When you consider the obsession of the institutional Christian Church down the centuries with inventing, promoting, defending and enforcing so-called ‘orthodox’ dogmas, creeds and doctrines, you might imagine that Jesus had some interest in such things. Well, he didn’t. His concern was to create a new community that embraced, embodied and practiced love: divine love expressed in human love; love for God that is inseparable from love of neighbour.
When Jesus emerged from his days and nights of fasting in the Wilderness to begin his ministry, he didn’t start lecturing about the finer points of theology, about obscure aspects of philosophy; no, we are told in Matthew’s gospel that he “withdrew to Galilee” and “From that day began to proclaim the message: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is upon you” (Matthew 4: 12, 17). That is to say: ‘Change your ways, start living as citizens of the kingdom which is here now, start living according to God’s Rule of Love’.
In Luke’s account this amounts to a revolutionary manifesto. In the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus announces his mission by quoting from the prophet Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (Luke 4: 18-19). Jesus is primarily concerned with this world, the kingdom of heaven is about this world, the kingdom of God is about this world. His call is to live in this world as God wants us to live in this world. That is, in loving community: with loving kindness, with justice that is founded on love, with merciful justice that is free from vengeance and spite.
The vision of a better world in the here and now is what should guide the way we live. And the way to work for it is to create communities where the divine Spirit of Love is the determining force and where it is made manifest in human flesh and blood, showing people how to establish the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, right here in this world – bit by bit, community by community. This was a tough call back in the Palestine where Jesus taught, in the Roman Empire where Paul travelled and preached, and it is a tough call now. Suffering and hatred, war and oppression, nastiness and meanness of spirit are still all too evident, from still-troubled Palestine and Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, to the vile and morally cancerous downside of so-called ‘social’ media. As someone sang hopefully back in the 1960s, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love” (lyrics by Hal David, music by Burt Bacharach, sung by Jackie De Shannon, 1965) and as the Beatles sang wistfully in 1967’s Summer of Love, “With our love we could save the world, if they only knew.”
But where does that love exist? Where does it declare itself, show itself, manifest itself in this troubled world today? Where do we experience the loving nature of the kingdom of God? Where can we be that kingdom? When the early followers of Jesus, the first groups of Christians, asked that question their answer was to create communities that were, to the best of their ability, microcosms of the kingdom of heaven, outposts of the kingdom of God. They were, as individuals and as communities, organs of a single body that enfleshed anew the loving Spirit which had dwelt in Jesus.
In those days there was no set Christian doctrine, no agreed canon of Scripture, no single creed to which Christians had to subscribe, no priestly hierarchy to say what is ‘orthodox’ and what isn’t, no institutional Church to rule the consciences of faithful men and women. What there was, were diverse communities of many kinds of people who gathered in fellowship and equality to live as best they could according to the words and deeds of Jesus. Record of these had been preserved, initially in the spoken word and then in a variety of letters, hymns, prayers, teachings and traditions as written down by the likes of Paul and his companions, and whoever assembled the first gospels – which were not yet the same as the gospels we have today.
The Letter to the Colossians which, as we have it, was mostly but not entirely written by Paul, gives us a flavour of how these early Christian communities saw themselves. In the passage we heard earlier (chapter 3, verses 11-16) we learn that the community of the faithful rejects the distinctions and divisions of old inherited tradition, of nationality, ethnicity and social status. Rather it affirms the “things that suit God’s chosen and beloved people”, namely, “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience”, along with tolerance, forgiveness and peace. And to “bind everything together and complete the whole, there must be love.”
And although that was written for a Christian community two thousand years ago, I think it holds good for us and for everyone, today. In such a community we find the kingdom that Jesus announced in Galilee, a community where the values of the divine take precedence over the divisive niceties of dogma and theology. Of course, there will always be interest in such things as people explore the ideas that experience, study and insight present. And there is nothing wrong with that, just so long as they don’t get in the way of the essence of a truly life-affirming faith, which is love. As Paul wrote of the commandments inherited from Judaism: they “are all summed up in the one rule, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’” (Romans 13: 9).
Church communities are imperfect places made up of imperfect people, however well-intentioned, as they always were. We learn that from the New Testament itself. It is why forbearance is another valuable Christian virtue! Although we must hold the ideal before us and strive towards it, we must learn to live with our failures and foibles, and even to laugh at them as we laugh at ourselves. Taking yourself too seriously is a familiar, and sometimes dangerous, fault among religious people. What matters, whatever the details of our personal belief-system or the label we stick on it, is that we remain true to that loving core of the gospel. Our communities exist to be lights to themselves and to others in the darkness of a confused, desperate and shadowed world where love, the supreme gift of the Spirit, so often seems to be in short supply.