foundation for kingdom revolution

The Kingdom of God is at hand.

So said the Lord Jesus, two thousand years ago.

He said this:

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

and this:

Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

two thousand years ago.

Notice that, two thousand years later, there are still captives, still blind people, and still people who are oppressed. There are still many, even very many, whom the favor of the Lord has not yet reached.

Though this set of facts is objectively embarrassing, I do not expect modern Christians to feel embarrassed by them. I don’t expect them to feel anything at all. That is because, in truth, the Church no longer waits for the Lord or his Kingdom. It has long given up the role of lover on the cliff, watching for its king to return. The lonely, disappointed queen, within a few centuries of her Lord’s departure, took up with the fashionable pagan philosophies of the Roman Empire. Their union bore a child, the ancestor of today’s Christianity.

The strange-looking descendant cares little about captives, blind people, or the oppressed. It cares little about God’s will being done on Earth as it is in Heaven, about a Kingdom coming here from the Father. In other words, it cares not about the Gospel of Jesus. The bastard religion’s main hope and main concern are in attaining a personal ticket to an immaterial post-death state of bliss. The resurrection of the body, the coming again in glory: I tell you that for most Christians, especially in the so-called ‘apostolic’ churches, these are purely vestigial doctrines. They are recited during the creed; they are paid proper lip service by the educated.

‘Credo, of course! These doctrines are of the utmost importance to our Faith!’

Then, they are hurled back to their proper place in the ever-far-off future, to be ignored until next time someone commits the faux pas of bringing them up.

Some Christians make predictions of an impending Judgement Day or expect to be, in a short while, raptured into the sky. Sophisticated believers chuckle about these people, not realizing that they themselves have drifted far from the hot faith of Jesus. Mainstream Christianity has become teeth chatter and the dodging of ice floes, while the yokel prepping for the End Times still stands on the Gennesaret beach, the words of Jesus faint but audible.

Spiritual. Mystical. Not of This World. These are the mantras of the pseudo-Gospel church. The members in charge of her doctrine and mantra-making have lived in great comfort and honor, so we can understand their desire to all but eliminate the core of Jesus’ teaching: that the order which makes them fat and cozy is on the verge of destruction, to be replaced with a Kingdom where the first become last. We can even believe that this desecration of the Gospel was meant to occur. Full awareness may have led to action before it was ripe. The hour had, until now, not yet come.

The Holy Spirit has watched the Church mature over these two thousand years. He has deemed the time ready for a new phase of understanding and a new phase of work. All Christians are called to the field. You who love the respectable safety of the academy and esoterica, you who love the pleasure and predictability of the liturgical service: you too are called to the scythe and the daylight. You have received your rewards. Now give them up before they make you miss the hour.

You who hear the cries of the poor and need to bring them joy, you who see their suffering and need to bring them comfort, you who see their angry plights for justice and need to see them answered: your hunger will be satisfied. It will require the sacrifice of your own safety, of your ease, of your life, but you will eat.

The Spirit calls all believers to revolution, to concrete, political revolution, for the Kingdom of God. The Spirit calls us, right now and today, to erase every border, to overtake every worldly government and to create in their place a single government, a single state through which the Lord Jesus will reign and judge and bring prosperity. In power, the Lord Jesus will liberate the captives. In power, He will lift up the poor. In power, He will heal the blind and the sick. The Kingdom of God is at hand, and the Spirit calls you to take it by force.

The crucial question

But how can we expect to take and construct the Kingdom before its King, Jesus, has come again?

I said that the coming again of Jesus was a vestigial doctrine ignored by Christians who matter, but there is one place where his Second Coming is of great importance: within the confines of that question. That question, especially during the tempestuous political and ideological climate of the past two centuries, has been a favorite of Christian world-glazers who might see their social status and standards of luxury interrupted by any boat-rocking. Aware, perhaps, of the fragility of their current parasitic niche and their probable lack of fitness were it to be disrupted, they attempt to perpetually futurize the world-churning Gospel of Jesus in order to ossify the present or revert it to an even more safe and inert past.

Their play is to say that the Kingdom of God can only and will only be brought about by the Lord Jesus at his Second Coming. Therefore, any attempt to bring it about before then is not only bound to fail catastrophically, but is also blasphemous.

