The Kingdom of God and Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark

The kingdom of God as a concept means to assume that it leads to one clear and consistent idea. The concern of this approach was to find out what the kingdom of God meant in the teaching of Jesus. Otherwise, the kingdom of God as a symbol evokes an entire series of ideas such as the remembrance of God's activity. It is God's action in history on behalf of God's people and ultimately on behalf of creation as a whole that is the underlying referent to which all of Jesus' teaching leads. In fact, the kingdom of God involves the mystery of human history, personality, and culture, none of which is yet fully understood. Thus, the kingdom of God as a model is a way of seeking to dispel the vague cloud of confusion that often forms around the kingdom of God. A model is, in essence, a sustained and systematic metaphor. One must affirm that the kingdom is both heavenly and earthly; both present and future; both individual and social; both divine and human action; both gradual and climactic. It is the kingdom of God that constitutes the basic presupposition and point of departure for all Christian discipleship. The Gospel of Mark depicts the group of Jesus' ideal disciples as the community of the new family for the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God makes the fundamental demands: the demand for decision. Entering that group of the ideal disciples starts from the essence of repentance. The basic meaning of repentance is to reverse the course of life, to turn around, and head in a quite new direction. The comprehensiveness of repentance is a root and branch affair, a cleansing of insider and outside, affecting those who repent from the depths of their personalit and right through the whole of their lives. The essence of repentance is a decision which determines the quality of present life and future destiny. The kingdom of God present in and through the person of Jesus encompasses the offer of new life and the demand for discipleship. The kingdom of God demands the radical decision which is repentance and active response to Jesus, self-denial, giving-up, and endurance. In the Gospel of Mark Jesus took the kingdom of God and transformed it from Jewish nationalistic hope to a universal order. In order to discard Jewish nationalistic dimension of the teaching of Jesus regarding the kingdom of God, the Gospel of Mark uses the terms salvation and eternal life, substitutes them for the kingdom of God, and then understands the discipleship as the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God as a universal order could find the fulfillment of its ultimate desires for righteousness, justice, peace, happiness, freedom from sin and guilt, and a restored relationship to God.