So what’s the good news?
One of the things I enjoy about studying the Bible is how often I discover things hiding in plain sight. Recently, I went looking to see what the gospels say about the word “gospel.” The simple answer is: not much. In fact, the word hardly appears at all! Thirteen times to be precise, and seven of those instances are in Mark. Matthew uses the word four times, Luke twice, and John never uses it. On the other hand, the word is used dozens of times in the epistles/letters portion of the New Testament. What’s going on?
To look at the epistles first, the gospel (literally “good news”) is the early church’s message or proclamation about Jesus. For Paul, this is Jesus’ death on the cross for the forgiveness of sins and Christ’s resurrection as the promise of new life. There isn’t much ambiguity in their understanding of the word.
But when we come to the gospels, the writers seem to assume that we the readers already know what the word means. Most often it’s used in the context of Jesus or the disciples “preaching” the gospel. However, they never say what that “good news” actually is. Despite that, implicitly or explicitly, the gospels assume that we should believe in it.
Now I think it is a serious question whether Jesus actually ever used the word “gospel.” One of the things critical scholars agree on is that Jesus didn’t go around talking about himself, at least not in the way Paul and the early church did. The occasional places in the gospels where he seems to are generally agreed to be early church insertions of what it came to believe about Jesus. And yet, Jesus certainly had something to say. “He spoke with authority and not like the scribes.” So, what was his message?
As I said, the gospels typically use “gospel” without saying what it meant. But there might be one exception, in the first chapter of Mark. It is Mark’s summary of Jesus’ preaching at the start of his Galilean ministry. I have written about this verse often because I think it is a key that opens the lock on the mystery of what Jesus was about. But I may be wrong. The meaning of the sentence in Greek is not entirely clear (just as a sentence in English can be interpreted in different ways). So here is the NRSV’s translation of Mark 1:15, followed by my rendering of it.
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
“Now is the time you’ve been looking for. God’s kingdom is here, at your fingertips. Change your thinking about this and believe this good news.”
Today, it seems that a majority of New Testament scholars believe Jesus was an apocalypticist. That is, he believed that God was about to bring this world to an end (the apocalypse) and replace it with a new and improved version. Hence, “the kingdom of God has come near.” But literally the Greek says the kingdom is “at hand.” This could be a time reference but it could also be more spatial, as I translate it.
The kingdom of God (or heaven) shows up repeatedly in Jesus’ parables. Sometimes there is a “future” element to his stories, but at least as often Jesus is talking about something that is here and now. In particular, he tells of people finding the kingdom, or of what it takes to do so.
None of these stories make the kingdom sound like something that is about to arrive at some time in the future. Instead, he talks about diligence in searching for the kingdom, as with the woman who sweeps her house searching for a lost coin. He talks about sacrifice for the kingdom, as with the man who sells all he has to acquire the greatest pearl he has ever seen.
Then there is the Galilean ministry story (Mark 12) where Jesus is asked to name the greatest commandment. But Jesus replies with two commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbor. The scribe who asked the question affirms Jesus’ answer and gives his own expansion of it. Then we are told, “When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’” It hardly sounds like Jesus is telling the scribe the kingdom is arriving soon but rather that, based on his wisdom and insight, he himself is very near to being in the kingdom here and now.
There are several instances in the gospels where Jesus is asked when the kingdom is coming. Jesus usually gives an ambiguous reply about signs to look for just before it happens. The assumption is that the kingdom is coming in the chronological future. There is one exception, however, in Luke 17, where Jesus gives a very different response.
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”
This is one of the confounding things about the gospels: they don’t hesitate to include material that not only contradict other gospels but even things said in their own text. Four chapters after the quote above, in Luke 21, there is a long discourse from Jesus very much about “things that can be observed” which will precede the kingdom’s chronological coming.
So, which interpretation is right? Or rather, which did Jesus actually believe and teach? Well, as with so much about Jesus, we’ll probably never know for sure. What is clear is that the early church believed in a kingdom coming chronologically down the road. And it was the belief of many people living in Palestine during Jesus’ life. And that’s what make me suspicious. It was the conventional belief at the time, and Jesus was rarely conventional.
There was much agitated belief among the Jews of Jesus’ day that a messiah would appear who would expel the Romans and reestablish the kingdom of Israel. In the early church, there were many expecting Jesus to return from heaven and bring about a cosmic transformation of this world. This was Paul’s belief. Over time, this belief began to fade until in the 4th century something viewed equally miraculous occurred: Emperor Constantine made Christianity the new official religion of the empire. Thus, it was believed, the world’s greatest political kingdom had become Christ’s kingdom on earth.
