Being the Church Then and Now: Issues from the Acts of the Apostles
William Loader
1 "Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6)
When the vision fails to materialise, what do we do?
Introduction
In these
studies we shall be looking at the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles
and I have called the series of five studies: “Being the Church Then and Now:
Issues from the Acts of the Apostles”. There are issues which have been with
the Church from the beginning and which every generation must face afresh.
Luke, the writer of the Book of Acts, helped the people of his generation to
face the issues by telling the story of Jesus in the gospel of Luke and the
story of the earliest years of the Church in the book of Acts. He was writing
only a couple of generations down the journey. He has collected together
memories and traditions which had come down to his generation and put them
together in a way which highlights the concerns of his own day. We are indebted
to him not only for the information he gives us in the process, but above all
for the issues he points up. He will be our guide and at the same time we shall
take into account wider resources of the New Testament as they cast light on the
events and the issues he records.
1. The Hope of the
Kingdom
Right at
the beginning of Acts, Luke identifies the first major issue. The disciples ask
the risen Jesus: “Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts
1:6). Here they identify the very heart of their concern. “Will you at this
time restore the kingdom to Israel?” We frequently skip over their question and
hurry over to Acts 1:8 where Jesus declares that they shall be witnesses to the
uttermost ends of the earth. But let us hear their question:
“Will you
at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” It is not a stupid question or an
irrelevant one. Jesus’ answer, “It is not for you to know the times or the
seasons which the Father has laid down on his own authority”, in no way detracts
from the validity or seriousness of the question. It is merely about the issue
of timing. The central issue for the disciples is the restoring of the kingdom
to Israel. Why? Because this was also the central issue for Jesus, which he
proclaimed and promised and for which he died.
Jesus had
proclaimed, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” The promised reign of God is about
to break into human history. Already in Jesus’ ministry there were signs of
that breaking in of God’s reign. Jesus said, “If I by the finger of God cast
out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” Already where men and
women were being set free from the powers that enslaved them, God’s reign was
being established. But primarily the coming kingdom of God, God’s reign, was a
vision. Luke tells us that when Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, he
took up the scroll of Isaiah and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, he has sent me to
preach liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the
oppressed go free, to preach the year of the Lord’s favour.” He declared,
“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God; blessed are you who
hunger now, for you shall be satisfied; blessed are you who weep now, for you
shall laugh.”
Over 500
hundred years earlier the prophet had spoken of God’s people Israel, broken in
spirit, living in poverty and hunger, captive in a foreign land, in exile, and
had promised liberation. They would return home to their own land, to worship
God in freedom and peace, and all the nations would rejoice in Jerusalem as a
centre of peace and justice. They would beat their swords into ploughs and
their spears into pruning hooks. The human community would feast and drink wine
together. God’s reign would be restored to Israel.
Now in his
time, Jesus looked upon the dejected, broken spirit of the people of his day.
He saw their poverty and hunger, their slavery and oppression at the hands of
the Romans and local authorities, their yearning for the promised redemption
and deliverance, and he used these words of Isaiah to declare that God had
heard the cries of his people. God had looked upon the pain of his people and
their sin; God had not abandoned or forgotten his people. He would establish
his reign. The kingdom of God is at hand! When Jesus declared the promise of
God’s reign, he also used other familiar images from Isaiah. “Many shall come
from east and west and shall sit at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the
kingdom of God.” The birds, familiar symbols of the Gentile nations, would find
shelter in the branches of the great mustard bush of the kingdom; and in one of
his most provocative acts, Jesus clears room in the Gentile court of the temple
to symbolise the great promise that the nations would come to God’s kingdom and
find there a place for themselves.
The vision
of the kingdom was both something which Jesus proclaimed and something which he
lived out during his ministry. He looks forward to eating bread and drinking
wine in the kingdom with his own; but already during his ministry he celebrates
the coming reign of God in advance. For it was this great vision of justice and
peace for all peoples, of redemption and liberation, which he proclaimed and
which he lived in word and deed. In the celebration of Holy Communion we
continue to enact that great vision, when men and women, when all peoples shall
come together at peace, enjoying the presence of God, sharing bread and wine,
in a great communion of love. It remains the great vision of the kingdom, the
passion of Jesus in all his ministry, the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to
pray: “Your kingdom come!’
When,
therefore, the disciples turned to Jesus and asked, “Will you at this time
restore the kingdom to Israel’, they were giving voice to this passion. Their
expectations had been raised. Jesus had declared God’s promised kingdom was at
hand. He had been rejected and brutally put to death on the cross. But God had
raised him from the dead. He was vindicated. He was right. The kingdom is at
hand. But when?
