Imagining the Kingdom
J. R. R. Tolkien is considered the father, or maybe grandfather, of modern fantasy. Being passionate about literature and language, it was only a matter of time before he developed a language to make stories of his own. Once he had developed his own language, he built a world for the language to reasonably occupy. The synthesis of this invented language and invented world was the foundation of the stories he wrote. As a result, the stories feel like they exist within a realistic history. The world feels lived-in. It has character. Tolkien didn’t just make up characters. He invented creatures, plants and animals, languages, places, cultures, histories, myths, legendary heroes, and religions. The world has depth.
Unfortunately, not all fantasy narratives share Tolkien’s passion for worldbuilding. One particularly notorious example is the Netflix original movie Bright. Bright is essentially a big city cop drama with fantasy elements mixed in. Imagine a modern city in the United States, but with elves, orcs, and fairies. While this is an interesting concept, the movie didn’t do well with critics, especially critics who were fantasy fans. The idea of having all these different races with very different characteristics and histories all living together but that not having any effect on the history of the United States is odd to the point of being unbelievable. When people really started to think about the world that Bright inhabited, they couldn’t help but wonder if the creators really took the time to think about this world. You can’t have so many things be so different and yet leave all the structures of the world the same.
As much as many of us would be happy to just criticize Bright and move on, I think Christians are also guilty of the same mistakes, and we need to start acknowledging it. We believe in some truly amazing things, things that would completely upset our current social order if they were fully realized, so why do we continue living the way we do? Shouldn’t our views be pretty incompatible with the “present evil age” as Galatians 1:4 puts it?
If you were to imagine the Kingdom of God fully realized at the end of time, what would that look like? It’s certainly easy to go with a simple answer. “I’d be happy and get to see all my loved ones and no one would ever be sick or sad.” That is certainly a nice sentiment, but it does a Bright level of work on world details, when the Church needs a Tolkien-like imagination.
What do you do on a daily basis in the Kingdom of Heaven? Do you work? Do you need to earn money? Does money even exist in the Kingdom? How do you feed yourself and your family? Do you have your own personal land on which no one can trespass or does everyone just kind of walk around wherever they want? Do we build big, magnificent cities, or do we live in perfect harmony with nature?
Are there problems you face on a daily basis? Are there poor people and rich people or does everyone have the same access to what they need? Do we see racial differences? Are people who look different from us respected and fully embraced? Are people with life styles that are different from our own welcome around us or do we still draw hard boundaries to keep some people out? Is everyone family or do we privilege some relationships over others?
And with the full power and grace of God revealed in ultimate triumph, do we still have personal struggles? Do we still hold grudges or do we forgive easily? Do we still distrust people who have hurt us in the past or do we overlook the harm people have done us before? Do we still struggle with personal sins, if so how do we fight them? Do we hide and suppress our hidden desires or do we make them known to God and to neighbors who can help us?
Isaiah imagined a world in which even predation was abolished. In Isaiah 11:1-9, the prophet speaks of a kingdom in which wolves, leopards, and lions live in peace with their former prey. That may sound completely ridiculous, but that is the Biblical image of the Kingdom. Death, scarcity, hunger, greed, and violence no longer hold any power. People and animals are free to live in the joyful bliss of God’s holy presence.
We are called to proclaim that Kingdom. We are called to so vividly imagine that Kingdom that we pray for God to make it real for us in our lives and in our world. We are living in the end times, the middle space between God’s ultimate act of salvation in the death of Jesus on the cross, and the culmination of all prophecy at the end of time. The present age is one in which the Kingdom struggles in daily battle against the forces of evil that control the world. This is a spiritual warfare that we participate in constantly, and one of our greatest assets is imagination.
God’s Word describes the Kingdom we proclaim. Through the Holy Spirit, this vision becomes more and more real to us until it is finally fulfilled in the world. In the dark, violent, and evil age we live in now, we can’t afford to be lazy in our imagination. Our neighbors, the poor, marginalized, and oppressed are relying on us to proclaim the Kingdom with boldness. We must imagine the coming kingdom and fight against all evil powers that would prevent it. If we truly see the Kingdom that God’s Word describes, we cannot help but actively pursue it. We are driven to fight against greed, hate, and intolerance. We are compelled to go out and fight the systems that exploit people that hold them down and tear them away from the Kingdom’s goal.
If we think of life looking essentially the same in the Kingdom of God as it does now with just a bit less sadness, we aren’t vividly imagining the Kingdom. The World that God is building is completely different from the one so deeply affected by sin. The structural parts of our world that we take for granted will be undone. We pray for boldness and vision to see the World God is making and to let go of our attachments to the evil opposed to this Kingdom. The night is passing. A new age is dawning. Christ is making all things new.
