Imagine you are standing out in an endless field of dry grass. In front of you, on the edge of your sight, you can see a strange-looking structure standing up amid all the flatness. You think your eyes might be tricking you—it looks like a pyramid flipped on its head, standing with its point touching the earth. The closer you get to the pyramid, the stranger the thing appears. Not only is the whole bulk of the enormous pyramid balanced on one tiny spot, but it doesn’t expand outward the same way the classic Egyptian ones do. It expands in fits and starts, almost like a ziggurat, some places going out wide and steep, other places almost completely leveling out, with no perceivable gradient.
As you step under the shade of its gigantic shadow, you notice huge heaps of brick littered beneath the pyramid, standing like tombstones for giants. Looking up, you can see places these brick hulks might have fit into the structure, but were pushed out. You take note that none of the structure appears to be made of brick, but all of stone, more like a mountain than something built by people.
You stand under the huge, expansive thing for what could be hours, trying to make sense of it. You would feel inclined to grin at the absurdity of the upside-down rock if it didn’t fill you with something like dread. Even when your attention wavers, the shade keeps you close by.
Curious how such a huge and strange thing can balance on one point, you glance at the tip of the pyramid, where it touches the ground. You see the pyramid come to a point on the ground about a hundred yards from where you stand, but you find you can’t actually look directly at the point. How did you not notice how bright it was there? In fact, the point of the pyramid is so blindingly bright you can’t actually get a good look at it. You know for some reason the light is Jesus, but you stand still, reflecting with some discomfort that you did not notice the light until you were close to it. The longer you look at the bright light, which hides Christ like a fog, the more your eyes burn.
Out of sheer curiosity you take a step closer, just to see if it helps you see Jesus better. You think for a moment you see a shape in the white light, but immediately your attention jerks back to a burning sensation all over your body, like you just opened an incredibly hot oven. You leap back, startled and a little synged. You decide to try and content yourself with just standing and looking into the brightness.
Eventually you have to look away, so you turn your eyes back up to the hulking mass of rock over your head. Suddenly, you’re stricken with doubt that there even is a rock there at all. You see its corners fade in and out, its structure seeming to be made of something like flecks of ash. You even notice birds flying through it, scattering the ash into the wind.
You glance back at the silent brightness, which appears to be emitting the aetherial mountain of dust over your head. Your dread fades into despair. You look down at your human feet, firmly planted in the dirt. As you turn to leave in dissolution, you hesitate as something new steals your attention.
Down the Rabbit Hole
A majority of mainline Christians in America go about their lives like the person in this story. They come under the shadow of this nebulous concept of the Kingdom of God, and are told to “look to Christ”. The longer we stand still, looking at that blinding light of His perfection, the more uncomfortable we become. We look up at His “kingdom” but don’t really see a place for us to fit in spiritually, let alone physically. Getting closer only seems to result in pain from your first experiment, so why would you want to get closer? From that limited perspective, any rational person would turn around and leave the disappointing, ugly thing.
But what if we drew closer? What if we let the light burn us? Would it get easier, or would it kill us? I know, this allegory may seem a little weird, but reality really hasn’t been ‘normal’ since Jesus was raised from the dead.
If you have the audacity to call yourself a ‘Christian’, either you don’t know what that word really means or you claim a very peculiar and unpopular view of reality. You claim that you yourself are, like Jesus or like the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle, an interruption of the natural order, because you affirm with Paul that “you are a temple of God, and that the Holy Spirit of God dwells in you” (1 Cor. 3.16). You, like the temple of the ancient Hebrews, are a tiny portal to a higher world, the perfect reality of God’s reign. You also affirm that, when the God-man Jesus Christ comes back in power, the body you’re in right now will be resurrected from whatever state of decay or disintegration it was in, and will be glorified like Jesus (Phil. 3.10-11, 1 Thes. 4.14).
But the strangest thing of all which you affirm is, despite all the trouble, death, pain, sickness, confusion, and doubt, the Kingdom of God has, in fact, already come to earth in the form of a man. You affirm that this Kingdom put an end to the old order of death and will come to complete fruition in the bodily return of Jesus Christ in power. You affirm something, which to worldly understanding is a blatant contradiction, that the rule and reign of the good King is, in some real sense, already here and is active in the twenty-first century, and also that it has not come yet. You affirm, as Theologian George E. Ladd puts it, that we live, “between the times”, with one foot in eternity and one on the perishing earth.
