Reading Synoptic Gospel Ecologically
The Kingdom of God as the Renewal of Creation
Jesus presupposed the creation theology of the Hebrew Bible, centred on the belief that God created all things (cf. Matt. 19:9; Mark 10:6) and, as ‘Lord of heaven and earth’ (Luke 10:21; Matt. 11:25), cared for the whole of his creation. As we shall see, this was the presupposition of his teaching about the kingdom of God. But creation theology also appears explicitly at a number of key points in Jesus’ theology:
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1. To support his command to love enemies, Jesus uses the
notion of imitation of God: ‘so that you may be children of your Father in heaven;
for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the
righteous and on the unrighteous’ (Matt. 5:45).19 The God who generously and
mercifully pours his blessings on all people without distinction is the Creator
who, according to Psalm 145, ‘is good to all, and his compassion is over all
that he has made (Ps. 145:9). He is the source of all the blessings of the
natural world, including sun (Ps. 19:4–6) and rain (Pss. 65:9–11; 104:13;
147:8; Lev. 26:4).
2. . ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of
them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father. And even the hairs of your
head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many
sparrows’ (Matt. 10:29–31; cf. Luke 12:6–7). While the point of this saying is
to reassure the disciples of God’s providential care for them, this rests on
the assertion that God’s providence embraces even the sparrows, whom humans
value so cheaply that a pair costs a penny in the market. It is God who
preserves each sparrow’s life, and so not one sparrow can be caught in a
hunter’s net without his knowledge and consent. Jesus’ words here reflect the view
of the Hebrew Scriptures that God’s caring responsibility embraces each living
creature he has made (Job 12:10; Pss. 36:6; 104:29–30).
3. ‘Look at the birds
of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your
heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? . . . Consider
the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell
you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if
God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is
thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you . . .?’ (Matt. 6:26,28–30;
cf. Luke 12:24,27–8). Again, this is an argument from the lesser (wild flowers
and birds) to the greater (human), but again the lesson for Jesus’ hearers
cannot be had without the premise that God cares for birds and wild flowers.
That God feeds the birds (as he does all living creatures) is explicit in the
Hebrew Bible (Ps. 147:9; Job 38:41; cf. Pss. 104:27–8; 145:15–16). Humans can
trust in God’s provision because they too are members, even if eminent members,
of the community of God’s creatures for whom he generously provides.
4. Probably Jesus’ hearers would also have
understood his parables of growth (Mark 4:3–8,26–32; and parallels) in terms of
Jewish creation theology. They would not have supposed the growth of grain or
mustard plants to be some kind of autonomous natural process, but as due to the
blessing of God (cf. 1 Cor. 3:6). Only through the blessing of God is his
creation fruitful (Deut. 7:12; 26:15; 28:4–5; Pss. 65:9–11; 67:6; 107:38; cf.
Gen. 1:22,28). So in these parables the comparison is between God-given growth
in creation and the Godgiven growth of the kingdom of God, or, we might say,
between the divine work of creation and the divine work of salvation and renewal.
Also worth noticing at this point is the fact that the Psalms feature so
prominently among the biblical sources of Jesus’ creation theology. They would,
of course, have been among the Scriptures best known to both Jesus and his
hearers.
From these indications
of the importance of creation theology to Jesus the question arises as to its
relationship to his proclamation of the coming kingdom of God, which the
Synoptic Gospels consider the overriding theme of his mission and teaching.
Misunderstanding at this point has been fostered both by the tendency of
scholars (enshrined in the so-called ‘criterion of dissimilarity’) to stress
only what appears to be novel in the teaching of Jesus vis-à-vis Judaism, and
also by the perception of some kind of opposition between creation and
eschatology, as though the eschatological kingdom comes to abolish and replace
creation. Instead, we should recognize the continuity between Jesus’ teaching
and the Scriptures and traditions of Judaism, without which what was novel in
his teaching cannot be understood, and, crucially, that the kingdom of God in
the teaching of Jesus represents not the abolition but the renewal of creation.
Just as Jesus’
creation theology seems rooted especially in the Psalms, so also is his
understanding of the kingdom of God, though Isaiah and Daniel are also
important in this case. Most treatments of the background to the kingdom of God
in the Gospels give no great prominence to the Psalms, but Bruce Chilton’s work
especially remedies this failure.[1]
The kingship and rule
of God are more prominent in the Psalms than in most other parts of the Hebrew
Bible, and they are closely related to creation. It is as Creator that God
rules his whole creation (Ps. 103:19–22). His rule is over all that he has
made, human and otherwise (Pss. 95:4–5; 96:11–13), and it is expressed in the
kind of caring responsibility for creation that we have already seen reflected
also in the teaching of Jesus (Ps. 145). All non-human creatures acclaim his
rule now (Pss. 103:19–22; 148) and all nations must come to do so in the future
(Ps. 97:1), for God is coming to judge the world, that is, both to condemn and
to save (Pss. 96:13; 98:9). His own people Israel’s role is to declare his
kingship to the nations (Pss. 96:3,10; 145:10–12). When God does come to judge
and to rule, all creation will rejoice at his advent (Pss. 96:11–12; 98:7–8).
