The Kingdom of God Jesus announced the approaching Kingdom of God and therefore called people to repentance. The first two Gospels have set this at the beginning in a programmatic saying as a summary of his preaching and have thus characterized the central and dominant theme of his mission as a whole (Mark 1:15; Matt. 4:17). Thus, the Kingdom of God, or Kingdom of Heaven (a Jewish circumlocution for God preferred by Matthew), does not just denote a final chapter of his "system of doctrine" (a concept that cannot be applied to Jesus, in any case). The underlying Jewish word (malkhuta) means God's kingship, and not primarily his domain. This meaning prevails in the New Testament texts. But Kingdom of God or Heaven is also used in a spatial sense ("Enter . . ."). The burning expectation of the Kingdom of God was widely spread in contemporary Judaism in manifold form, based on the Old Testament faith in the God of the fathers, the Creator and Lord of the world, who had chosen Israel to be his people. But with this faith there had united itself the contradictory experience that the present condition of the world was ungodly, that Satanic powers reigned in it, and that God's kingship would only manifest itself in the future. In wide circles, this expectation had the form of a national, political hope in the Davidic Messiah, though it had expanded this hope in apocalyptic speculation to a universal expectation. In each case it was directed toward the Last Days. Likewise, in Jesus' message, the expression Kingdom of God has a purely eschatological--i.e., future--sense and means an event suddenly breaking into this world from the outside, through which the time of this present world is ended and overcome.
These traditional motifs of the end of the world, the Last Judgment, and the new world of God are not lacking in the sayings of Jesus preserved in the Gospel tradition. Thus, Jesus has not by any means changed the Kingdom of Heaven into a purely religious experience of the individual human soul or given the Jewish eschatological expectation the sense of an evolutionary process immanent in the world or of a goal attainable by human effort. Some of his parables have given rise to such misunderstanding (e.g., the stories of the seed and harvest, the leaven, and the mustard seed). In such cases, the modern thought of an organic process has been wrongly introduced into the texts. People of classical and biblical times, however, heard in them connotations of the surprising and the miraculous. The Kingdom of God, thus, is not yet here. Hence the prayer, "Thy kingdom come!" (Matt. 6:10; Luke 11:2), and the tenses, for example, in Jesus' Beatitudes and predictions of woe (Luke 6:21-26). The poor, the hungry, and the weeping are not yet in heaven. The petitions of the Lord's Prayer presuppose the deeply distressing circumstance that God's name and will are abused, that his Kingdom is not yet come, and that men are threatened by the temptation to fall away.
In regard to Jesus' preaching, one cannot, therefore, speak of a realized eschatology--i.e., the Last Times are now here (according to the view of C.H. Dodd, a British biblical scholar)--but of an eschatology "in process of realizing itself" (according to the view of Joachim Jeremias, a German biblical scholar); for God's Kingdom is very close. It is on the threshold, already casts its light into the present world, and is seen in Jesus' own ministry through word and deed. In this, his message differs from the eschatology of his time and breaks through all of its conceptions. He neither shared nor encouraged the hope in a national messiah from the family of David, let alone proclaimed himself as such a messiah, nor did he support the efforts of the Zealots to accelerate the coming of the Kingdom of God. He also did not tolerate turning the Kingdom of God into the preserve of the pious adherents of the Law (Pharisees; Qumran sect), and he did not participate in the fantastic attempts of the apocalyptic visionaries of his time to calculate and thus depict in detail the end of the present world and the dawn of the new "aeon," or age (Luke 12:56). Nor did he undertake a direct continuation of the Baptist's preaching.
All the ideas and images in Jesus' preaching converge with united force in the one thought, namely, that God himself as Lord is at hand and already making his appearance, in order to establish his rule. Jesus did not want to introduce a new idea of God and develop a new theory about the end of the world. It would therefore be incorrect to understand his preaching in the Jewish apocalyptic sense of immediate expectancy, coming, as it were, to a boiling point. The proximity of the Kingdom of God actually means that God himself is at hand in a liberating attack upon the world and in a saving approach to those in bondage in the world; he is coming and yet is already present in the midst of the still-existing world. In Jesus' message, God is no longer the prisoner of his own majesty in a sacral sphere into which pious tradition had exiled him. He breaks forth in sovereign power as Father, Helper, and Liberator and is already now at work, as is indicated by Jesus' proclaiming of his nearness and by Jesus' actions in entering the field of battle himself, to erect the signs of God's victory over Satan: "But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Luke 11:20). For this reason, Jesus called out: the shift in the aeons is here; now is the hour of which the prophets' promises told (Matt. 11:5; Isa. 35:5). This "here and now" carries all the weight in Jesus' message: "Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it" (Luke 10:23-24). In answer to the Pharisees' question about when the Kingdom of God is coming, Jesus therefore said, "The Kingdom of God does not come in an observable way, nor will they say, Look, here it is!' or There!' For look, the Kingdom of God is within your reach" (Luke 17:20-21; another translation: "in the midst of you").
The dominant feature of Jesus' preaching is the Heavenly Father's turning in mercy and love to the suffering, guilty, outcast, and to those who, according to the prejudices of the "pious," have no right to receive a share in the final salvation. Numerous parables described how God behaves toward them and shows himself as Lord and King (e.g., Luke 15; Matt. 18:23ff.; 20:1ff.). They all speak of God's action in images drawn from daily life, so that everyone can understand. They belong to the uncontestedly oldest stock of the Jesus tradition. But Jesus did not only teach this, he practiced and illustrated it himself by his own behaviour and thereby offended the pious, who claimed the Kingdom of Heaven for themselves.
In this message of the approaching Kingdom of God, Jesus' call to repentance is grounded. He called on all not to miss the hour of salvation (Luke 14:16ff.; 13:6ff.), to sacrifice everything for the Kingdom of God (Matt. 13:44ff.), and to receive it like a child (Mark 10:15), without the presumptuous and desperate conceit that one might win it and realize it by one's own works (Mark 4:26ff.; Matt. 13:24ff.). Jesus' summons to be wise, to be on the watch (Luke 16:1ff.; 12:35ff.; Mark 13:33ff.; Matt. 24:45ff.), and to surrender the fiction of one's own righteousness (Luke 18:10ff.) belongs here, too. In Jesus' preaching, repentance does not mean a prerequisite or precondition or even a penitent contemplation of oneself but, rather, a consequence of the proximity of the Kingdom of God (Matt. 4:17) and an opening of oneself for his future, a movement not backward, but forward. Jesus in this way binds future and present insolubly together. The apocalyptic's question about how much time still has to elapse before the new world of God is here is thus rendered meaningless. He who asks this only proves that he understands neither the future nor the present properly; namely, God's future as the salvation that is already dawning and one's own present in the light of the coming Kingdom of God.
Jesus therefore rejected the demand that he produce "signs" as proof of the dawning of the time of salvation (Matt. 12:38ff.; Mark 8:11). He himself is to be viewed as the "sign," just as once Jonah, the prophet of repentance, was the only sign given to the people in Nineveh (Luke 11:29ff.). The sign is not identical with the thing signified, but it is a valid indication of it.
According to the Synoptics, Jesus never made his "messiahship" the subject of his teaching or used it as legitimation for his message. It is significant that the "I am" sayings of John, which bear the stamp of Christology throughout, are not found in the Synoptic tradition. That does not in any way affect the fact that Jesus in a decisive way included his own person as eschatological prophet and charismatic miracle worker in the event of the Kingdom of God: "And blessed is he who takes no offense at me" (Matt. 11:6).
The Galilean period