To call yourself a Christian is just flat crazy to the secular mind, and blasphemy to a non-Christian religious mind. It’s treason to the established order of the world, flatly contradicting the secular ontology of human infallibility and completely dismissing the authority of other world-religions, promising death and judgement to a global framework which seeks to do life without God. To a secular or religious mindset, a plain reading of what Christians actually believe is enough to relegate Christianity as something backward and destructive to the natural order, something like a disease. However, supposing what Jesus taught was true, then we would have to conclude that the world is a disease in need of a cure. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important”.
The Controversial Kingdom
Where do we get all these crazy claims in Christianity? They all flow from a very peculiar book, and in that book, from a very peculiar person: Jesus Christ, who coined the widely theorized and widely misunderstood term the “Kingdom of God”. It’s crucially important to understand that the Kingdom of God wasn’t just a talking point in Jesus’ earthly career, or a supporting argument for His more important agendas of salvation by grace through faith, etc. The Kingdom was Jesus’ cornerstone message, His main platform, His flagship argument. In fact, He goes so far as to say in Luke 4 that teaching the good news of the Kingdom was the reason He was sent,
“But He said, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent” (Lk, 4.43).” The fact that Jesus spoke more about the Kingdom of God than any other topic should give us pause as we reexamine the emphasises we place on His teachings today. Our most emphasized teachings in the evangelical church have to do with a systematized doctrine of salvation, or theorizing how much of what Jesus said He actually intends for us to take literally, but very little of our interests have to do with a biblical understanding of the Kingdom of God, except maybe as a pseudonym for heaven or the “pearly gates”. Although the term Kingdom of God is exchanged for Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew’s gospel, they are to be understood as the same topic and not to be superimposed over a colloquial idea of the ‘harp-and-cloud’ stereotype of heaven. There are boundaries to these two topics, and there is a reason why Kingdom of Heaven is not used interchangeably with heaven in Scripture, as I will explain more later in this chapter.
The phrase Kingdom (of God/Heaven) is used at least 107 times in the gospel books alone. For reference, in the whole New Testament, the word salvation is used only about 42 times, money/wealth is used only about 41 times, and church is used only about 73 times. Out of all the most discussed and theorized concepts talked about by Jesus, the concept of the Kingdom of God overshadows them all. In the Old Testament, many bible scholars would agree that the Law given to Moses was the crowning achievement, and all subsequent writers wrote in the shadow of the Law. A similar narrative structure can be recognized in the Kingdom of God in the New Testament—though of course itself not a uniquely New Testament concept. The Apostles and teachers that followed after Christ’s ascension lived in the light of His Kingdom message.
Oftentimes in Scripture, the whole of Christian teaching and practice is described and summarized by “the good news about the Kingdom of God” (Mk. 1:15; Lk. 16:16; Acts 8:12). This was the gospel Jesus preached in the towns and villages (Lk. 8:1; Mt. 9:35), and the gospel Phillip taught and was martyred for (Acts 8:12), and it was this gospel which Paul testified to the Jews, persuading them wherever he went (Acts. 28:23). It’s Scripturally evident that the good news of the New Testament is weighted in the direction of the Kingdom—whatever that means. It cannot be dismissed or overanalyzed. It’s from this primary flywheel that the rest of Jesus’ teachings and the apostle’s witness turn.
But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking the biblical Kingdom of God is easy to comprehend. Unfathomable damage has been done through an incomplete and ill-informed understanding of the Kingdom of God which Jesus taught. There are fine shades to the biblical representation of the Kingdom which cannot be glossed over, and often demand serious focus and interpretation. For example, in Jesus’ earthly ministry, He did not hesitate to speak to the religious leaders of His day as if the Kingdom of God were actually present in Himself, meaning locally available wherever He physically walked (Lk. 17.21, Mat. 12.28, Mk. 1.15). This may have struck you as strange with your first few readings of the gospels, but naturally we find our own personal ways to rationalize what Jesus likely meant—because what He is proposing is either too ridiculous or too far beyond our mental faculties to entertain.
This kind of talk is admittedly confusing to today’s readers, and certainly didn’t go over well with first-century Jewish religious leaders either. But their violent reactions to Jesus weren’t due to not being able to understand Him, but the other way around. The hyper conservative Pharisees and the coldly practical Sadducees seemed to have a pretty good handle on what Jesus meant when He talked about the Kingdom of God being “at hand”. In fact, they called what He said blasphemous, because they understood its implications. But what was it about this subtle phrase which carried with it so much controversy?
