I have long debated whether Jesus thought procreation would exist in the Kingdom.  Clearly there would be both men and women, and Jesus was notable for his time in treating women as equals, whose spiritual lives matter as much as those of men. As he tells Mary and Martha, women should worry less about performing their gender-specific duties and more about developing their moral capacities, because the time of the Kingdom is drawing near. 

We must admit that one reason why equality of the sexes has been difficult to achieve for us, even as we mainly acknowledge it as an ideal to be aspired to, is, in a word, sex.  And its logical consequence (albeit only for heterosexual couplings, but please note there is no evidence Jesus felt any animus towards the other kind). 

Jesus talks very little about sex, not at all about romantic love.  He does say that divorce is wrong, but probably because it was used as a means for the man to rid himself of an aging wife and get a younger one, leaving the first destitute.  Divorce is wrong because in the world Jesus lived in, while both partners had the equal right to end a marriage, that equality masked underlying inequities relating to material resources, and there was no such thing as alimony. 

You are supposed to love everyone around you, but romantic love has a notorious self-seeking aspect to it–for a while, you care for one person more than all others.  This can lead (as I know) to feeling an enhanced love for humankind, brought on by the glow of intense emotional fulfillment–but it can also lead to jealousy and resentment, especially when that feeling is not returned. 

Jesus said “What God has put together, let no man put asunder.”  But that’s for this life.  In the Kingdom, God is in charge, and marriage is about producing new generations to replace those who die–suppose no one is going to die anymore?  Perhaps marriage will no longer exist there–that wouldn’t be divorce–no man would have sundered those unions.  And of course there would be many marriages ended by the Kingdom’s very coming, because we all know many times a good person ends up joined to someone of lesser character. Sheep often end up married to goats, but those mixed marriages will be granted what might be called a plenary divorce in the Kingdom. 

This is a society of arranged marriages Jesus lives in–some of those marriages led to love, but they rarely began with it.  Jesus’ own mother probably did marry at a very young age, after a period of betrothal, and it was her parents who decided who she would marry.  Her husband (who seems to be gone by the time Jesus began his ministry) probably was significantly older, though not a decrepit geezer with no sex drive as some of my fellow Catholics would have it.  With a poor life expectancy for most, and a limited period of fertility, it was necessary for women to marry young and have many children, just to keep the population from declining. 

Jesus clearly loved children, thought they were in many ways closer to the Kingdom than anyone else–but much of what he’s reported as saying about them isn’t really about children in the literal sense, but rather the capacity for childlike innocence and faith that he thinks we all have as adults, but which we allow to fall into disuse as we grow old and cynical (like me).

Wordsworth put it best, many centuries later, and of course he was thinking of Jesus when he wrote this–

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So will there be children in the Kingdom?  This is a particularly knotty problem, and I think it troubled Jesus.  Obviously not all children are equally good.  There is much selfishness as well as innocence in a child’s nature.  They can be terribly cruel.  In point of fact, the worst adults are usually those who retain the worst aspects of childhood into adulthood.  We are all born narcissists, and some remain so. 

I don’t think he could let himself believe any children would be among the goats who are destroyed in Gehenna.  Not small children, anyway.  And yet he knows that some are born with more potential for evil than others–if they enter the Kingdom, and grow to adulthood, will they not corrupt it?  But they are not yet old enough to be held responsible.  So will the chaff be allowed to grow up alongside the wheat, before a second harvest is conducted?  Or will they remain children, forever?  I don’t know the answer, and I wonder if he did.  He had the option of trusting that God would know what to do. 

But I think, overall, it’s more likely that he believed marriage, sex, and procreation, among humans, would not continue as they had before, because he saw very clearly the consequences, as well as the pleasures, of these behaviors.  There would still be animals, and probably they’d live on as before, since they were always obedient to God’s will, they were never the problem that needed fixing.  Humankind was the problem, and the Kingdom is the solution. 

However, I also think that in many ways, the Kingdom was the solution to his real problem–that he saw how beautiful life can be, how genuinely good people can be to each other, and he wondered why it couldn’t always be thus, why evil triumphs over good so often, why even the best natures can be corrupted by the worst–and he wanted those who are good to know that they aren’t fools, suckers, rubes–that they are the way, the truth, and the light.  They are what God wants us all to be.  But we must choose this freely, without compulsion, and with all the adherent sacrifices–or it means nothing. 

Okay, I’ll stop now.  I’m trembling a bit as I type this. 

(editing) Hah! Page 2!  Longer than I thought.  🙂

If Jesus’ own followers had trouble understanding him, safe to say that the authorities would have the same problem, but much worse.  It is a revolutionary message Jesus preached; not an insurrectionary one.  The distinction between the two is often lost.  Let me tell you a very sad story from the land of my ancestors.  And this is fully documented history, not myth.  Though the period of history it stems from has been the source of myths aplenty, and they live on. 

There was a man named Francis Sheehy Skeffington.  “Skeffy” they called him, with a roughly equal mixture of affection and derision.  He was a pacifist.  And a socialist.  And a feminist.  And a vegetarian.  And a nationalist.  And a lapsed Catholic.  In early 20th century Ireland.  He was large, and contained multitudes. 

