The Kingdom of Heaven

This time through Matthew, I thought about the Kingdom of Heaven. Through Jesus' words, starting from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew deconstructs our most basic assumptions about how to live, instincts like, "it is better to be happy than to mourn," or, "if someone attacks me, I should defend myself." He overturns our systems of value in episodes like the one where Jesus tells the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven." Nietsche, Sartre, and Camus thought they were doing groundbreaking work with their existential crises; actually they were two thousand years behind the times.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not like the kingdom of this world. It is alien to us, and that is the beautiful thing about the message we find in the Gospels. I started going to a small group at Campus Crusade at Berkeley, and last Tuesday we discussed arguments for the existence of God. Afterwards, I was thinking about why I believe God exists, and one of the main reasons is the foreignness of the content in the Bible, mostly in Jesus' teachings. No human being, using only his or her imagination, would be able to create a world that runs so counter to our natural instincts. The kingdom of heaven is greater than I can understand, and that is why I am glad to believe in it.