Defining the Kingdom
Like many pivotal phrases in Christianity, true and basic meanings have been lost through a web of misinterpretations and cultural connotations. Despite all this confusion, I think it is possible to regain a solid and unbiased idea in our modern minds of what Jesus meant. A concise definition of the greek word Basileia, which is generally translated as “Kingdom” in English, has to do with sovereignty, or royal power.
Although the word “Kingdom” implies monarchy, its root meaning is thankfully more accessible to modern minds. Basileus, the root of Basileia translates to “the notion of a foundation of power”, according to Strongs. Although it might be helpful to imagine a kind of knights and castles definition of this word, the biblical idea of Kingdom is more broad than that. It is something present wherever there is a foundation of power—meaning a personal will which is able to enact change. Philosopher and Christian writer, Dallas Willard succinctly defines Kingdom as “the range of one’s effective will”. For example, I am sitting in a chair in a coffee shop. The range of my effective will can be imagined to be the range of my arms to reach. I can reach out and lift my coffee cup, I can open the book on the table, I can type this sentence on my laptop. My will is capable of being acted upon in my environment.
A stronger example would be my range of effective will as a citizen of the United States. I could will for a bill to be passed in legislation, but that won’t make it happen. That is beyond my range of effective will. The only way I could change this would be to expand my foundation of power, to broaden my range of effective will. I can do this by going to college, getting a degree in political science, serving minor roles in government, running for higher offices, and maybe one day I would be in a position of power which would allow me to impose my will on the bill.
Now blow this concept up to a cosmic level. God is said to have a foundation of power. In fact, Scripture tells us He himself is the highest foundation of power—the range of His effective will covers everything He created. The whole created order is made to function within the range of God’s effective will, in other words, to function in obedience to His will the same way molecules and cells in our body obey the genetic code in our DNA. This is the Kingdom of God at its root—life perfectly ordered and maintained by the power of God.
The reason we cannot talk about the Kingdom of God in this simple way now is because there is a cosmic divide. Whatever obeys the will of God lives or abides in the Kingdom of God. However, the sin nature of mankind has made it so our normal experience is outside the Kingdom of God, outside the range of Gods effective will. This is why such stories as the tower of babel, and the many times God allowed Israel to fall into captivity are significant. To a mind that doesn’t understand the biblical notion of the Kingdom of God, the tower of babel could have just been a benign building project. The biblical writers understood that when people try to supplant the rule of God’s will with their own rule and will, not only are they rebelling against the ruler of the universe, they’re rebelling against their own spiritual makeup—like a creature that willfully allows a fatal virus to corrupt its genetic code. Sin literally unmakes, it allows us to fall apart because it keeps us outside the Kingdom of God. You’ve probably heard preachers say something along the lines of, “It was the mercy of God that scattered the people from the tower of babel”. Look at it in context—in love God willed the best for mankind, and the best was for them to repent, to turn around and come back into the will of God, which is the only foundation of power which allows us to function the way we were designed to.
This is where Jesus’ ministry of healing is so powerful. He did not heal the blind and the deaf and the sick at random, as it often seems in the New Testament. He used healing as a teaching tool to illustrate the Kingdom of God. God’s will was so perfectly done in Jesus that the created order around Him corrected itself at His word and touch. Notice in the gospels how many times the preaching of the Kingdom of God is paired with healing the sick. Jesus spoke as if the Kingdom of God was present in Himself, not just because He is God in flesh, but because wherever He went he carried a heavenly foundation of power through His connection to the Father; and if you’re tempted to think the physical manifestation of the Kingdom of God left with Jesus’ physical presence on the earth, listen to what He tells His disciples when he sends out the seventy-two: “Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you; and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’” (Lk. 10:8-9).
The dislocation of the human soul which occurs through sin, meaning disobedience toward the will of God, is mankind’s most ancient and fundamental problem. Everything else is a foam on the surface. Sin, as in the original term makes it out to mean, is “missing the mark”. But missing the mark can’t be understood as just an arbitrary perfectionist judgement, as if any other ring on the target would do just as well as a perfect bullseye. Missing the mark is astronomically more catastrophic than failing to do well at archery practice. It’s missing the mark on a NASA rocket launch, where there’s a very slim margin of error and anything outside that will send both rocket and crew beyond hope of return. Remember my snakes and feral cats analogy? Sin is as ancient a problem as snakes, and mankind has spent centuries devising countless pesticides and poisons to get rid of it. When the Kingdom of God is active in our lives, it quickly gets to work as the natural predator of sin; and when the snakes are gone, you can finally walk in your garden with confidence.
