The Kingdom at Hand

The very first thing Jesus does in the Gospel of Mark — after his baptism, after the wilderness, after John the Baptist is arrested — is open his mouth and start preaching. And the line he opens with is the line that summarizes everything that follows. Mark gives it to us in one short sentence:

The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news! (Mark 1:15, NIV)

You probably know that line, even if not from Mark — from Matthew, where it appears as the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 4:17, in the older translations). The kingdom of God is at hand. It’s the announcement that opens Jesus’s public ministry. It’s the announcement he sends his disciples out to repeat. It’s the announcement that summarizes, in seven words, what the whole gospel is about.

And in English, it lands a certain way. Kingdom sounds like a place. A territory. A realm — somewhere you go to, with borders and a capital and subjects living inside it. We hear the kingdom of God and we picture either a future heaven we’re trying to get into, or some kind of spiritual space that exists somewhere else and that we’re invited to enter. Is at hand sounds like a time announcement — it’s coming soon. It will be here shortly. The phrase becomes a kind of forecast: somewhere, sometime, the place called the kingdom is going to arrive.

This isn’t exactly what Jesus’s first audience heard. The Greek word, and the Hebrew word underneath it, were doing something else.

The Greek is basileia (βασιλεία). The Hebrew, when the Hebrew Bible talks about God’s kingship, is malkuth (מַלְכוּת). The Aramaic that Jesus actually spoke is malkutha (מַלְכוּתָא). And all three of these words mean, primarily and first, not a territory but a reign. Not a place but an activity. Malkuth is what a king does — the exercising of his rule, the carrying out of his authority. It can secondarily mean the realm a king rules over, but that’s a derived meaning. The primary sense is the action of ruling itself.

The biblical scholar George Eldon Ladd — long-time professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of the standard evangelical work on this question — put it about as plainly as anyone has. The primary meaning of both the Hebrew word malkuth in the Old Testament and of the Greek word basileia in the New Testament, Ladd wrote, is the rank, authority and sovereignty exercised by a king. A basileia can be the territory the king rules, and it can be the people he rules over, but those are secondary and derived. First of all, a kingdom is the king-ing. The reigning. The act of being in charge.

This matters more than it might sound like. Once the Hebrew underneath comes into view, the kingdom of God shifts from being a place we’re trying to reach to being something more dynamic — the active, real-time ruling of God. God’s kingship. God’s being in charge. The kingdom of God isn’t a destination. It’s what happens when God is actually running things.

That alone reframes a lot. But there’s more to hear, because the verb attached to the noun is also doing more than English suggests.

The Greek verb the New Testament uses is ēngiken (ἤγγικεν), from the root engizō — meaning to draw near. The kingdom of God has drawn near. The older English translations rendered this is at hand. The NIV softens it to has come near. But the Greek is in a particular tense — the perfect — which in Greek doesn’t quite work the way it does in English. The Greek perfect tense describes an action that has happened and whose effects are continuing in the present. So ēngiken, literally, means has drawn near and is now here. Not is about to arrive. Not is approaching but hasn’t gotten there yet. The Greek says: it has come, and it is here.

This is the part where the New Testament scholars start using a phrase that has become standard across most current Christian traditions: already and not yet. George Eldon Ladd is the modern voice most associated with it. The idea is this. The kingdom Jesus announces is already present — it has broken in, it has arrived, it’s happening now through Jesus’s ministry. When he heals, when he casts out demons, when he forgives sins, when he eats with sinners, when he speaks the words that turn the world upside down — that is the kingdom of God happening. God’s active rule is already at work in the world. But the kingdom is also not yet fully here. Israel is still under Rome. Wrong is still winning. Death is still in the world. The full and final reign of God — when every knee bows, when every tear is wiped away, when the wolf lies down with the lamb — is still coming. Already, in the person of Jesus. Not yet, in its full unfolding.

So when Jesus opens his ministry by saying the kingdom of God has come near, he’s making a claim more startling than English suggests. He isn’t saying something nice is going to happen someday. He’s saying the active rule of God has broken into the world. Right now. Through me. Look around — it is happening. The healings, the meals with sinners, the words that go against everything anyone had been taught — these aren’t previews of a kingdom that’s still on its way. They are the kingdom itself, arriving and at work.