However, I don’t think Jesus had any of this in mind when he talked about the kingdom of God (interestingly, a phrase not found in the Old Testament). He did not mean either a cosmic or political entity about to come around the historical corner. Rather, it was an experiential reality already present, hiding in plain sight.
I think that is the plain meaning of that wayward passage in Luke quoted above. Clearly, this must have been a tradition about Jesus that was somehow lost in the shuffle of the early church or, more likely, suppressed. In fact, we can see that was the case for it is prominent in the noncanonical gospel of Thomas, now viewed by many scholars to date from the same time as the other gospels. For Thomas, the kingdom is all around us but hidden, waiting to be uncovered.
And that’s the other reason I believe this was what Jesus meant about the kingdom: it’s genuinely good news. Those coming kingdoms are all rather daunting. Their arrival is good news for some but not so much for many others. The apocalyptic kingdom stories in the gospels have an awful lot of weeping and wailing in them. In the book of Revelation, it becomes a downright bloodbath.
But the kingdom that is at hand, at our finger tips, and even already among and within us, is a kingdom of hope and possibility. In all of this, of course, “kingdom” is a metaphor. It was Jesus’ attempt to communicate the presence and reality of God here and now. It may not be a very helpful word anymore.
In any case, it is good news to know that the Sacred Reality at the heart of all existence is also at the center of each one of us and of the world in which we live. What Jesus knew was that we won’t look for God if we don’t know that God is there to be found. Jesus’ mission was to assure those around him that God was indeed very much here now, if they would just open their eyes and hearts to see.
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2 thoughts on “So what’s the good news?”
It is indeed hard to know what Jesus actually taught, especially once one realizes that the gospels are in large part delivery vehicles in narrative form for religious beliefs worked out over the preceding decades, e.g. by Paul. The historical Jesus slips through here and there, but how can be sure when we read of the actual Jesus?
As a layperson, I can’t adjudicate between the various proposals by scholars. The Luke passage, and Gospel of Thomas, certainly suggest a kingdom that is available now. On the other hand, if John the Baptist was an apocalypticist, and if Jesus intentionally travelled all the way from Galilee to become a disciple of John, and if the post-Jesus movement was apocalyptic, one might infer that Jesus himself was the apocalyptic link. I think the Mark passage could reasonably be taken to mean “at hand” = “soon”. There is a lot of urgency in Mark, which possibly could be explained if Jesus and his disciples thought that time was almost up, and that people better repent before it was too late. But again that assumes that Mark is describing the actual historical situation, and not narrating Paulian expectation.
In any case, since the end of the world obviously did not occur, I think that the sensible approach is to shelve apocalypticism, and to adopt the Thomas interpretation, and that the church should be teaching people to wake up and take advantage of their potential, instead of pounding them with a message that they are broken and helpless, and that there is nothing to do for it but wait for the glorious end.
Michael, you’ve summarized the interpretation dilemma very well. And, of course, it was a problem very early on. In Matthew, and then Luke, you can see them backing away from Mark’s certainty that the end is just around the corner. Fast forward to the modern age and it’s all just silliness, resurrected repeatedly by the fundamentalist crowd, as it was a week or so ago and (more ominously) in those believing that preserving the country of Israel will lead to the second coming. Heaven help us.
Back to ancient history, I admit that the Mark 1 verse I quoted frankly sounds more like John the Baptist. And there are scholars today who believe JB’s and Jesus’ stories are more intermingled than we’ve realized. The need to repent in its traditional meaning does not seem to have had a place in Jesus’ preaching. It could fit, though, in the literal meaning I use (“go beyond your mind/thinking”). This could be another example of Jesus being deliberately ambiguous, as he is so often in his parables. i.e. use traditional language in nontraditional ways to get people thinking.
Well, I could go on. But I think your conclusion is the main point. The church needs to re-sift all this material to come up with a message of genuine hope.
I believe that what seems to be the current belief of a majority of scholars, that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher (back to Schweitzer, in other words), is a mistake. I just don’t see what would have been the popular appeal nor how it would have made Jesus stand out, since such preachers were a dime a dozen. But to this larger point, today it just doesn’t take us anywhere and makes Jesus a historical oddity (like so many). Unfortunately, I don’t see the church’s theological/biblical scholar corps doing anything to give it a new direction. They seem too buried in their Greek and post-modernism lexicons to do anything so practical.