The Kingdom as Living
The Kingdom of God, as we’ve described it so far, is the divine foundation of power in human experience, it is the range of God’s effective will into which He calls people to participate through obedience. Human life and flourishing can only come about in so far as the individual is living within the will of God. The pervasive use of trees in Scripture to describe human life and flourishing is a perfect example of what this kind of life is like. Take Psalms 1 for example, where the Psalmist prefaces the book with the “blessed” person. He describes someone who is blessed as as “a tree firmly planted by streams of water, Which yields its fruit in its season And its leaf does not wither; And in whatever he does, he prospers.” (Ps. 1:3). The blessed person is part of a little natural ecosystem, a sustainable lifesource which produces routine fruit—but how does someone get to be like this tree? The Psalmist tells us, this is the kind of person who finds his/her delight in the Law of the Lord (Torah of the Lord: meaning direction, instruction of the Lord). To live in the will, direction, guidance, i.e. the way of God is to live a fulfilled human life.
The Kingdom of God is at the same time the most basic thing in existence, and also the most complicated thing. The Kingdom of God is made complicated to human beings because, like individually twisted spools of wire, we each need unique twisting back into straightness.
A Network of Lies
In the biblical story, the gospel of the Kingdom of God is the uniting thread. From the first pages of Genesis, it has been a story about God’s perfect will for human beings, and our distrust of God. Sin springing from our natural inclination toward distrust and unbelief—which is what carries the appeal of secularism today—unanimous justification of human disbelief. The Kingdom which is accessible to human experience is dependent on justified, true belief—which is what makes up knowledge. The most fatal thing to human flourishing in the Kingdom of God is misinformation and our choice to believe it.
What was it that lead Adam and Eve to distrust God and disobey? It was firstly misinformation, from the “father of lies” (Jhn. 8:44), and secondly it was their conscious decision to believe the word of the serpent over the word of God. Systematic distrust of the word of God reinforced with misinformation is what keeps human life buried in worry, doubt, meaninglessness, and waywardness—all things which unravel when the Kingdom of God is practiced and experienced as an active reality in our lives. At its root, the struggle everyone has with entering the Kingdom of God has to do with their choosing to believe misinformation, and thereby to distrust the word of God, which is the “which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” (2 Tim 3:15).
John 8 vividly describes the way human beings choose to live in lies, as Jesus turns to speak to the “Jews who believed Him”. After turning away the Pharisees when they had brought out the woman caught in adultery, Jesus tells them that He is: “the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.” (Jhn. 8:12). The crowd was still not convinced of Jesus though, and were not prepared to take Him at His word. In essence, looking back to Psalm 1, the streams of water were flowing from Jesus, but the tree was pulling up its roots. Note Jesus’ response to their unbelief. He paints the human situation in stark contrast with His divine perspective, when He says,
“Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word. You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me. Which one of you convicts Me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe Me? He who is of God hears the words of God; for this reason you do not hear them, because you are not of God.” (Jhn. 8:43-47).
There’s a lot here to unpack, but don’t get scared! Although Jesus’ language here seems harsh, especially toward people who already ‘believed’ Him, what He’s saying is invaluable information about the Kingdom of God. The first thing we should notice about this is, they don’t get what Jesus is saying. It’s not because they’re dumb, or theologically illiterate. They practically give Jesus little catechism answers when they talk about their father being Abraham and God. They think they are saved for knowing, they think they have Salvation just for being the sort of people they are—in short they have a secular bent to their thinking, “we don’t need Jesus to live”. Jesus’ teaching might interested them, they might even ‘believe’ and agree with what He is saying, but they are not ready to make Him the King of their lives and follow Him.
The next thing we should not is the topic of fathers. In John particularly, we are meant to understand Jesus’ life, motivation, and power flowing directly from the father; like Jesus is an old-fashioned diver at the bottom of the sea and the Father is the home-boat pumping air down into His helmet. The Father is His source of life as Jesus abides in the Father’s love (Jhn. 15:9). But human beings do not naturally abide in the Father’s love the way Jesus does—the world we see, the way we make sense of it, the meta-narratives we create are all fashioned around lies and half-truths. The sin we see in human behavior is just the tip of an infinitely larger iceberg, which infects our whole human experience outside of the life of God. In summary, human beings are dead because our father is not Father God by nature, but the devil, the father of lies. The death which flows from this system of lies makes the Devil a ‘murderer from the beginning’. It for this reason Jesus’ words were not understood by the people. But His main point wasn’t to tell the people about how wrong they were and how irreversible their miserable condition was. He was offering the last life-raft to people who wouldn’t even acknowledge the boat was sinking.
