Building the kingdom

When John the Baptist was in prison, he sent disciples to Jesus to ask if Jesus was the one they were waiting for (the Messiah).

There is some speculation on why John did that, because his testimony when he baptized Jesus seemed pretty definitive, but maybe those disciples needed to know. They got to see many healings and miracles in the course of a day, but I want to focus on the answer after that.

Matthew 11:
4 Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:

5 The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

This was a fulfillment of prophecy. Both Psalms 146:8 and Isaiah 42:7 refer to the healing aspects, like the eyes of the blind being opened and the lame being able to walk.

Neither of those verses mentioned the gospel being preached to the poor, but that gets referenced when Jesus preaches in Nazareth, where he quotes the beginning of Isaiah 61:

Luke 4:18
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

As it is, Jesus did all of that and continues to do it. We may not see as much of the physical healing now as in other dispensations, but it happens and will happen again. Certainly, modern medicine is capable of doing a lot more than it does, with a lot of its failure being due to money.

Maybe that is why the gospel being preached to the poor resonated with me so much.

When I was a missionary, it always felt like the gospel was the answer to every problem. Later on as I started trying to help people with eating disorders and depression, who were often suicidal... it's not that I never mentioned anything religious, but that usually wasn't what was needed in the moment. There were whole other levels that they needed to go through before the nature of God or modern day revelation could be helpful.

That didn't take away anything from my faith, but I got more of a concept of the foundations that we are built on. Most of them had at least three Adverse Childhood Experiences, and there were things that needed to be undone before they could be redone.

In a world where everyone tried to be like Jesus, I'd like to think that they wouldn't have had so many horrifying encounters with abuse, but people do misrepresent Jesus a lot, so there may need to be some caveats in place. As it was, some of them had been damaged by things related to Christianity, so approaching through that direction could not be immediately helpful.

I suppose that's why I have been thinking of this in relation to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, though looking at abuse makes it more complex. Like, if esteem is so badly damaged that it leads to self-harm and self-starvation, now things are working backwards.

I still find the model useful, because it is hard to deal with emotional and spiritual needs when the physical necessities of life are in question.

And that's really what I am leading up to: to successfully preach the gospel to the poor, the poor have to be fed. They have to be educated.They have to be in a good enough place that they can meaningfully absorb the gospel.

Jesus could do that. He eased physical suffering and fed multitudes. They apparently had a treasury where things could be given to the poor. The rich were instructed or inspired to give to the poor, and if not everyone was as reluctant as the rich young ruler or as enthusiastic as Zacchaeus, there were probably many people who did better than they would have without him.

I know we can't do everything he can do, but we can feed more people than we do, and provide more medical care, and create a better world.

That is where things started getting harder to explain when I started writing about the parable of the sheep and the goats: we can definitely do this thing, but we could probably do this thing too, and if we can do it, shouldn't we try?

We cannot complete the building of the Kingdom of God on Earth, but we should be working toward it, and that would involve doing the things he would do. Doing them imperfectly, but still doing them.

That's what followers of Christ do.

I will work toward a world of comfort and freedom and health and knowledge. There is so much in even those small verses that we have plenty to do.