The Lord Jesus is indeed the only one who can bring about the perfection of the Kingdom. But the way this truth is emphasized has led to a funny conundrum in mainstream Church teaching. Though the earliest disciples of Jesus didn’t concern themselves with gaining political offices, bishops and popes have long lauded and embraced confessing political leaders. Teaching continues to affirm the goodness of the political vocation.¹

Yet when a Christian individual finds himself in a position of political authority, what should he do with it? What is the vision of the Good he should aim at? The obvious answer is that he should aim at the realization of the Kingdom of God, the central vision of our Faith and of our Lord’s teaching, but to do so, according to the ‘wait for Jesus’ logic, would open him up to charges of Pelagianism, secular messianism, utopianism, communism. To try to realize the Kingdom before the Second Coming of Jesus is Antichrist behavior.² At the very least, it would be obviously imprudent and Polyannaish and theologically ignorant for a Mere Man to try to establish God’s Reign on Earth.³

So where to aim, then? How far off the mark must a politically engaged Christian hit to avoid accusations of blasphemy and of upsetting the natural order? Many rich and powerful Christians have determined that the safest, most pious way to exercise power is to embrace “Nature” fully, to champion Total Ghoulishness as the will of God in this sinful age. More pathetic yet conscience-tuned Christians have seen fit to go all-in on worldly liberation movements, which are generally atheistic, abortion-loving, and ugly, not to mention inept, prone to corruption and, more often than not, unserious about actually taking and wielding power. Their uncritical support for these movements can be embarrassingly full-throated.

And so Spirit-illuminated eyes must continue to see anguish that could conceivably be remedied, but is not; must continue to see children, the elderly, and the sick in mind or body suffer, their salvation postponed, their pain perhaps eased only by Death, the enemy. Because Jesus doesn’t come, and none can take his place. So must we continue to wait? Another century, another ten, another twenty, accepting that the elimination of suffering is out of our hands? Must we continue to pray and wait?

No. We need not wait anymore, and while simply praying and waiting were once acceptable, they are no longer. The elimination of suffering and of conflict, and even of death, is within reach.

Parousia

First, another funny contradiction in Church teaching: we acknowledge and make the presence of the Lord Jesus here a major point of emphasis, yet we simultaneously say that we are waiting for Him to return. The last words He spoke before His Ascension, “I am with you always, until the end of the age,” that unmistakable affirmation of His continued presence, somehow came to mark the beginning of a drawn-out era of expectation.

This irony has developed and proliferated during the expectation period, dotting and making vibrant the field of our Faith. The Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus, for instance, is made present at every celebration of the Mass under the appearance of bread and wine. Immediately after the transformation of these mundane materials into the Person of Jesus, we proclaim the Mystery of Faith: “When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, O Lord, until you come again.” This bread and this cup are Him, yet we pray as though he has not yet come. Mysterious indeed.

The curiosity is compounded with the fact that there are usually many voices repeating the prayer, bringing to mind another saying of the Lord’s that wherever two or three are gathered in his name, He is there among them. Was he mistaken? We could perhaps say that he was speaking quite literally, in which case we should ensure that Christians only gather in duos or trios. Alternatively, we are just being rude, speaking of one present as though he were absent and eagerly awaited.

An orthodox believer cannot deny that Jesus is currently present on Earth, but those particular “styles” of presence (the presence of Jesus in the Eucharistic species and the presence in the believers gathered) are implicitly treated as less-than-full. The Eucharist is Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, which seem to us an array of parts that amount to less than their sum: a particular human person. Bread and wine, even when their substance is transformed into something else, lack useful implements available to run-of-the-mill humans: a mouth and vocal chords for teaching and issuing commands, hands for signing legislation, legs for collapsing under heavy burdens. Jesus in Eucharistic form lacks the potency and agency of a man. The same goes for the presence of Jesus within the congregation which, if it is acknowledged at all, will usually be in a kind of spooky way, as a “mystical” presence which might be detectable with your spiritual sixth sense if you really try at it.

We get closer to the real Real Presence when we look at the teaching on the ministerial priest, an alter Christus standing in for the Lord at the altar. This style of presence is intensified in the Pope, the “vicarius Christi and pastor of the whole Church” who has “full, supreme and universal power over the Church.”⁴ These are examples of offices occupied by breathing men who do work that is unique to Jesus’ ministry, using divine power which flows from Him. The more-exact likeness of Jesus in church clerics, men who are like Man, has given clericalism much of its power and persistence.⁵

Yet a pious distinction officially remains in place between these men and the Lord Jesus. The vicar is not the King himself; the alter Christus is not the main Christ. There is not perfect identity; they are not talked about as though they are truly One with the Lord. While in the Eucharistic Presence the power of a human person is lacking, in the human persons who receive Holy Orders, some of the Presence is lacking. Hence the fear about working to build the Kingdom. Jesus is recorded as having told his disciples to “do this in memory of me.” He is recorded giving them the keys of binding and loosing. But he is not recorded directly telling them, in clear speech, to take and to construct the Kingdom of God. A straightforward reading of the New Testament makes the coming of the Kingdom something for which we must be prepared, but which is out of our control. Its coming will be accomplished when the Father sends his angels and the one bearing the strange title of Son of Man to inaugurate the Kingdom in power. As Saul learned when he offered sacrifice in Samuel’s absence: if God gives a work to someone else, do not try to do it yourself. If we are not the Son of Man, if we are not the Lord Jesus Christ, then wait we must.

