In a passage common to Luke and Matthew, Jesus compares his reputation to that of John: “For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ ” (Luke 7:33–34 // Matt. 11:18–19). Moreover, in this same passage, Jesus draws another sharp distinction between himself and John: “I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he” (Luke 7:28 // Matt. 11:11). Even as he affirms John’s prophetic ministry, he signals that God is now present and active anew through him. The contrast between Jesus and John in this passage provides an important clue to understanding the distinctive character of Jesus’ ministry, the focus of which was the kingdom of God. How do we account for Jesus’ transition from participant in John the Baptist’s ascetic movement, with its standard covenantal emphasis on repentance and cleansing from sins, to being stigmatized for keeping company with those in need of reform?
John’s imprisonment and execution had a traumatic effect on Jesus, but another passage common to Luke and Matthew suggests that Jesus’ views were developing in a different direction even before that. When John sends his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus replies:
Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me. (Luke 7:22–23 // Matt. 11:4–6)
Paul Hollenbach proposes that this shift was caused by Jesus’ experience of God’s power being mediated through him to exorcise and heal, which he interpreted as the kingdom of God being present in some sense. The Gospels do consistently portray Jesus as having a distinct authority to enact the kingdom in word and deed that is markedly different from John’s apocalyptic vision of awaiting God’s approaching judgment.
As we attempt to situate Jesus in the Galilean context of his ministry, one question we must ask is: How did Jesus’ message and embodiment of the kingdom of God deal with the hardship of that village populace? This is a difficult question for at least two reasons. First, as Bultmann famously said, already in the earliest strata of the tradition the proclaimer has become the proclaimed. That is to say, the kingdom of God is the primary focus of Jesus’ activity, but in the Gospels, Jesus himself, his identity and significance, is the center of attention. The second complication follows from the first. Once Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God became a set of beliefs about him, the metaphor of the kingdom of God became more abstract and spiritualized. A Galilean or Judean audience in the first century would have heard the phrase “kingdom of God” as a political metaphor and would have grasped the implicit contrast with the client kingdoms that were an extension of imperial rule, such as that of Herod Antipas. To examine Jesus’ message and enactment of the kingdom of God in relation to the sociopolitical landscape of Galilee is to explore the politics of the kingdom, that is, how Jesus was organizing and mobilizing his followers to embody divine power in their local context.