 So the kingdom of God tradition which Jesus inherited was indeed a revolutionary one. It wasn't that from time to time God might do things that people would like, though that might be true as well. It wasn't that God would take people away from this world and take them somewhere else called heaven, nor was it that there would be an end of the world entirely to be replaced with a purely supernatural entity called God's kingdom. But nor in Jesus' mind was it something that would come by violent revolution. And one of the key things about Jesus' proclamation is that he used the language of the revolutionaries about the kingdom of God, but that he constantly reinterpreted it. He made it mean what he believed from his own reading of Israel's scriptures. It had to mean. Jesus inherited in other words the kingdom of God tradition, but it was not about the end of the world. It was not about going to heaven and it was not about violent revolution. It was about, however, just as the revolutionaries had hoped, something which would happen dramatically as a result of which God's promises would be fulfilled and Israel and the world would be transformed forever. And this would involve in some way God taking charge of his world in a new way. And Jesus is constantly carving a different path, a reinterpretation of what God's kingdom would look like. And he does this particularly in the parables. Anyone who says that Jesus simply took on the views of the kingdom of God which were popular in his day and simply reaffirmed them, and people have said that very frequently, not least with the end of the world idea. Oh yes, the Jews expected the end of the world. Jesus said kingdom of God, so that means Jesus expected the end of the world. That is just a trivial misreading. Jesus is constantly saying let me tell you what the kingdom of God is like. It's like a farmer going out and sowing seed and some falls here and some there and some there and a lot of it gets wasted, but then there will be a great harvest. Or it's like a man who had two sons and the older one said this and the younger one said that and so on. Jesus is constantly breaking open the popular conceptions of kingdom in order to show that it is in fact happening, but that it doesn't look like the validation or vindication of the kind of aspirations that so many of his contemporaries had.