To understand how loaded this announcement was, we have to remember what Jesus’s first audience had been waiting for.

Israel in the first century had been under foreign rule for nearly six hundred years. Babylon had conquered them in 586 BC and carried them into exile. The Persians had let them come back but kept them under imperial control. Then came the Greeks under Alexander the Great. Then the Egyptian and Syrian successors of Alexander, whose persecution of the Jews led to the Maccabean revolt. Then came Rome, which by Jesus’s day had been occupying Judea for nearly a hundred years. Six centuries. Six centuries of being ruled by foreigners and waiting — through the prophets, through the writings that envisioned the end of all of it, through the synagogue prayers — for God to finally come and rule his people himself. The prophets had promised it. Isaiah had described it. Daniel had given timelines for it. Every Jewish prayer service breathed it. The hope of malkut shamayim, the reign of heaven, wasn’t an abstract spiritual idea. It was the hope of a real people who had been waiting six centuries for God to do what he had said he would do.

So when Jesus stood up in Galilee — in occupied Galilee, under Roman rule, in a country whose people had been waiting for centuries for God to come — and said the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the good news — he wasn’t making a quiet devotional statement. He was making the most loaded announcement anyone could make in first-century Judea. He was saying: the wait is over. The thing the prophets promised, the thing your grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents prayed for every day of their lives, the thing every Jew has been hoping for since Babylon — it is happening. Now. Here. And I am the one bringing it. No wonder it electrified the crowds. No wonder it threatened the religious authorities. No wonder it eventually got him killed. The kingdom of God has come near was, in the first century, one of the most politically and theologically dangerous things you could say. Jesus opened his ministry with it.

And here’s the strange thing — and the part that most disappointed his contemporaries. When Jesus said the kingdom is here, he didn’t mean that the Romans were about to be driven out and a new Jewish king was about to be installed. He meant something more radical and more peculiar than that. The kingdom Jesus was announcing was a kingdom in which the king himself would suffer. It was a kingdom that grew like a mustard seed, hidden and slow. It was a kingdom whose first citizens were the poor, the meek, the persecuted — not the powerful. It was a kingdom that began with a Galilean rabbi being executed by the occupying power and was rumored, three days later, to have only just begun. It was malkuth — God’s active rule — but the form it took was nothing anyone had pictured. The wait was over. But what arrived wasn’t what most of Israel had been waiting for.

Two thousand years later, Christians still live in the already and not yet. The kingdom is here, in fragments. We see it in moments of grace, in unlikely kindnesses, in the quiet expansion of the church across continents and centuries, in the slow rolling-back of injustice, in lives transformed. We don’t see it fully. We still wait for what Jesus called the kingdom of God come with power — the final unfolding when the not yet finally becomes now. But the announcement Jesus made in Galilee still stands. The reign has broken in. The active ruling of God has begun. Malkuth shamayim, the reign of heaven, is happening — slowly, mustard-seed-style, in places we don’t always notice — even as we still pray, in the prayer Jesus himself taught us, your kingdom come.

Reading this yourself

The next time you read a verse about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, slow down at the word kingdom. Try replacing it, just in your head, with reign or ruling or active king-ship. (You don’t have to translate it that way out loud. You just have to remember that the Greek word the New Testament used was primarily about the action of ruling, not about a place called the kingdom.) Then read the verse again. Seek first the reign of God. The reign of God is within you. The reign of God is like a mustard seed. The phrases will sit differently. You’ll start to hear why the kingdom of God is something we can pray to come, not just a place we hope to get to.

For six centuries the prophets had promised that God would come and reign. For six centuries the Jewish people had prayed for it, generation after generation, in their synagogues and in their homes. And on a hillside in Galilee, a teacher whose ministry was just beginning opened his mouth and said: the time has come. The Greek was ēngiken — it has drawn near and is now here. The Aramaic was malkutha — the reign, the active ruling, not a territory you traveled to. He was telling his people that the thing their grandparents had died waiting for was happening, in their middle, through him. Slowly, mustard-seed-style, in places nobody would have looked. But happening. The reign of God, breaking in. And so we still pray, in the words he taught us — your kingdom come — knowing that the part of it that has already come is real, and that the part that is not yet is on its way.