We could only act with hope of success, with great hope, if we came to learn that the Lord Jesus is not only present here, but is present in a more intimate, more complete, and more powerful way than we had previously thought. We could only hope to succeed in building the Kingdom of God if we came to learn that we and He are perfectly One, that we are the Lord Jesus and He is us.

We and the Son are One

The Lord Jesus has come again, and you are He.

Let us compare the moment of the Lord’s return with the moment of his first advent to Earth. It was by the Holy Spirit, who came upon the girl Mary, that Jesus first arrived here. He returned in the exact same way, on the day of Pentecost, with the Holy Spirit entering into that very same woman, but into many others as well, planting a seed, forming a new Body which would grow in wisdom and in power over many decades.

The Body of Christ was Paul’s favorite appelative for the Church. Nowhere does he put the dulling qualifier “Mystical” before the phrase. We proudly take Jesus’ saying, “This is my Body,” very literally in the context of the Eucharist, yet we do not do the same for this teaching of Paul which will be of even greater consequence for the history of our salvation, which is an even more fortifying food. The Church of the 21st Century is the Body of Jesus Christ come to full maturity and ready to do His work.

During His first appearance on Earth, Jesus was limited by the form of His body. There are no miracles of multilocation recorded in the Gospels: he taught and healed wherever his two feet rested, then he moved somewhere else. This is why He sent out the disciples to proclaim the Kingdom and to exorcise demons. This is why he bemoaned the dearth of laborers for the harvest. In that first form, he could not do everything on his own. Yet when he sent the disciples to do the work in his stead, they did not have the fullness of His power (“Why could we not cast it out?”). The Lord knew that to bring salvation to the world, He would need to die and enter into a new, more glorious state.

What does He fixate on at the Last Supper, as the hour of His Passion comes near? What rationale does He give to His disciples for why He needs to leave them?

I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.⁶

The Helper. The Spirit of Truth. It is necessary that this Spirit be sent to His companions. He speaks in a veiled way, but He assures them, saying:

You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.⁷

He concludes the Last Supper with these words, the climax of an intense prayer directed to the Father:

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.⁸

Then He goes to die.

The coming Spirit. The joy of a new birth. And perfect oneness, even as He and the Father are one. These are the gifts He hoped to give His friends by His dying.

The Lord suffers His Passion, is raised from the dead, and walks with His disciples for forty days. Then the time that He said must come, comes: the time to leave them and return to the Father.

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”⁹

And the men in white spoke truly: from heaven He came again at Pentecost, when the Spirit entered into the temple of the Church, bringing a human being to live and grow great there. The Spirit-filled Church is the Lord Come Again, the Lord Reborn. In the days following the Spirit’s descent, His Body, though still possessing the disruptive gravity of the newborn at Bethlehem, was nascent and feeble. It is no longer. The prophecy of Paul, that the Savior would “transform our lowly body, conformed to his glorious body,” has been fulfilled. There is not another Body which will appear on the clouds of heaven to judge the World. The great prophet emphasized that there is one Spirit and one Body. The Body of Our Lord is you.

Read how our ancestors hoped for this moment. They knew that their work was to build up the Body of Christ,

 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.¹⁰

The fullness of Christ. To grow up in every way into Him. These are remarkable words spoken during our infancy. I do not want to linger with annoyance on the forces that have led them to be diminished or ignored since those days. I do want to point out that when those words were recorded, the population of the whole world was around 200 million people, and few of those had ever heard the name of Jesus. Today, those baptized into the Body of Christ number around two billion. The time the young Church longed for is here.

While the parousia, the presence of the Lord, shows in Church as a whole, it is relevant to the future of our revolution that the Lord can be present in full stature in individual members of the Body of Christ as well. Paul said,

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.¹¹

Paul was a walking corpse, a host for the Lord Jesus, who made himself entirely one with the man, who took over Paul’s life and reproduced in it his own, even unto a violent death. The Lord is like an icheumonid: He seizes upon a living thing, hollows it out to make space for Himself, feeds on its strength, and brings it quickly to a gruesome end so that His own life can abound. To be a doomed vessel for the King was the glory of our brother Paul. Those who saw his face saw the face of Jesus; those who heard his voice heard the voice of Jesus. To behold as the World beholds would not have revealed this. Paul’s fleshy body would have looked different; Paul’s accent would have been different; Paul’s hair might have been less lush, if the icons are to be trusted. The disciples of Jesus did not initially recognize the man with whom they journeyed to Emmaus. But when they broke bread with Him, when they reflected on His words, they saw who He really was.