(These last three sentences show how close these Psalms are to the message of Isa.
40 – 66, where the rule of God is also central.)
The kingship and rule
of God in the Psalms have both a spatial and a temporal dimension. They are
cosmic in scope, encompassing all creation, by no means confined to human
society. They are also eternal, established at creation and set to last forever
(Pss. 93; 145:13; 146:10). Yet God’s rule is widely flouted and rejected by the
nations, and so it is still to come in the fullness of power and in manifest
glory.
The God who rules from
his heavenly throne (Pss. 11:4; 103:19) is coming to establish his rule on
earth. It is this coming that Jesus proclaims. His distinctive phrase, ‘the
kingdom of God comes’, stands for the expectation of the psalms and the
prophets that God himself is coming to reign.
The cosmic scope of
the kingdom can be seen in the opening three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer in
Matthew’s version:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
your kingdom come.
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:9–10).
The phrase ‘on earth
as it is in heaven’ should probably be understood to qualify all three of the
petitions. Presently, God’s name is perfectly hallowed, his rule perfectly
obeyed, and his will absolutely done in heaven, but all are neglected or
contested on earth. Probably the emphasis is on humans coming to hallow God’s
name, to acknowledg God’s rule and to do his will, but we should recall that in
the Hebrew Bible non-human creatures also do these things, often when humans
fail to do so (e.g. praising God’s name: Ps. 145:5,13; acclaiming his rule:
Pss. 103:19–22; 145:10–11; doing his will: Jer. 8:7). Moreover, the coupling of
‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ cannot fail to evoke the whole creation, everything God
created at the beginning (Gen. 1:1; 2:1,4). God, it was standardly said, is the
Creator of heaven and earth, and this is the basis on which his kingdom must
come on earth as it is in heaven. The kingdom does not come to extract people
from the rest of creation, but to renew the whole creation in accordance with
God’s perfect will for it.
As well as proclaiming
and explaining the kingdom of God, Jesus instantiated it in the many activities
of his ministry. These included the miracles of healing, exorcisms and the
so-called ‘nature’ miracles. They also included significant acts such as his
demonstration in the temple, sharing meals with sinners, blessing children,
washing the disciples’ feet, and riding a donkey into Jerusalem. All these
activities are to be understood as proleptic instances of the coming of the
kingdom, helping to define how Jesus understood the rule of God, but more than
just symbols of its coming. In such activities the kingdom was actually coming,
but in anticipatory fashion, in small-scale instances. Their small-scale nature
comports with the way most of the parables represent the kingdom by events set
in the ordinary world of Jesus’ hearers. Just as a mustard plant, in the
parable, grows to the dimensions of the mythical world tree, so, when Jesus
stills the storm, a squall on the lake evokes the vast destructive power of the
mythical abyss. Just as the extraordinary generosity of God in his coming
kingdom is figured, in the parable, when a master serves dinner to his slaves,
so it takes place when Jesus pronounces the forgiveness of a notorious sinner
who washed his feet.
The activities of
Jesus were small-scale anticipations of the kingdom that heralded its universal
coming in the future. What is notable about them, for our purposes, is the way
that their holistic character points to the coming of the kingdom in all
creation. Jesus brough wholeness to the lives of the people he healed and
delivered: reconciling them to God, driving the power of evil from their lives,
healing diseased bodies, making good crippling disabilities, restoring social relationships
to those isolated by their misfortune, while of those who had everything he
required much. Some at least of the nature miracles anticipate the
transformation of human relationships with the nonhuman world in the renewed
creation. In the feeding miracles God’s generous provision for his people
through the gifts of creation takes place even in the barren wilderness, as had
happened in the first exodus (Ps. 78:15–16, 23–5) and was expected for the new
exodus (Isa. 35:1,6–7;23 41:18–19; 51:3; cf. Ezek. 34:26–39). When Jesus walks
on the water and stills the storm, God’s unique sovereignty over the waters of
chaos is evoked, with the expectation that in the renewed creation the
destructive powers of nature will be finally quelled. While most of Jesus’
activities focused on humans and human society in relation to God, there are
sufficient indications that Jesus and the evangelists also embraced the fully
inclusive understanding of God’s rule over all creation that is so prominent in
the Psalms.
[1] Bruce Chilton, Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans/ London: SPCK, 1996), ch. 2.
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