The first narrative account of what Jesus was up to when he walked these wild landscapes, has always gripped me. I was telling a friend that I often begin reading it and stop somewhere around chapter 11. It is usually a time thing or purely distractability because the thing is only 16 chapters. The story moves fast as Jesus rushes along the countryside trying to keep up with the way God is intersecting with humanity. His first words in the story are like that of a prophet, who’s job is to announce what God is doing. For Jeremiah it was an announcement of exile and homecoming, for Isaiah-as varied as the 66 chapter are-he announces a similar thing. So, with the hope that God has arrived in a definitive way, Jesus says, “the time is filled out and the kingdom of God is here.”
The rest of the story has the reader or the listener asking all sorts of questions concerning who Jesus is and why all the religious people are missing what this announcement is about. We learn who Jesus is and what this announcement of God’s kingdom is all about through the odd characters that dash in and out of the narrative. A crazy bleeding naked man, a lady with menopausal issues, and even the one who nails Jesus to that torturous tree, to name a few. I remember writing a piece of curriculum a while back that was exploring the kingdom of God, the tag for the that teaching was: the kingdom of God is a place where the outsider belongs inside. It is space where God’s embrace has opened to you and you trust it. With the whole of your life: friends, love, cash, futures, and nows-it is all embraced and held, and the yoke of, well… everything lifts in God’s order to things.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not believe life is then light and easy and full of pink bunnies hopping everywhere, that’d be annoying. But it is different. The space of our lives is reordered as things that didn’t seem to fit, find a home and things that we thought we couldn’t live without, die. So the second half of the first phrase Jesus says makes sense in light of this reordering, “change your thinking and trust the announcement.”
