Blogging through Mark’s gospel took me 60 posts over some 18 months. When I have time (or rather, when I make time) I will gather all those posts together and see whether they make any sense as a whole, for I wrote them post by individual post – in micro rather than macro. But the theme I was trying to draw out of each passage was that of the emerging Kingdom of God in and through the life of Jesus.

The two sub-themes were probably the supernatural power of the Kingdom in things like healing miracles and feeding the thousands, and also the clash between the Kingdom and religion as seen in the many clashes between Jesus and the Jewish religious authorities of the day. A critic would say that this reflects my own church tradition context, where the emphases on the supernatural and on the dangers of the dead hand of religion are dominant. I suspect less detail was given to the teachings of Jesus and so these next few months will see me continue with the theme of the emerging Kingdom but this time looking at the ethical teachings of Jesus in what we know as the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ (Matthew 5-7).

As will have been obvious from the series on Mark, my theology of the Kingdom is that through the coming of Jesus – his life, death, and resurrection – the Kingdom has already broken into the creation in part but that its fullness has not yet arrived and will not until Jesus returns; it is also a part of our calling as believers to extend the boundary of the Kingdom through our mission in and to creation. This is the theology upon which I will also base my posts on the Sermon: the ethical teachings of Jesus are not an impossible ideal to be realised only in the new age, but are the call of God to an ethical life in the here and now. While there is an expectancy upon us to strive towards this higher life, however, and achieve it in many ways, with the Kingdom as yet unrealised in its fullness we will also fail many times.