What happens when an ancient group of people:

The answer is easy. These people would have to develop a theology about the divine correction of the injustice by God in what John Dominic Crossan calls “The Great Divine Cleanup of the World”. In his book “God and Empire”, Crossan details a clear and articulate picture of how 1st century Israel (including John the Baptist and Jesus) would have imagined and hoped for God’s plan of justice. I can't imagine any other scenario for these people. They had to believe this or else they had to imagine a different God.

This was not a new idea formed by either John or Jesus. Using different techniques, they both taught an already common understanding of the needed solution. This is NOT what the fundamentalist talk about today when they create those crazy books and video games about the dramatic end of the world. The original meaning of the great divine cleanup was a political shift in power that would leave the world in a better status for those oppressed people. One example of this common outlook is this excerpt from the Sibylline Oracles which was a document dating back to around or just prior to the time of Jesus’ birth:

This isn’t a departure from the origins of Judaism. In fact it echoes the formation of Judaism as a community without a king because kings always become tyrants, with a commitment to the forgiveness of debt, and also included the rejection of the dominance created through generational wealth (50th year Jubilee). Israel was formed as a society in contrast to Egypt and its oppressive pharaoh. Throughout the Torah, the Great Prophets, and the NT, Israel desired a return to those first principles of a community of peace and justice.

The value of this story lies in its meaning of justice. This is a contrast to our common view of retributive justice that seeks retribution for wrongs. Justice in God’s kingdom is distributive justice which means distributing resources to all as needed in a just manner. The model for distributive justice in their minds was the Jewish patriarchal view of fathers providing justly (not necessarily evenly) for their wife (or wives) and children.

Too often people look at these stories as if they were magical predictions of the future, but I think that is dangerous and often clouds the real meaning. Instead, we should let the story's truth shape our own vision for how the world could work and become motivated to fulfill our responsibility. The Kingdom of God is a present experience because as Jesus said, it is "inside us" which means it exists as a vision in our minds already. Instead of trying to guess when and where it may magically happen, we should be cultivating the collective vision and developing a plan to make the vision a physical reality. This means that anyone interesting in the Kingdom of God must also be interested in politics. Politics is the process of making our values public realities.