Kingdom and Kindom
Reflections on the Lectionary for July 26th
I had a conversation the other day with a former student, about the kingdom language found in the Synoptic Gospels. This student had heard me mention offhandedly once that I didn’t love the trend toward replacing kingdom with kindom, which seems to be especially prominent among left-leaning Christians. This former student was going to be preaching soon on some of the kingdom texts of Matthew, and wanted to talk through what’s at stake in these passages, and what might give me reason for skepticism about the movement toward kindom.
Over the years, I have taken a few different stances on the matter. Several years ago, for instance, I was asked to give four short little lectures on the concept of kindom for our national denominational gathering, which you can find archived here. I agreed to give those lectures because I’m all in favor of the idea of kindom, which strikes me as a wonderful way to structure our life together. In a world where we are constantly asked to think of ourselves as separate from each other and even opposed to each other, kinship is a nice way to think about what we have in common and what we might owe to each other. I would love to live in a kindom. That’s not my objection.
My objection to kindom is that Jesus didn’t mean kindom, he meant kingdom, even if that might make us uncomfortable. But I think it’s valuable to wrestle with the things that make us uncomfortable.
We often use kindom to try to avoid hierarchy, power, and gender in our theological language, but that was precisely what Jesus had in mind when he used the word kingdom. We don’t often like the language of kingship and domination, so it’s tempting to erase it. That’s not such a bad temptation. But the truth of the matter is that in his so-called “Kingdom Parables” and in his teaching about the kingdom in general, Jesus really did mean kingdom, with all that it implies. Jesus didn’t erase the structures of power, domination, and patriarchy. I’m not sure that someone of Jesus’ time and place could have imagined a world without them. But Jesus did reinterpret and reimagine those structures, or at the very least he tried to reclaim them from the people who monopolized them.
The lectionary for this Sunday includes several short, punchy parables (or, maybe, comparisons, since these are quite short for parables). There are five of them, right in a row, in this part of Matthew. They all start the same way: The kingdom of heaven is like. (Matthew wrote kingdom of heaven, rather than kingdom of God as Luke and Mark put it, probably out of a Jewish avoidance to speaking or writing the name of God). The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, Jesus begins, and it is like yeast, and the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, and it is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, and it is like a net thrown into the sea. These parables—which are really more like pithy sayings—come rapid-fire in Matthew’s telling, interspersed with explanations for the benefit of his disciples.
I once heard John Dominic Crossan say that if you were an observer of Jesus’ ministry during his lifetime, and you were asked to offer a synopsis of his teachings, you would probably have said that the content of his preaching and teaching was the kingdom of God. I think that’s true, and it’s also a bit counterintuitive for us, who have been conditioned to think that Jesus’ teaching was all about salvation, or sin and redemption. Modern Christianity often summarizes Jesus’ life and teaching in those personal terms, so we assume that that must have been what he was doing. But if we take the New Testament gospels as reliable witnesses, it’s much more accurate to say that Jesus was preaching about the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven. That comment from Crossan helped crystallize for me the way the Jesus of history might differ from the Jesus of faith (or “the Christ of faith,” as Crossan and his collaborator Marcus Borg often put it). We tend to emphasize the personal ramifications of Jesus’ life and teachings—the idea that he died for our sins, for example—but if we look at what Jesus actually taught, it often boils down to the kingdom.
If we are looking for explanations of why we think Jesus must have preached about personal salvation when he actually preached about the kingdom, we might begin with the observation that kingdoms are inherently political and are inherently real-world, situated in times and places, and that no such kingdom actually became established in Jesus’ lifetime or in any time since. Perhaps we avoid thinking about Jesus’ teaching in terms of kingdoms because the kingdom never materialized. Heaven has not come down to earth to take up residence among us, as Jesus suggested and as many of his followers expected. In his teachings about the kingdom, Jesus’ language pointed to an actual kingdom, with all that implied. He seemed to anticipate a realm of power, a sphere of influence, that did not come to pass. So it’s natural that we would read his words differently today.
Context matters. Jesus lived within an empire—the Roman Empire. He was a subject of that empire but not a citizen. He was born into its eastern border provinces, where Roman power offered the fewest benefits and the most risks. Empires usually work by pulling resources from the periphery to the center—by extracting wealth and labor from the far-flung exteriors to enrich the center, and to protect the center. Those peripheries and exteriors can be geographical, or they can be economic. Judea and Syria and the other parts of the eastern Roman Empire were both. Territories like the ones where Jesus lived served two main purposes to Rome. They offered a tax base from which to sustain the massive costs of empire, and they provided a buffer zone by which enemies might be kept at bay. (For much more on the workings of empire, check out my newly-released book on Acts and power and violence and empire, which you can find here, and get for 30% off until August 9th with code IM2026). So Jesus would have grown up in an environment that was taxed to build roads elsewhere, where Roman soldiers kept the peace that protected others, and where foreign political figures dominated.
