I once attended a meeting where the Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Social Security, was speaking. Amongst other things, a member of the audience asked him why politicians spend all their time sniping at each other, and apparently disagreeing with each other on principle.
The politician said that actually, that wasn't true. That politicians of different parties might well agree with each other and support the other side, but that such agreements were never reported by the press. The media were only interested in the fights, in confrontation and in bad news. They never reported good news.
How different it was for Jesus. When he heard the bad news that John the Baptist had been arrested, he didn't spread that bad news around, wringing out of it as much sensationalism and drama as he could, but instead took over John's work and roamed throughout Galilee proclaiming the good news. And people flocked to listen to the good news.
What was that good news? That the time had come for God's kingdom to be experienced here on earth. Mark uses a very economic style in his gospel, so that we're only given the one phrase, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the good news."
Although since the time of the prophet Jeremiah, some 400 years before Jesus, people had gradually become aware that they could develop a personal relationship with God (Jeremiah 31:33), they didn't know that they could actually enter his kingdom.
Jewish wisdom said that good fortune or wealth was the result of God smiling on someone, and that ill fortune or poverty was therefore the result of sin. So current thought at the time of Jesus was that only the wealthy would come anywhere near God or his kingdom, because clearly, they were specially blessed.
When Jesus told the ordinary people and poor people and outcasts that God's kingdom was at hand for them, he turned the received wisdom of the ages on its head. Much later, after the rich young man had asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus told his disciples it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter God's kingdom. The disciples were utterly astounded by this remark, and asked Jesus in a bewildered sort of way, "Then who can be saved?" (Mark 10:23-26).
So the news that God was available even for ordinary people really was good news. And it was so unexpected and so welcome and so exciting that Peter and Andrew, James and John, the young fishermen working the Sea of Galilee from their home town of Capernaeum, immediately left their work and followed Jesus.
But that was then. That was a people who thought of themselves as a Chosen Race, a people set apart for holiness by God. And it was in a time when there wasn't too much in the way of entertainment or excitement. It was also a time when the people were suffering under the rule of an oppressive foreign power. No wonder they were thrilled by the news that God was there to rescue them and was available to them personally as well as to the Chosen Race as a whole, and that they themselves could enter his kingdom.
What sort of impact does the good news have today, in a time when the only news worth reporting is bad news? A time when good news isn't news at all, and when most people have turned away from the traditional worship of God in church. And what is God's kingdom, anyway?
Many people over the ages have thought of the kingdom of God as a place, variously called paradise or heaven or utopia or some such thing, and a place which we only enter after death. But that's only part of the truth. Jesus never revealed the good news as the kingdom of God is waiting for you after you die. He said that the kingdom of God is at hand, is right beside you here and now.
In the earliest days of Christianity, Christians expected Jesus to return at any moment in great triumph and glory and that his second coming would usher in God's kingdom. In his early letters St. Paul almost seems to be looking for such an occasion around every corner, but it didn't happen. And so St. Paul gradually developed Jesus' own ideas of the kingdom, and his later letters show quite clearly that the kingdom is both here and now and after death.
The problem is that you have to experience the kingdom to know what it's about. You can't see it or feel it or touch it or hear it. It's not a physical place that you enter, either here or after death.
It's more a state of being in the presence of God, of living in the presence of God. It's a state of knowing that when you speak to God he's there listening to you and responding to you. It's a deep, underlying happiness which never goes away, even through the bad times.
It's not constantly living on a high, although sometimes there are moments of ecstasy. It's not escaping the pain and difficulty of life here on earth, although there is always support and a presence to help you through it. It's not being so holy that you're high above everybody else and barely human, but it is becoming more human all the time. It's not knowing everything there is to know about God and about Jesus, but it is having an increasing desire to learn more and to constantly search for the truth, whatever that truth might be.
Living in God's kingdom here on earth is not a solitary occupation. It's a communal thing and it encompasses many, many different types of people with different ideas and coming from different directions. It's the growing ability to live comfortably alongside such people, even though you may disagree with their ideas and think they have their Christianity all wrong.
God's kingdom on earth should be, and occasionally is, his church. The church on earth is far from perfect, but it does hold out the possibility of reflecting something of God, something of the love and the caring and the support and the outreach and even the excitement and the happiness of life lived with God.
"Now we see in a glass darkly," said St. Paul, "but then face to face" (1 Corintians 13:12). The closer a church is to God, the more its members will experience God's kingdom here on earth. And after death, it will be but a short step beyond the veil into God's very real presence in heaven.