See how Jesus made himself identical to others even during his first coming. Remember the confusion when the King said, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Then, “I and the Father are one.” Remember the outrage.

Our Lord is sunfire, melting all difference into unity: difference between Himself and Our Father, difference between Himself and us, difference between me and you. The fire is nearly ready to consume the world: it needs only our generation’s bodies to reach a critical mass. So, brothers and sisters in the Lord, a choice must be made. Do you cling to your impotent, social-media-addicted, entirely forgettable lives, convincing yourself with fluctuating success that things are good until you fizzle out, perhaps alone, a few decades from now? Or do you step with courage into the furnace, allowing your flesh to be fuel for the work that the Father has tasked you with, the work of the Eschaton?

This is the foundation for Kingdom revolution: you are the Body of Jesus Christ. You are the Son of Man. You are the Messiah who has come again, and your hour is at hand. Your task, your only task, is nothing less than the conquest of the whole universe for the one, political Kingdom of God. The truth of your identity having been revealed to you, the old training-wheel tasks, the preaching, the rituals, the prophetic criticism of political life from the sideline: these are no longer sufficient. Those works don’t need to disappear, but they must be limited to their proper place, unambiguously oriented toward the only work that really matters. Revolution is that work.

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The Body of Christ’s members have received different gifts and will contribute in different ways to the one task. In this era of the Body’s maturity, in these Last Days, the first step we must take on our journey to Jerusalem is to cultivate ministers for a new ministry. This ministry will be that of the professional Kingdom revolutionary.

The horrible failures of worldly governments are rooted in the chasm in personality between worldly political leaders and the Lord Jesus. In almost every way that the Lord Jesus is, they are the opposite. This is why politicians are consistently the most hated, the least trusted, and the least successful of all men. In the Kingdom revolutionary, the Church will put in power a group of politicians who are conformed perfectly to the image of the Head, Christ the King. The love and wisdom and power of Jesus will flow from these politicians and will create through them a new world of justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. The specifics of our policy platform will differ depending on the particular day and place where the Kingdom is being extended. The policies are secondary: the root of the Kingdom promise is not a set of laws, but the power and trustworthiness and everlasting goodness of God as our political ruler.

These members of the Body, these revolutionaries, will serve as the spearpoint which the whole Church will thrust into the side of the dying world. Their days will be spent taking political power from the worldly and exercising it with the righteousness of God’s reign. They will be warriors, legislators, planners, and judges. As the bishop and the presbyter are seen to embody in a special way the High Priesthood of Jesus, so will these members embody in a special way His Kingship.

To succeed, the Church must be aware that the World will try to water down the concept of conformity with the Son into a meaningless abstraction. It must guard against this trick, and it must do so by demanding that specific identifying aspects of our Beloved’s face be clearly visible in the revolutionary ministers. Like Paul, the revolutionaries must be men and women who are dead, in whom Christ lives completely, whose faces are transformed into His Face, with all of its aspects unambiguously present upon them. The most important and distinct aspects of Jesus are these:

1. He was penniless and propertyless.
2. He was unmarried and prioritized his mission from the Father above his relationship with his biological family.
3. He regularly withdrew into silence and prayed to His Father.
4. He told only the truth.
5. He was lowly, associating with outcasts and not seeking personal fame or worldly honors.
6. He came to bring the sword, and he was prophesied to come again in violence at the head of the armies of Heaven.
7. He knew the Scriptures well.
8. He was baptized and the Holy Spirit came upon him.
9. He spent most of his ministry not in isolation, but living and working in community with those who felt compelled to proclaim the Kingdom with Him.
10. He loved the world and he loved his companions. He was moved by their suffering; he wept for them; he was willing to suffer and to give up his life for them. Overflowing love most defines the face of Jesus.

Those who hear the call to the ministry of the revolutionary must know that accepting the call will mean taking on a new, radically Heavenly life where every one of those aspects of Jesus are at all times unmistakably visible. The community of revolutionaries must develop a culture dedicated to the honing and maintaining of those aspects, and they must develop a formation process by which the called can be cleanly uprooted from worldly culture and replanted in the purity of the new. The whole Church must make sure that those who are able to hear this call, hear it. Those who accept the call and leave everything to realize the Kingdom ought to be encouraged, for they will share a special brunt of our collective cross.

