Repent, the Kingdom Is at Hand
When people hear this Biblical phrase, they usually hear, “Jesus is on his way! Behave, lest the Master kicks your ass with eternal fires of Hell!” And they couldn’t be more wrong. Naturally, that interpretation then further translates into exhortations to obey one’s elders, simply, to do what the earthly authorities approve of as a proper way of fighting the so-called sin. And if possible, also to feel really bad and sorry about one’s human nature and life choices as long as possible.
More often than not, it means damnation of gays and keeping the women silent, it means demanding abortion bans no matter the medical reasons, and it also means that serving justice and being righteous should manifest as not giving an inch to anyone who does not deserve it. With those unworthy always being “them” outside of the oh-so pious in-group. You know, the “lowly” folks like immigrants, heathens, witches, outright unbelievers, but also all those politically inconvenient, and so on.
And of course, it also means supporting politicians who (at least) promise to enshrine all of that in strict laws of the land.
In the minds of people who see it that way, Jesus is pretty much a monster with literal sword coming out of his mouth. A ruthless, bloody killer of his enemies (as if he had any, even though many did and do consider him an enemy). Well, no one should really wonder why, in some regions of the world, those people proudly pose for family photos on Christmas with their military grade weapons.
Perhaps they also imagine that, when they will finally float in air as per their weird nudist fantasy, they will also see Jesus with a semi-automatic mowing down all those Satan’s minions who dared to oppress their religious freedoms by simply objecting to their doctrinal inanities and suggesting that they should keep them for themselves instead of insisting on misguided “evangelism.” A perverse revenge daydream of a hurt, deluded Christian ego screams in secret, “Serves you right, you demons!” (Insert a cinematic mad-villain laugh.)
Of course, such attitude is not exclusive to Christians. It permeates all religions, but for various reasons, which I won’t go into, the Abrahamic traditions — that is to say, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — are especially susceptible to this kind of medieval insanity. However, as I said in the beginning, such attitudes and (lack of) understanding have nothing to do with Jesus and his message.
For starters, sin simply means missing the mark. It’s a mistake rooted in intuitive duality of human experience, the proverbial munching on the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And while the nature of human experience is not an error per se — it allows separation and thus interaction equally as conscious unity with God — it’s the reason why any individual with only that limited kind of view is unable to appreciate that there’s nothing but God, which in turn leads to imagining and naming, thus limiting, God into various entities and concepts, carving idols as it were.
Naturally, that further propagates into inability to fully honor (not love or obey!) one’s ancestors — meaning, all circumstances that lead to here and now — which in turn results in acts motivated by fear and desire, as opposed to acting just due to a creative impulse or simply acting for the action’s sake. Thus, an individual feels envy, or fear of missing out as it is euphemistically called these days, which then frequently results in lying, taking what is not given, violation of agreements, and even killing — war being the most extreme case — just because the only recognizable absolute in the world becomes death (and, conversely, survival at all cost). And at that point Eden becomes impossible to perceive.
And yet, Eden, or Kingdom of God, didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t stop existing and no one was literally expelled from it. It’s just that the afflicted individual became utterly oblivious to it. In other words, Eden remained as it always was, it just turned from lived reality to that reality being merely at hand, waiting to be seen and recognized. Like a cup on the table — it’s at hand, you just have to stretch out that hand and grasp the cup.
In the same vein, “to repent” simply means to stop munching on the fruit of that “forbidden tree,” and refrain from judging parts of the world as good and evil. After all, it was never a one-time event in the past (so-called “Adamic sin”). We are all susceptible to it in the same way ever since humans gained metacognitive faculties more than fifty millennia ago. It’s original only in the sense that all the other errors hinge on it. Furthermore, such value judgments can never be objective to begin with as one man’s poison is often times another man’s meat.
However, while pain is inevitable and suffering is optional, causal outcomes of actions we take and choose from a limited set of options are always given — the causes have determined effects. Hence, to keep the pain at minimum and eventually free ourselves from strictly dualistic worldview where death is the sole (though still illusory) ruler, we also ought to follow the Ten Commandments, the eternal law of this world. That’s how repentance really looks like.
So yeah, repent, because the Kingdom of God is truly at hand. Just, for God’s sake which is also yours, use your brain and don’t be a stupid fool.
