On the face of it Question 5 of Brian McLaren’s list seems a very surprising one: What is the Gospel? Surely there is no need to unpack this one since we all know so well what the good news is about – it is the news about God sending his Son Jesus to the cross to die for our sins so that we could be forgiven and have our place secured in heaven and that this is possible for us simple through grace.

In asking the question, however, McLaren is suggesting that we may have got the answer wrong. His assertion is that this definition of the word ‘gospel’ has come to us via the 16th century Reformation while it would be more correct for us to take the understanding they had in the 1st century. When Jesus used the word or Paul or one of the Gospel authors, what did they mean when they used this term?

Kingdom of God
Finding Jesus’ answer is quite simple for it forms a part of his earliest message – ‘The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the good news’. For him the good news was about God’s Kingdom, his rule, being near. It was about Jesus being the Messiah, about God keeping his promise to Israel and creation through his anointed servant. (At that time, of course, this was a truly radical message since there was another claiming something very similar – the Roman Emperor and his Empire.) ‘Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion,’ says McLaren. ‘Instead he came to announce a new kingdom, a new way of life, a new way of peace.’ And this kingdom is about God’s will being done here on earth as it is in heaven.

Transformation of creation
Rather than forcing Jesus and his message into the Greco-Roman neoplatonist way of thinking, it is far better to see him fulfilling the three-fold narrative that we first see in the Old Testament. First, Jesus calls on us to accept the new birth that leads to an abundant life of the ‘new Genesis, a new creation’. Second, he calls on us to follow him as we embark on a new exodus into the freedom of the kingdom. And third, within that new kingdom – ‘imagined by the prophets and inaugurated in Christ’ – we will experience the peace and new life of a transformed creation that is available to all.
Jesus’ message, therefore, was not something brand new that the world had never heard of before, it was the continuing message that God had been speaking to his people from the start. What was striking and new about it, however, was his insistence that this kingdom was ‘at hand’. It was no longer a distant dream but a reality, at least in part, in the here and now.

The good news, therefore, is not about God coming to help us escape this world but coming to transform it with resurrection power.


Share