City Of God 5

The kingdom of God is within you. Remember those words? Ascribed to none-other than Jesus Christ, and quite shamelessly taken out of context by New Age fanatics. If the kingdom of God is within you, then of course that makes you holy and worthy. As an individual. An individual separate and on his own. It's great fodder for the spiritual but not religious contingent. I don't think they're entirely wrong, but this is taken out of context, and this puts a dent or two in its credibility. I'm going to give you here the text in Spanish, then translate it into English: "Dense cuenta que el reino de Dios esta entre ustedes." Or, take note that the kingdom of God is among you. This pulled from Luke's gospel, chapter 17, verse 21. In English this would translate that the kingdom of God is AMONG you. Not in you, not within you. Adentro is the Spanish word for within or inside. Entre means among. So Jesus is not telling us that the Kingdom of God is inside us but among us, or with us here. This provides a very interesting distinction. And it turns thoroughly on its head the kind of quasi-gnostic Buddha-babble that we are expected to swallow. This isn't just a matter of adjusting through meditation and mindfulness one's inner spirituality, like a thermostat. Nothing wrong with the concept or practice by the way, and this appears to help a lot of people, even if it's little more than a kind of psycho-spiritual placebo. And really, to suggest that the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven, is among us, for me begs the question: what is this kingdom of God? My first answer would be "Jesus". Jesus isn't simply the ruler of the kingdom. He is the kingdom. Just as the word of God isn't the Bible, but the one that the Bible points to, Jesus. And I am not going to wax on here about Mohammed, or Buddha, or whomever else and aren't they also the kingdom of Heaven because I am not interested in skewing things. I have no opinion about the other religions and here I am not writing about them, so all you liberals and new age folk who believe that all religions are one and equal, this has nothing to do with your argument. And ditto to you fundamentalists who think your god is better than other gods and would beat the crap out of any other gods on the school ground. I am not one of those idiots either, Gentle Reader. In terms of comparative religion, as with extra-terrestrials and life on other planets and Brexit, I am an agnostic. So, the kingdom of God, or Jesus is among us. He is here. The fulness of God made visible and real to us, and even if he is no longer with us in body, he is with us always in spirit, and not necessarily through the agency of the churches, though I'm almost sure that they might also play a role. Jesus, the kingdom of God, is here and present with us, not only in ourselves, but in others, because Jesus is God incarnate in our suffering and damaged humanity. This, unfortunately, is not a magic formula that will prevent us from doing evil things, otherwise President Dump would not exist in the White House and we wouldn't have otherwise intelligent and rational Christians talking like brain-injured idiots who believe in the military and just wars. Jesus is among us, and even though it is good to be quiet before him and pray, if the fruit of this prayer does not manifest in the way we treat one another, especially the people who are poorest and most vulnerable among us, then, in the words of James: "Si alguien se cree religioso pero no le pone freno a su lengua, se engana a si mismo, y su religion no sirve para nada. La religion pura y sin mancha delante de Dios nuestro Padre es esta: atender a los huerfanos y a las viudas en sus aflicciones, y conservarse limpio de la corrupcion del mundo." Here it is in English translation: If anyone believes themselves to be pious but fail to control their tongue, they are deceiving themselves, and their religion is futile. Pure and spotless religious faith in the sight of God our Father is this: to take care of orphans and widows in their afflictions, and to keep themselves pure from the corruption of the world.