2. The Disappointment
Luke tells
this story because it was an issue in his day and it is an issue we must face
in ours. Jesus had proclaimed the coming reign of God, good news for the poor,
liberty for the captives, but the poor of Galilee remained poor. The people
were not liberated. The hungry were still hungry. The broken hearted were still
broken hearted. The weeping still wept. And over 2000 years later the problem
is no less acute: the poor are still poor, the hungry are still hungry, the
weeping still weep, the humble have not been exalted, the exalted have not been
brought low, the rich have not been turned empty away.
Was Jesus
wrong? Had he miscalculated? Was the vision too idealistic? too all
encompassing? The belief that the great reversal would happen very soon lived
on in the early decades of the Church. The coming of the kingdom and, with it,
the second coming of Jesus, was at hand. Paul could still believe for a long
time that it would happen while he was alive. But it did not come, as many
expected it; it had not come by Luke’s day; it has not come in ours. It might
be easy for some to collapse into atheism and declare Jesus just another
fanatical visionary of the time. We might want to gain comfort in the good that
has happened. But the pain remains, when we look into the world without rose
tinted spectacles. The poor are by and large still poor, the hungry still
hungry, the weeping still weeping, the life and love of God still spurned and
rejected.
We rarely
pause to face this reality. And yet facing the reality of such pain is a
creative moment. It enables us to listen, to listen to what is happening in the
world around us, and to listen to what is happening inside ourselves. Our
temptation will always be to avoid pain, to deny that it is there, to explain
it, to compensate for it. I believe it to be one of the most important events
in the Christian pilgrimage. Because it is a point of pain it is a centre of
enormous energy. For individuals and for churches that energy can be self
destructive; it can be what drives people into religious ghettos; it can also
be a major step together on Christ’s way.
3. Reaction to the
Pain of Disappointment
In the
second part of this study I want to identify some common reactions to facing
the pain of realising that the vision has failed to materialise. One is to
postpone the vision. It is entirely future. It is utopia. Usually this is
allied to a shift in location. The vision becomes a vision about heaven. One
day at the end of the world, when Jesus comes again, or one day in heaven,
these things will all be true, these hopes fulfilled. This solves the problem,
because we now say that Jesus was not talking about life on earth, but about
life in heaven. The fact that nothing much has changed on earth is not a
problem. Jesus was not talking about change on earth, only the change which
there will be for us in heaven. Unfortunately the fact that kingdom of God often
appears as kingdom of heaven in Matthew’s gospel has encouraged this tendency.
Accordingly Jesus came to tell us about heaven. In fact, however, “heaven” in
the phrase, “kingdom of heaven’, was just Matthew’s preferred way of speaking
of “God” and never meant “kingdom is heaven’. Heaven’s reign, means when God
who is in heaven establishes his reign in heaven and on earth.
If you
postpone the reality of the vision to the future or elevate it into heaven,
serious consequences result for the way we understand the Christian message.
The main task becomes to tell people about the heavenly kingdom and how Jesus
told us it was there and made it possible for us to enter. We don’t have to
concern ourselves with any change for the poor and hungry, the humbled and broken
spirited. What we offer is hope beyond, not hope or change within the world.
The vision of the kingdom is a promise; it is not an agenda. The job of the
church is to persuade people of the promise and the way of receiving it. “Your
kingdom come” refers to the future promise. “Your will be done on earth as it
is in heaven” might lead us beyond this and often has. But then, where this has
happened, it has depended upon how we define God’s will. This has often been
limited to the commandments about doing good and the commission to tell others
about heaven.
Postponing
the vision to the future or relocating it from earth to heaven fails to take
seriously the down to earth character of Jesus’ promise. It doesn’t make sense
of Jesus’ claims that the kingdom could break in in the acts of his ministry
amongst people. It is not wrong in emphasising the future, or even in
emphasising heaven, for the promise is of a new heaven as well as of a new
earth. It is wrong in denying that the promise applies to the here and now
realities of earthly life.
A second
response I want to highlight is related to the first. It does not limit the
kingdom to a future event or a heavenly place which we enter after death. It
identifies the hope of the kingdom as referring primarily to the spiritual
dimension in people. It internalises and spiritualises the vision. Jesus’
promises to the poor and the hungry become promises to the spiritually poor and
spiritually hungry. New creation refers now only to salvation of the soul.
There is no pain in the vision of Jesus not being fulfilled, because the vision
has been narrowed to the spiritual life of the individual. There are many
variants of this response. Sometimes it takes the form of an exuberant
emotional spirituality, busyness with the soul’s inner peace and joy, buoyed up
by enthusiastic fellowship. This can happen in the charismatic or so called
“renewal” movement, though it needn’t. But it is found equally in other forms
of spirituality, for instance, in some of the new forms of Christian mysticism,
and in those more traditional forms of Christianity where individual ethical
behaviour, being good, is at the heart of things. These are often linked with a
strong belief in the future or the heavenly kingdom. There is a little bit of
this heaven, the kingdom of God, in each of us or in our spiritual fellowship,
but the world we live in is something to be survived, lived through, like
Pilgrim on his progress to the celestial city.