The full-time revolutionaries cannot be the only ones who are transformed. It is important for the revolutionary project that the whole Church develops within itself a disgust for the appearance and scent of worldliness, that it clean off the middle- and upper-class grime that has accumulated on itself throughout the easy centuries. As love, particularly extra-familial and extra-sexual love, is the most effective soap for that filth, a top priority should be the development of Christian communities where believers genuinely know and love one another, rather than communities where believers show up for an hour on Sunday and sit in forward-facing pews with people they hardly know. To make this happen, presbyters and bishops should cooperate with the laity to make major reforms to the dying parish system, perhaps drawing inspiration from the small house-church communities of our early existence. Christians content with interacting anonymously online should move in with and build tight communities with other believers, especially if they are among the few who share a desire for the real Kingdom of the Gospel and not the metaphysics-tainted, incorporeal, beatific MMO marketed by traditional Christianity. Be active in seeking out brothers and sisters to live and work with: don’t wait passively for these communities to pop up ready-made for you.

A Church unsoftened by worldliness will be necessary for another reason. It must sharpen the revolutionary spearpoint through another immensely important ministry: the ministry of the Prophet. The community of revolutionaries must not be allowed to decline from a short-lived seriousness into laxity and security as so many other Christian communities have. It’s hard to imagine anything worse than standard worldling pigs wielding political power in the name of Jesus and His Kingdom. Again: it must not be allowed to happen. Therefore, prophets must be chosen who will closely observe the way the revolutionaries live and work, spending sufficient time in their communities to ensure that all of the aspects of Christ the King are clearly visible upon them. They must point out discrepancies they see between the Church’s political ministers and the Lord Jesus, not giving any friendly passes, not harboring any sycophantism or desire for favors. They must not fabricate faults because they hold some ideological loyalty prior to the Kingdom or because they want to throw red meat to a worldly populism that happens to be ascendant. The Church’s prophets must know intimately the Lord Jesus and the aspects of His face, and they must be unfailingly honest, unafraid of angering power, and unafraid of retribution for speaking the truth. When the prophet points out flaws in the life of the political ministers, the whole Church and even those outside the Church must forcefully insist that the flaws be rectified so that the Face of Jesus can show clearly in power. I can envision good-faith disagreements between the prophets and the revolutionary politicians, and I trust that these disagreements will be resolved through the Spirit of God.

Every member of the Body of Christ must, in every season of life, ask himself and his brothers and sisters and the Father how he can most effectively contribute to the Reign of God’s conquest of the world. Every member must ask, “Am I using all of the talents I’ve been given? Or is fear or laziness leading me to hide some away in the sand?” Every member of the Body must be demanding the political Kingdom publicly when the circumstances make it profitable to do so; every member must be offering their expertise and their effort for the gathering of the Kingdom and its governance. If some corner of the world can be put in the hands of the Kingdom revolutionaries through elections, then every member should be voting for them and defending our project. If in another corner, power can only be taken by revolutionary violence, and the fruit there is ready to fall, then those members who are able should unwaveringly take up arms or fill the streets or contribute to the taking of power with whatever unique gifts they possess.

The obsession of Jesus was to see here God’s Kingdom and its justice. You are of value to the Body inasmuch as you share this obsession and are willing to act boldly upon it. If you linger on other visions and act for other ends, then you are a shriveled limb, a blind eye, a sore on the Body. You are dead weight. You are useless. And you will need to answer to Our Father for your uselessness. Woe to you especially if you’re prepared to give Him a refined theological defense of your inactivity.

The warning I give is one I must heed with you. I have no Kingdom fruit to show. I have longed to act but have not known how, and the atomization I see within the Body, and the whirlpools of discourse and routine and Christian-branded trifles which trap us and lead nowhere: these can tempt toward despair. I am burdened with the fear of disappointing the one who loves us so much.

But we are blessed to live during the pontificate of Francis, who shines with the image of the Lord and who continuously and lovingly nudges us with the words He spoke two thousand years ago: be not afraid. We have the Spirit, the Helper, who stokes our courage and our hatred for the status quo.

And we have the eyes and the ears of the Lord Jesus Christ, who cannot grow deaf to the cries of the poor, who cannot avert His gaze from their suffering. We have the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ who cannot abandon them in their pain, who cannot shrug his shoulders and walk away, who must do something to save them. We, the Lord Jesus reborn, have his love, and we have his power. Let us, then, set aside our fear and act. Humanity thirsts for the New World, the Civilization of Love, the Kingdom of God. You alone are Living Water. Destroy the world once more, and once more build anew.