That last part—the role of political and governmental figures from somewhere else—is a key aspect of Jesus’ kingdom rhetoric. Think about the political markers in the gospels. Luke begins the story of Jesus’ birth with mentions of Augustus, a powerful Roman emperor, and Quirinius, the governor of Syria, and Herod the Great, who ruled the region on behalf of Rome. Both men were from the Italian mainland, but they held political power over the land of Jesus’ birth. Or look at the men who controlled Jesus’ fate at the end of his life. Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and while his early life is a little mysterious, he was probably also from Italy. And the Herod mentioned in the trial narratives is Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great. The members of the Herodian dynasty were slightly more local to the region than Pilate and Quirinius and Augustus, but they were hardly insiders to the life and culture of Jesus. The Herods were installed by Rome to rule as client kings—as a layer of insulation between the local folks and the imperial power structure. They hardly represented the interests of people like Jesus.
So Jesus’ whole life, from his birth to his death, was lived under the thumb of an empire—an empire that he would have thought of as a foreign occupying power. Kingdom was not a neutral category for him, and it could not have been a positive category either, at least as he experienced it in the real world. Kingdom would have described a loss or an absence, for Jesus and people like him; it would have been a way to say that his nation’s kingdom established by David and made grand by Solomon now had been subjugated and controlled by someone else, and made to serve some other people’s interests. Rome’s glory belonged to someone else, and it came at the expense of Jesus and Jesus’ people.
There’s no way to understand Jesus’ words about the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God without taking that context into account. It’s like if someone went around today talking about the democracy of God or heaven’s constitutional order: you would almost have to take it as a rebuke and a critique of the democracy and constitutional order that the speaker knew well. If you talked about God’s nation, you would be necessarily criticizing the president’s nation or the nation represented by congress, or whatever power structure that was in view. It would always be a comparison, and it would always be a critique. The same was true for Jesus. Every time he talked about God’s kingdom, he was implicitly talking about Caesar’s kingdom too, and not in a flattering way.
Look, then, at what Jesus says about the kingdom of heaven in Matthew. Is it powerful and large? Yes and no. It is like a mustard seed, which is tiny, but which grows into a large bush—a tree, in Matthew’s exaggerated language. Or it is like yeast that is nearly invisible until it causes the whole loaf to rise. Is the kingdom of heaven obvious? No, it is hidden like a treasure. Is the kingdom of heaven like all the rest of the kingdoms? Not at all; the kingdom of heaven is like a pearl of great value, better than all the other pearls. Is the kingdom of heaven for everyone? Ominously, it is not. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like a net full of fish, and only some will be kept. (Whether it’s better to be kept or thrown back, from the fish’s point of view, is an interesting question).
In these kingdom parables, then, Jesus is describing power and he is describing scope and scale, but he’s doing it in a way that runs counter to expectations and counter to the claims of empire. The Roman Empire claimed to be powerful, large, and obvious, and it claimed to offer peace to all its inhabitants, but those claims probably landed differently for people at the peripheries of the empire or on the edges of its power, compared to people at its centers. Empires levy violence in pursuit of their goals, and they deploy war on many to gain peace for some. In his parables about the kingdom of heaven, Jesus was subverting empire’s claims and putting God in the place of Caesar. Jesus was suggesting an alternative way to live, a new and different world order, predicated not on human power and violence and enrichment of the center, but on hiddenness and smallness and a certain resistance to grand claims. And—crucially—Jesus was replacing Caesar’s power and hierarchy with God’s power and hierarchy. He wasn’t imagining getting rid of the structures of kingship, but he was imagining what it would be like to remake it.
Kindom simply does not capture that, and kindom undermines the very thing that Jesus was trying to do with the language of kingdom. It’s not that Jesus was unaware that kingdoms were hierarchical institutions that inflict violence; Jesus was very much aware of that, and that’s why he chose kingdom as a metaphor. He wanted to subvert the strength of empire, and co-opt it and turn it into a symbol of an alternative way of life. He wanted to set God up as a force opposing Caesar, opposing Pilate, opposing Herod, opposing all the instruments of violence and oppression that dominated his world. When we turn kingdom into kindom, we lose that critical edge.
That’s not to say that kindom has no place. Kindom is a wonderful idea, and it’s worth proclaiming, this idea that we are all related and that we all ought to treat each other as kin. I’m all for it. But it’s not quite what Jesus said, in his parables about the kingdom. Jesus lived in a kingdom, and when he said that a different kind of kingdom was coming, he meant it.