Another
quite different approach is to assert that the Church itself is the kingdom of
God. The Church is the promise. This is a way of institutionalising the kingdom
of God. But this can only be done by naively imagining that the institution of
the Church is a little bit of perfection on earth. To suggest this is to kid
ourselves. Another approach which focuses only on the present is the one which
takes the kingdom vision as a reform programme. The vision’s reality is then
something for us to achieve by our own informed efforts and strategies. Within
this approach there is usually a heavy emphasis on social and political
realities and the vicious nature of oppression may even lead its adherents to
the use of violence to achieve change, such as among freedom fighters or
earlier in the war against Hitler. But too often such approaches fail to
recognise individual dimensions of change and the future quality of the kingdom
as God’s gift. The result can easily be a quasi atheistic legalism, a string of
well informed oughts bound like a heavy guilt inducing burden on the backs of
believers. Here there is no transcendent hope.
These
approaches may not be wrong in what they affirm. But they are wrong in what
they deny. When we think in these ways, we are massively truncating the vision
of Jesus. Jesus’ vision of God’s reign was not an invitation to withdraw from
the world into a religious ghetto community or into pious and moral
individualism. It cannot be reduced to a reform manifesto of ideals to be
achieved by human effort. To seek the kingdom of God was never to pick out a
part of reality where God might reign or a time in reality when he might reign.
To seek the kingdom of God never meant anything less than to seek God’s
promised rule in the whole of reality, in space and time. Everything is
included. Everyone is included. This is the promise Jesus proclaimed. The
vision is all encompassing. It is this all encompassing character of the hope
of the kingdom that creates the pain when we see the kingdom unfulfilled. But
this hope of the total reign of God must not be watered down for the sake of
our not having to face the pain. Otherwise God is not god of all, but a god
with a limited domain. People make gods in order to run away from the pain Much
religion is driven by the energy of that pain. It drives people into the
comfort of closed systems, preoccupation with partial reality, pious flight
which is practical atheism in relation to the world in which we live.
4. The Reality and
the Agenda
Jesus
proclaimed good news to a people living in poverty and oppression, broken in
spirit, both spiritually and materially, both individually and corporately
deprived. This was not just a heavenly hope. It was not just hope for the end
of the age. It was not just hope for spiritual renewal for individuals and
communities. It was not just hope for material well being and social justice
for individuals and communities. It was all of these in enjoyment of the reign
and presence of God. This was real hope. That is why the disciples’ question
makes sense. Had it been fulfilled, they would have seen it. And it was this
real hope that Jesus proclaimed as near at hand and for which he asked his
disciples to pray.
The impact
of the promise was so strong that for generations people were proclaiming it
was just around the corner. Jesus had said it was at hand. But he had not said
how it would come. Luke writes Acts to tell us not only that Jesus announced
the kingdom, but also that the promise is being fulfilled. The Church is part
of that promise. To that extent it is true: Jesus promised the kingdom and God
sent the Church. The promise is not being fulfilled by a single stroke, as it
were, but in two steps. First the Church and then the total fulfilment of the
vision. The Church is nothing other than the place within which and through
which the kingdom is coming into being. It is not itself the kingdom as if it,
itself, incorporated God and were a little bit of perfection on earth. We know
this is not true. But it witnesses to the vision and lives by it. The vision is
the Church’s true agenda as well as its hope. The Spirit is the gift which
enables the Church to fulfil that agenda. You and I are the place of the
promise of the kingdom now. Yet ultimately the kingdom is God’s reign, God’s
effort, God’s gift. We are not asked to usurp God, but to share his purpose and
by his Spirit become his action in the world.
The two
step fulfilment of the promise of the kingdom means we do not run away from the
pain. We weep with those who weep. We mourn with those who mourn. We join Jesus
as he weeps over Jerusalem. We refuse to take popular religious options which
pretend Jesus never promised such a kingdom and pretend God is not god. The
pain remains as long as the vision is not fulfilled. Each time we approach the
Lord’s table the brokenness is set before us and the vision is re-enacted.
Because it is the Lord’s table and the Lord’s world we receive nourishment to
face the pain. Nourished by the pain and by the promise, we look at the world
around us and within us and we ask with the disciples, “Lord, will you at this
time restore the kingdom to Israel?” And we hear Jesus answer: “It is not for
you to know the times or the seasons God has set on his own authority. But you
shall receive power after the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my
witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and to the furthermost
ends of the earth.” In the ensuing studies we shall explore what this means.
The vision remains; the pain is real; the agenda is clear: the Spirit is with
us; and God is Lord.