Although he was baptized Catholic, he’d been raised in a majority Protestant community, and his people were prosperous, which directly inverted the situation of Protestants and Catholics on most of the island, but there was no bigotry in his nature, no intolerance.  Only a desire for all to be free and equal and happy.  James Joyce, who went to school with him, sometimes referred to him as as “Hairy Jaysus” because of his beard (not sure I get the joke, since the original Jaysus had a beard too). 

So he became something of a character in Dublin, where he eventually moved, and Sean O’Casey recalls how you might be at a some mainstream political rally in a theater or somewhere, and all of a sudden this reedy voice would pipe up, shouting “VOTES FOR WOMEEEEENN!!!” and they’d start screaming “SKEFFY!” and look around for him in a rage, to throw him out, maybe rough him up a bit, but that never deterred him.  He went right on with it.  Nobody said being a pacifist socialist feminist vegetarian nationalist lapsed Catholic was easy.

So there was, you may have heard, a nationalist uprising in Dublin in 1916, which got some people killed, though vastly more were being killed in Europe at the time, and let’s just say the English took it in poor humor, and leveled much of the city. 

Skeffy knew some of the people behind it, like the socialist labor leader James Connolly, and there was some mutual regard there (“Whoever is not against us is with us”, words to that effect).  Once the rebellion was put down, they rounded up the leaders and shot them, one by one, even Connolly, who was badly wounded in the leg.  They tied him to a chair, half-dead, and filled him with lead, and to say this evoked strong emotions in the populace is severely understating the matter.  Many think it was killing the leaders of the uprising that made it a belated success, and if they’d just locked them up, Irish independence might have come later, or never. 

But before any of that happened, they shot Skeffington.  He wasn’t involved, naturally.  Nobody in the movement would have thought to ask.  His feelings about violence of any kind were well known.  But he was out there, all the same, in the thick of it, bullets flying everywhere, trying to discourage looting (for which he was mocked by the poor Dubliners doing the looting), and ran smack into a military patrol. 

The officer in charge asked him if he supported Irish independence.  He said yes, but he opposed violence and wasn’t a member of Sinn Fein. The officer, who had been fighting a world war we should recall, and whose mental state was dubious (he was, to all reports, not the most affable person before the war), didn’t believe him, made him a hostage against future insurrectionary activities, and when those predictably continued, ordered him shot by firing squad.  And then again, when his leg was seen to be moving. 

Francis Sheehy Skeffington had a wife and a young son. 

The officer faced a court martial later, and was briefly put under observation at a hospital, then released, to live out a comfortable life in Canada, with no apparent sense of remorse. (Oh and he got his pension.)  The officer who insisted Skeffington’s executioner be tried for war crimes fared somewhat less well (because there was considerable sentiment among the officers that the only good Irish nationalist–well, you know) but he eventually helped organize The Boy Scouts. 

So let’s just say that in times of confusion and sporadic insurrection, and lots of different groups plotting various things, and an occupying force that doesn’t have even the foggiest understanding of the occupied, and doesn’t much care what the people they’re keeping down want, things like this happen.  All the damn time.  Usually with no consequences to the people who carry out the executions.  But at least he only got shot.  Twice. 

And there really ought to be a statue of Skeffy in Dublin.  There’s one of Connolly, over by Liberty Hall.  I was there summer before last. 

If the good shall be rewarded with eternal life in Heaven (which was not a Jewish thing), and the evil with eternal torture in Hell (which I don’t believe Jesus would have desired), what’s the Kingdom for? 

You agree he was talking about something that’s going to happen soon, and you agree that it’s an earthly Kingdom.  Okay, but then what’s the point about saying “You’ll be sorry when the Kingdom comes”–you’ll be sorry no matter what.  If you die before the Kingdom comes, and you’ve lived a bad life, you’ll be punished as badly–or worse!  Because all indications are that Gehenna is not about eternal torture, but rather just a fiery destruction of body and soul.  Over very quickly.  The chaff are thrown on a fire to burn, but everybody listening knows that kind of fire doesn’t burn very long. 

If there is also heaven and hell, then the Kingdom is redundant.  It makes no sense.  And since everybody in the Kingdom is good, they don’t need to be judged–they already have been.  So why do they need to die and go to heaven, when they’ve proven themselves worthy of eternal life–not afterlife.  Jesus, like most people in his time, didn’t think it was a good fate to live forever in any afterlife.  Afterlife is a shadow of this life.  Moses and Ellijah (and possibly himself, as a sacrifice) may end up there, to serve God, but they will know none of the joys of earthly life–Moses isn’t happy that he never sees the Promised Land.  He accepts it.  It’s a burden he bears willingly, for the good of his people.  Jesus’ people are those who follow the Golden Rule. 

I don’t know for sure Jesus meant there’d be immortal bodies, or what exactly he thought that meant.  But the way you explain it–makes no sense, based on what he said.  John’s gospel is of course saying precisely this, but John’s gospel has rejected the Kingdom.  It didn’t come, so it can’t be what Jesus meant.  (Also, those horrible Jews need to burn in hell forever.)

If being in heaven is being alive, then so is being in hell.  The dead can’t be happy or miserable.  So he who loses his life shall save it only makes sense if it refers to an earthly existence in a physical body, and if that existence is just as brief and troubled as it was before, then it’s not much of a reward for a life of self-sacrifice and service to others.  It has to be more than that, or it’s an inadequate reward.  And of course the goats have to see what they’ve lost by living a selfish life–but their suffering shall be brief, because no point rubbing it in.  The good live, a long time or forever, without suffering.  The evil die, and that’s that.