The Kingdom Is Here

Read it: Mark 1–2; Matthew 5–7

Mark’s Gospel is in a hurry. It skips Bethlehem completely and races through events with the word “immediately” again and again. It begins with John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness by the Jordan River and baptizing crowds who came to confess their sins.

One day Jesus, now about thirty, came from Nazareth and was baptized too. As He came up out of the water, the Spirit came down on Him like a dove, and a voice came from heaven: “You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). Then the Spirit sent Him into the wilderness for forty days, where Satan tempted Him. Israel had spent forty years in the wilderness and failed again and again. Jesus spent forty days there and did not fail.

“The time is fulfilled”

Then Jesus began to preach in Galilee. His message fits in two sentences: “The time is fulfilled,” He said, “and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the gospel!” (Mark 1:15).

What is “the kingdom of God”? Not a country with borders. It means God’s rule, God putting the world right as its true King. The prophets had promised that one day God would come as King and set everything straight. Jesus was saying: that day has arrived, because I have arrived. “Repent” means turn around, change direction. “Believe the gospel” means trust the good news.

He walked by the Sea of Galilee, a large lake where fishing families worked, and called two pairs of brothers: Simon and Andrew, James and John. “Come, follow Me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men” (Mark 1:17). And they left their nets.

What the kingdom looks like

In the lakeside town of Capernaum, Jesus taught in the synagogue, the local meeting place for prayer and Scripture, and people were amazed because He taught with authority. He drove out an evil spirit. He healed Simon’s mother-in-law of a fever. By evening the whole town was crowding around the door with their sick. Yet early the next morning, “while it was still dark, Jesus got up and slipped out to a solitary place to pray” (Mark 1:35).

A man with leprosy came and knelt before Him. Leprosy was a terrifying skin disease, and the law kept such people outside the community. Nobody touched them. Instead, “Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man,” and said, “I am willing ... Be clean!” (Mark 1:41). Normally touching someone unclean made you unclean. With Jesus, cleanness flowed the other way.

In Mark 2 four friends couldn’t get a paralysed man through the crowd, so they climbed onto the flat roof, dug through it and lowered him down. Jesus looked at him and said something nobody expected: “Son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5). The religious teachers were scandalised: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7). Exactly. So Jesus proved His authority: “get up, pick up your mat, and go home” (Mark 2:11). And the man walked out.

Then Jesus called Levi, a tax collector. Tax collectors worked for the occupying Romans and often cheated their own people, so they were hated. Jesus ate at his house with a crowd of other “sinners.” When the religious leaders complained, He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).

The Sermon on the Mount

Matthew gathers Jesus’ teaching into one long sermon, given on a hillside in Galilee. It begins with blessings that turn the world upside down: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:3–5). Not the strong, the rich and the confident: the empty, the sad and the gentle.

Jesus tells His followers, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). He has not come to throw out the Old Testament: “I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). But He goes deeper than anyone had. Not just “don’t murder” but don’t nurse anger. Not just “don’t commit adultery” but don’t feed lust in your heart. And most startling of all: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).

He teaches them to pray “Our Father,” and tells them to stop worrying about food and clothes: “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). He ends with a story of two builders. “everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matthew 7:24). When the storm comes, that house stands.

If you read the Sermon honestly, it is wonderful and terrifying. Who actually lives like this? Christians have long seen it both ways: as the real shape of life in God’s kingdom, and as a mirror that shows us we need the King’s mercy before we can begin.

Where Jesus is in this

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus starts His public work in the synagogue at Nazareth by reading Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind” (Luke 4:18). Then He sat down and said, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).

That is what Mark 1–2 shows in action: good news for the poor, freedom for the trapped, healing for the sick, forgiveness for sinners. The King promised to David has come, and His kingdom doesn’t arrive with an army. It arrives with a touch on a leper’s skin and a word of forgiveness to a paralysed man.

Think about it: Jesus said the people who are “blessed” are the poor in spirit, the mourners and the meek. Who would your school or your feeds say is “blessed”, and why is Jesus’ list so different?

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Bonhoeffer thought Christians had made the Sermon on the Mount “safe” by treating it as only for monks, or only for the future, or only an impossible ideal; he insisted it is Jesus’ real instruction to people He has already called, and that the Beatitudes describe His followers rather than set conditions for getting in. Start with chapter 5, “The Sermon on the Mount”.