The Truth as a Way
Jesus’ point in John 8 was not to just put people down, it was to draw people to Himself—to wake them up to the fact they were sitting comfortably in a boiling stew of lies. What they needed, and what we need desperately today, is the truth. The truth is not something that can be taught in a classroom, nor learned through life experience, nor found in silence and solitude—though you can have all these things with the truth. Jesus told them, “I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.” (Jhn. 8:12). The truth is something you abide in, something you love, something you live with and follow—Jesus Christ is the truth.
But of course we know this! We’ve heard it all before. “The truth isn’t something, it’s Someone”, “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship”, we’ve heard it over and over. But why don’t tidy platitudes like these do more than tickle our heart-strings? Because our experience of truth is not so vague, it’s not wrapped up in subtle shades of language and tone, but in hard fact. You don’t avoid stepping into oncoming traffic because you are predisposed by a personal conviction that it’s dangerous. You don’t do it because you know you’ll get killed if you do that. You don’t even have to get run over to know that getting hit by a car it is an experiential reality—something you assume must be like your own experiences of tripping and hitting the ground, or walking into a door-frame by accident, only multiplied by hundreds. Our knowledge of real life is experiential, to have knowledge at all is to have “justified true belief”, as the philosophical maxim describes it.
Human life is naturally predisposed to beliefs, but the trouble is justifying those beliefs. This is why, in recent centuries, there has been a falling away from the idea that we can ever be certain of any proposition. There’s no standard by which to justify our belief and have real knowledge, so we devise all sorts of surrogate standards: humanism, rationalism, egoism, naturalism, all the “isms” which are the sand-pillars of the secularist experiment. The moment they are set under the weight of human experience they collapse, leaving generations of people trained to put faith in these pillars disillusioned and desperate, as I’ve discussed earlier. Jesus presents mankind with a unique standard—Himself, and by this we mean His earthly life and His present ministry through Holy Spirit. Since Jesus is Himself the originator and sustainer of reality (Col. 1:17; John 1:3; Heb. 1:2), there is no one more qualified to justify or condemn a human belief and make judgements as to what is real knowledge, or “truth”.
It’s His light which leads people to justified true belief, on which one can confidently build a life set apart from fear of possibly living under lies. But what exactly does this look like? How do we get this light? How do we know the standard by which to judge information and recognize truth? It is not by memorizing formula or even by reciting doctrine—it comes through knowing the person Himself; “he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life”.
Can we actually ‘follow’ Jesus as if he were still walking on the earth? Yes, we absolutely can—this is what discipleship, or apprenticeship to Jesus is. There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation surrounding the word ‘discipleship’ in church today. It’s become a buzzword more than a meaningful concept that is actually put into practice. Dallas willard describes discipleship as:
“…being with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become like that what that person is. An “apprentice” of Jesus is learning from him how to lead their life as he would lead their life if he were they.”
We follow Jesus in order to know Him better, and in knowing Him better, we learn to live like He did, which is the baseline call of every believer—to be like Christ (1 Jhn. 2:6). Taken to its rightful conclusion, true discipleship may lead us into doing things that we might have considered irresponsible and idiotic prior to our full commitment to Christ. It might lead us to abandon jobs, reprioritize finances and leisure time, experience more frequent discomfort and greater degrees of suffering, etc. But as you grow in discipleship you will grow out of fear like a childish habit, you will know the peace and abundance Jesus feels with the Father, you will find a true family of like-minded followers, you will fall in real love with Jesus, and you will be at home in the present Kingdom of God as it surrounds you and moves with you like it did with Jesus when He walked on earth.
Yes, the Kingdom of God is accessible—more accessible today than many give it credit, but it’s an expensive route to take. It will cost you all of your little kingdom—but in return you will inherit the Kingdom of God. The trick now is to ask ourselves, do we value the Kingdom enough to take Christ up on His offer?
