in a single phrase how Jesus anticipated that God would definitively transform the world as human beings can know the world.
Genuine transformation is a frightening prospect. It involves altering all the usual points of reference that people use to know who they are, where they are, and what they can do to improve their lives. “The kingdom of God has come with power” refers to a complete alteration of conventional reality. The phrase resonates with works that depict the apocalyptic dissolution of both social institutions and the tangible, physical world. The final chapter of the book of Zechariah, for example, predicted that Israel would envelop all the nations in an ultimate sacrifice on Mount Zion in the midst of warfare, destruction, earthquake, and plague. The Aramaic version of the book sets out that apocalypse in language like Jesus’:
And the kingdom of the Lord shall be revealed upon all the inhabitants of the earth; at that time they shall serve before the Lord with one accord, for his name is established in the world; there is none apart from him. (Targum Zechariah 14:9 [departures from the Hebrew text in italics])
To Jesus, this expectation was not merely a matter of symbolism or an expectation that could be passively awaited. Instead, he acted upon the apocalyptic scenario of transformation in order to actively join God in establishing his kingdom. His last public action—his intervention in the normal operation of the temple in Jerusalem—enacted the prophecy of Zechariah, particularly in its Aramaic version: “And there shall never again be a trader in the sanctuary of the Lord of hosts at that time” (Targum Zechariah 14.21b).
Putting those words into practice also put Jesus into direct opposition to Caiaphas, the high priest who had authorized the selling and buying inside the temple to which Jesus objected violently. He intervened with force and threw out both the vendors and their animals (Matt. 21:12–17; Mark 11:11–18; Luke 19:45–48; John 2:13–20).
This act is the key to why Jesus was crucified by the Romans, who had put their prestige behind the status quo in the temple. Although almost every claim ever asserted about Jesus has been subject to dispute, the fact of this forceful intervention is a matter of historical fact. More important than the details of Jesus’ action for an understanding of the prophetic force he wished to unleash, however, is the total vision of which Zechariah’s prophecy of the cleansing of the temple of commerce is a part. Jesus assimilated Zechariah’s vision into his own and made it a programmatic part of his action.
Three key texts in Zechariah set out characteristic concerns of Jesus’ message:
Thus says the Lord of hosts: I will save my people from the east country and from the west country; and I will bring them to live in Jerusalem. They shall be my people and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness. (8:7–8)
These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another, render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace, do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath; for all these are things that I hate, says the Lord. (8:16–17)
Thus says the Lord of hosts: The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be seasons of joy and gladness, and cheerful festivals for the house of Judah: therefore love truth and peace. (8:19)
Very often an ancient misunderstanding arises in the minds of modern readers of the Bible. A false contrast portrays “the God of the Old Testament” as violent and vengeful, while Jesus preached “the God of mercy.” But Jesus also was willing to resort to violence, and these prophecies of Zechariah, themselves in line with other prophetic messages in the OT, show that Jesus was directly inspired by the prophets.
When Jesus said, “Many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 8:11 [cf. Luke 13:29]), he echoed Zechariah (8:7–8). When he spoke of love of God and love of neighbor as summing up the Torah (Matt. 22:34–40; Mark 12:28–34; Luke 10:25–28), he developed a principle that Zechariah had stated (8:16–17). When he offended many of his contemporaries in Judaism by insisting that feasting, not fasting, was to be the rule in the kingdom of God (Matt. 9:14–17; Mark 2:18–22; Luke 5:33–39), he was announcing the new prophetic era (Zech. 8:19) of rejoicing.
By better understanding where Jesus’ teaching came from, how it derived from the prophetic tradition that fed his vision and encouraged his demand for justice and ethical action, we can also better see where it was intended to lead his followers. With the prophets before him, Jesus not only insisted on righteousness from individuals but also wanted communities to live by just judgment. Zechariah summarized centuries of the prophetic imperatives when he said, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another” (7:9–10).
In Zechariah’s prophecy, as in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, there is no such thing as requirements for individuals that are separate from human behavior in community. How could there be, when love is at the foundation of the prophetic ethic? That is why, in Zechariah’s imperative, God moves from what the community must do (“render true judgments”) to what individual Israelites must accomplish (“show kindness and mercy to one another”). Both parts of this single imperative to righteousness appear in the plural: Zechariah, like Moses before him and Jesus after him, is addressing his message to people in their totality, living in community and also conscious of themselves as individuals.
See also New Testament Ethics; Parables, Use of in Ethics
Bibliography
Chilton, B. Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God. SHJ. Eerdmans, 1996; Grappe, C. Le Royaume de Dieu: Avant, avec et après Jésus. MdB 42. Labor et Fides, 2001; Jeremias, J. Das Königtum Gottes in den Psalmen: Israels Begegnung mit dem kanaänaischen Mythos in den Jahwe-König-Psalmen. FRLANT 141. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987; idem. The Parables of Jesus. SCM, 1963; McKnight, S. A New Vision for Israel: The Teachings of Jesus in National Context. SHJ. Eerdmans, 1999; Weiss, J. Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Fortress, 1971.
Bruce Chilton

Bruce Chilton, “Kingdom of God,” in Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 452–456.