In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus formally outlined his conceptions of ethical and religious life as distinguished from those then current. It was the platform of the Kingdom of God. We might expect it to begin with denunciation. Instead it opens with a spontaneous burst of joy. A great good was coming. It would bring a store of blessings to all who had the inward qualifications to receive them. All who felt the divine dissatisfaction with themselves and the craving for social justice and righteousness, would get their satisfaction (v. 3, 4, 6). The higher social virtues, gentleness, purity of heart, peaceableness, would get recognition and gain ascendancy (v. 5, 7, 8, 9). But the climax of praise and promise is for those who propagated righteousness where it was not wanted, and suffered for it (v. 10-12). “These words belong to the greatest ever uttered” (Hegel). They are pure religion, and they were called forth by religious faith in a social ideal.
Have we known men and women who had some of these qualities, who lived within the Kingdom of God, and who enjoyed its blessings? If they have ennobled our life, let us think of them a moment with a silent benediction.
Study for the Week
We see from the passages we have studied that the mind of Jesus was centered on a great hope which was just ahead. It was so beautiful that even in anticipation it was filling his soul with joy and he knew it would bless all who shared in it. It seemed to him so valuable and engrossing that a man ought to stake his whole life on attaining it, and subordinate all other aims to this dominant desire.
I
He spoke of this great good as “the Kingdom of God.” Even a superficial reading of the first three Gospels shows that this was the pivot of his teaching. Yet he nowhere defines the phrase. He took an understanding of it for granted with his hearers, and simply announced that it was now close at hand, and they must act accordingly. What did the words mean to them? The idea covered by the phrase was an historic product of the Jewish people, and we shall have to understand it as such.
The Hebrew prophets had concentrated their incomparable religious energy on the simple demand for righteousness, especially in social and national life. The actual life of the nation, especially of its ruling classes, of course never squared with the religious ideal. The injustice and oppression around them seemed intolerable to the prophets, just because the ethical imperative within them was so strong. So their unsatisfied desire for righteousness took the form of an ardent expectation of a coming day when things would be as they ought to be. God would make bare his holy arm to punish the wicked, to sift the good, to establish his law, and to vindicate the rights of the oppressed. This great “day of Jehovah” would inaugurate a new age, the Kingdom of God, the Reign of God. The phrase, then, embodies the social ideal of the finest religious minds of a unique people. The essential thing in it is the projection into the future of the demand for a just social order. The prophets looked to a [pg 058] direct miraculous act of God to realize their vision, but they were in close touch with the facts of political life and always demanded social action on the human side.
Plato's Republic and More's Utopia are intellectual productions which have appealed to single idealistic minds. The Hebrew prophets succeeded in socializing their ideal. By the force of religion they wrought the conception of the Kingdom of God into the common mind of a nation as a traditional conviction which was assimilated by every new generation.
But when a great idea is appropriated by the masses, it is sure to become cruder to suit their intellect and their need; and when a national ideal is handed on for centuries, it will change with the changing fortunes of the people that holds it. When the Hebrew nation came under the foreign rule of the Assyrians, Persians, and finally the Romans, its freedom and chance for political action were lost, and its political ideals, too, deteriorated. The Kingdom hope became theological, artificial, a scheme of epochs of predetermined length and of marvelous stage settings. Yet, even in this form, it was a splendid hope of emancipation, of national greatness, and of future justice and fraternity, and it helped to keep the nation's soul alive amid crushing sorrows.
The people at the time of Jesus in the main held this apocalyptic conception of the Kingdom. It was to come as a divine catastrophe, beginning with an act of judgment and resulting in a glorious Jewish imperialism. Jesus shared the substance of the expectation, but as a true spiritual leader he reconstructed, clarified, and elevated the hope of the masses. He would have nothing to do with any plans involving blood-shed and force revolution. The Hebrew Jehovah became "our Father in heaven" and this democratized the Reign of Jehovah. The pious Jew expected God to enforce the ceremonial laws; Jesus had little to say about religious ceremonial, and a great deal about righteousness and love. Under his hands the Jewish imperialistic dream changed into a call for universal human fraternity. He repeatedly and emphatically explained the coming of the Kingdom in terms taken [pg 059] from biological growth, and his thoughts seem to have verged away from the popular catastrophic ideas toward ideas of organic development. These changes—if we have correctly interpreted them—represent Jesus' own contribution to the history of the Kingdom ideal, and they are all in the same direction in which the modern mind has moved. (For a fuller statement of these modifications see Rauschenbusch, “Christianizing the Social Order,” p. 48-68.)