If the cost of the Kingdom is anything to go by, it’s incredibly valuable. Think about the parable of the treasure found in a field: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (Mt. 13:44). Or even consider Jesus’ own life and death. His will was so surrendered to the will of the Father that when He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane before His humiliation, torture, and death, He was able to say with full sincereity, “not my will, but Your’s be done.” (Lk. 22:42). This was not sad resignation to a foreign will, this was His own will being so saturated by the Father’s will that the two could not be separated! Better than that, we’re told Jesus didn’t obey reluctantly, but He, “for the joy set before Him endured the cross” (Heb. 12:2).
The question we should be asking when we read these verses together is, what is it Jesus saw in the will of the Father which gave Him that kind of joy—the kind of joy that eclipses even the most severe and excruciating circumstances, and how do we get that vision. It doesn’t start with sheer obedience to the written word—although this is good and a beautiful thing, we can quickly burn out and give up if we don’t see immediate results. Where we start is in desperation and sincere repentance, which I will describe in greater detail in the following Chapter.
The Realized Kingdom
What was it that caught your attention? Was it the wind? A sound? Some kind of chemical imbalance tricking your senses? You turn to face that blinding light again. As if the thought entered your mind without you thinking it, you remember there is nothing but empty miles of dry grass in every direction. Then you hear it again, this time loud enough to discern as sound, but hardly a whisper, saying,
“Come closer.”
Filled with a discontent for a meaningful life anywhere else, you brace yourself for the heat you know is going to come, and take another step toward the light. The same sweltering heat sweeps over you, prickling your skin and searing the tips of your hair. You stand for a moment, gritting your teeth. Then, to your surprise you find you’re still alive—not consumed in fire nor in any real pain yet. You look in the direction of Jesus and for the first time see a shape in the light, like a real person. Filled with something like courage mingled with curiosity, you take another step closer. This time it really burns. You wonder if you’re getting in over your head. Maybe following closer is irresponsible. But one look at Jesus tells you you cannot turn back. You see His eyes now, and you know He’s calling you closer.
You go on like this for a long time, longer than you would have thought possible. Every step seems to double the heat, but every foot closer to Jesus sharpens and clarifies His shape. Soon you see flames flashing over your skin, threatening to burn you up like you’re a space shuttle reentering the atmosphere. But you’re not consumed, not even your clothes are consumed. The nearer you get to Jesus, the more detail you notice, and the more expression you see in his very human face. You see He is no statue of a historic Jesus, nor a ghostly essence of the cosmic Christ, but the very human, Jewish man with holes in his wrists.
You also notice that Jesus is not absent from the fire, as if He were in the eye of the storm. He is the source of the fire, and He lives in the middle of the fire. At the same time you notice this, you realize you can’t feel the heat any more. You’re not numb from the burning, or just used to it, you’re filled with life and energy because of it. In fact, you can hardly imagine how you could have lived without the fire.
When finally you reach Jesus, He’s smiling ear-to-ear. He puts a warm hand on your shoulder. You notice your own shoulder looks different. It’s grown muscular from the effort. Jesus lifts his other hand upward without saying a word. With the joy of pure love in His face, you can’t help but follow His gaze.
Looking up at the pyramid above your head again, you notice for the first time that it’s almost completely enwrapped in vegetation and flowering plants, feeding off the stone like it was rich, black soil. If this pyramid were a mountain, it would be the overgrown tropical kind of mountain. No barren, snow capped peak. You blink with confusion as you notice something else. How could you have missed it?
The surface of the pyramid is dotted with thousands of windows and gables, some like those in cathedrals and monasteries, others simple clay portholes from impoverished houses. You blink again in disbelief as you notice the whole surface of the forested pyramid is criss-crossed by paths and roads. Stranger still, you see these roads are populated by tens of thousands of people, walking along like ants on a ceiling, as if the earth were not above their heads.
With a pang of longing, you see men and women from every age and every nationality, looking up at you and waving to you, calling you toward them with child-like eagerness. ‘If only I could live like them’, you whisper allowed. But even as you do, you feel Jesus grip under your arm and lift you up. With a thrill of fright, you feel the familiar pressure of the dry earth lift from under your feet. Looking down, you see the old ground is no longer there. The dry and barren wasteland has given way to open blue sky, and you see Jesus standing now lowering you onto the pyramid, standing now at the crown of the great mountain. As you gently descend toward the waiting, joyful cloud of witnesses, you realize with clear eyes that you were the one who was upside-down, and the only way back right side up was through the narrowest way. Through the person of Jesus.
