Kingdom

At their innermost core, human beings have not lost the sense that they belong to God. They seek him consciously and unconsciously. "Image of God", "child of God", "the kingdom of God within you": these words and phrases point to the way human beings are constituted. Only those who have cut themselves off from God and think of themselves as monads feel anxiety before him. Those who experience themselves as one being with God, as children of God, do not fear him. They love themselves as they do all human beings and the whole of creation. Jesus was trying to tell us that with his metaphors of God the Father and his children who carrying within themselves his very being, his kingdom. (Contemplation, p40)

The Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21).

The Kingdom of God is among you (Luke 17:21).

The kingdom is inside you and it is outside you. The father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it. (The Gospel of Thomas, Wisdom, p264-5)

Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3).

My Kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as in heaven (Matt ).

Happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:3).

Happy are those who are persecuted in the cause of right; theirs is the Kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:10).

For every kingdom there is a king, and conversely, you must have a king before you have a kingdom. (Randy)

Jesus did not come among us primarily to establish the Church. His main mission was to promote and manifest "the Kingdom of God is close at hand (Mark 1:5)". It exists wherever God's will is at work and God's will is at work wherever people are faithful to the command that we love one another as God first loved us. It is present whenever God's power is making love, reconciliation and healing possible. It can be found in the redemptive (saving) presence of God whenever people love one another, forgive one another, bear another's burden, building of justice and peace and freedom, where people open to their Creator and serving their neighbor. The Kingdom of God has no boundaries; it may exist in the individual human heart, in groups, in institutions, in nature, and in the cosmos as a whole. It renews and transforms and recreates everything touched by it. It is past (esp. w/ Jesus), present (with the Church & other religons which is only a servant/instrument that at most just the initial budding forth - it strains toward the consummation of the Kingdom to be united in glory with its King - the full flowering), and future (will wipe every tear from our eyes...see Rev 21:4). The Kingdom of God includes all human beings, not just Christians. It has a worldly, fleshly, social, even political dimension. We are not to reject the vision of a final kingdom, but to broaden it [in the here and now] by removing oppression, poverty, disease, discrimination, war, hatred, and injustice from the world. (Catholic Update, Sept 1980)

The kingdom of God is a society (not individuals) where each individual has chosen suffering love as their way of life for the good of others and the whole. If each of us won't even give the little vices a chance (ie. drinking, gossip, 7 deadly), then the synergy from all of the little ones (like God's immanence) would result in not giving the big ones a chance to happen at all. (Randy)

For Jesus, the KINGDOM of God is concerned with a life LIVED now in response to God, in the PRESENCE of God. (Common Sense, p60)