Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom by Norman Perrin
Chapter 2: The Interpretation of Kingdom of God in the Message of
C. KINGDOM OF GOD IN CHRISTIAN LITERATURE
1. An Interpretation of Kingdom of God in Luke 17:20—37
It would be very interesting to reinvestigate the use of Kingdom of God in the New Testament as a whole in light of the thesis of the use by Jesus that I have presented above, but that is a task for another occasion.
For the moment I will discuss only one example of the reinterpretation of Jesus’ use in the New Testament literature, that in Luke 17:20-37.
In the Revised Standard Version Luke 17:20-21 reads as follows:
Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, he answered them, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say,
‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you."
We have already discussed the core of this, the saying, as an authentic saying of Jesus. At this point I would simply add that the saying is being transmitted in the narrative context of a question by "the Pharisees."
This narrative will have been provided within the tradition itself, and the Pharisees’ question will have been formed within the tradition, most probably by inference from the saying itself. Our interest at the moment is in the following passage, Luke 17:22-37, which begins:
And he said to the disciples, "The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and you will not see it. And they will say to you, ‘Lo,
there!’ or ‘Lo, here!’ Do not go, do not follow them."
Luke 17:22-23
This passage is deliberately linked to the previous one in two ways. In the first place it is represented as private teaching to the disciples after a more public form of teaching. This is a favorite literary device for
adding interpretations to teaching previously presented in the synoptic gospels. Then, secondly, the "‘Lo, there!’ or ‘Lo, here!’" obviously picks up the previous "‘Lo, here it is’ or ‘There!’" We are therefore justified in reading 17:22-23 as an interpretation of 17:20-21, which means that Jesus’ reference to the coming of the Kingdom of God is being interpreted as a reference to the coming of the Son of Man.
The remainder of the passage, verses 24-37, develops the theme of the coming of the Son of Man. That coming will be as lightning flashing and lighting up the sky; it will be analogous to the judgmental
catastrophes of the days of Noah and of Lot; it must be preceded by the suffering and rejection of the Son of Man, a Lukan passion prediction;
and so on. The details are unimportant; what is important is that this passage interprets Jesus’ proclamation of the coming of the Kingdom of God as a proclamation of the coming of Jesus himself as Son of Man.
Equally unimportant is the question whether this act of interpretation was actually carried out by the scribes who produced the synoptic gospel source Q, by some other early Christian scribes, or by the evangelist Luke himself, although this last is most unlikely. What matters is the clear case of an interpretation of Jesus’ use of Kingdom of God in terms of a use of Son of Man in the New Testament traditions.
This is one of the more dramatic of the Christian interpretations of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Earliest Christianity did not go on proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God as Jesus had proclaimed it; rather, earliest Christianity proclaimed the coming of Jesus as Son of Man. As Bultmann likes to put it: the Proclaimer became the Proclaimed. If we wished to use theological language then we could say that Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom as eschatological event, so earliest Christianity proclaimed him as eschatological event. But I will stay with the language I have been using and say, rather, that earliest Christianity used the Son of Man to evoke the myth of apocalyptic redemption where Jesus had used the symbol Kingdom of God to evoke the myth of the activity of God.
The development of the imagery of the coming of the Son of Man as apocalyptic judge and redeemer was a rather complex process in earliest Christianity,83 but in our present context those details are not important.
The imagery of the coming of the Son of Man as apocalyptic judge and redeemer is one possible variation of the theme of The apocalyptic
redemption which was the central hope of Jewish apocalyptic at the time of Jesus and of earliest Christianity. We discussed this in some detail earlier84 and it is obvious that the symbolism could vary enormously — one could speak of the coming of the Kingdom, of the archangel
Michael, of the Man from the Sea (4 Ezra), of Enoch as Son of Man or Elect One, of the Shoot of David, and so on, indefinitely. But behind the variety of symbols there is a consistency of myth: apocalyptic is always concerned with the myth of the final and decisive redemptive act of God on behalf of his people.
In moving from the symbol Kingdom of God to a symbol of apocalyptic redemption such as that of the coming of the Son of Man, earliest
Christianity may be said to have stayed within the same mythological framework but to have considerably changed the focus. In comparing Jesus with Jewish apocalyptic one is necessarily struck by the fact that the symbol he chooses to use is one that is necessarily a tensive symbol, only with the greatest of difficulty, if at all could Kingdom of God be reduced to a steno-symbol. But Son of Man is a very different matter.
Like the parallel symbols Shoot of David, Man from the Sea, archangel Michael, etc., it invites treatment as a steno-symbol, and it invites the that Jesus had always rejected. The Son of Man is perhaps not
necessarily a steno-symbol, but the Christian identification of Jesus as Son of Man makes it difficult to make it anything more. Jesus-as-Son-of- Man-to-come-as-apocalyptic-redeemer invites calculation of the time and seeking for signs. In this respect it is interesting that Luke 17:22-37 is virtually an apocalyptic discourse, like Mark 13; Matthew 24; Luke 21; Assumption of Moses 10; 1 Enoch 1:3-9; 1 Enoch 46:1-8; 4 Ezra 6:13-18.85 In the context of an apocalyptic discourse, Luke 17:23 contrasts very sharply with 17:21. In the genuine saying of Jesus, the kind of thing that is represented by "Lo, here it is!" or "There!" is flatly rejected. In the reinterpretation "Lo, there!" or "Lo, here!" is negated only to the extent that it is difficult to locate a lightning flash. The
context of an apocalyptic discourse rules out the kind of flat rejection of signs characteristic of Luke 17:21, and of the genuine teaching of Jesus.
In Mark 13, for example, the apocalyptic discourse par excellence in the New Testament; "Look, here is the Christ!" or "Look, there he is!" is similarly only partially negated — in effect Mark 13:21-22 negates the
"Look, here!" or "Look, there!" only to the extent that these are false Christs, not that the Christ could never be found in that way — while in verses 24-25 a series of signs are given by which it may be known that the Son of Man is about to appear.
The first major interpretation of Jesus’ use of Kingdom of God in the Christian traditions is the interpretation of the coming of the Kingdom of God in terms of the coming of Jesus as Son of Man. This remains within the general framework of the myth of God as active on behalf of his people, but the change is unmistakable. The tensive symbolism has given way to the steno-symbolism more usual in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic. Under certain circumstances the Son of Man symbolism of Christian apocalyptic could become tensive symbolism, but this does not appear to be the case in the apocalyptic discourses which are its natural context in the New Testament. In any case the shift toward steno-
symbolism is unmistakable in the move from Jesus to earliest Christianity.