Having examined the society to which Jesus spoke and the diagnosis that emerges from his teachings, we can now turn to the next question:
What did Jesus prescribe?
If a physician correctly identifies an illness, the diagnosis must eventually lead to treatment.
Jesus did not merely describe what was wrong with his society. He called people to change. His proclamation was practical, urgent, and directed toward transformation.
The central summary of his message in the Gospels is:
“Repent, for the Kingdom of God has drawn near.”
This sentence contains both the diagnosis and the prescription.
Something is wrong; therefore, people must repent.
But something new is also possible; the Kingdom of God has drawn near.
The command and the announcement belong together.
The Kingdom is the reality toward which people are called to turn.
The following interpretation will explore the hypothesis that Jesus' prescription was not primarily the establishment of a new religious institution, the enforcement of a legal system, or the seizure of political power. Rather, it involved a transformation of human beings and their relationships through a renewed orientation toward God.
5.1 Repentance: The Beginning of Healing
Every process of healing begins with recognition.
A patient who does not believe that he is sick is unlikely to seek treatment.
This is particularly relevant to our metaphor of a patient society.
A society can become accustomed to conditions that are profoundly unhealthy.
Violence can become normal.
Greed can become respectable.
The humiliation of others can become entertainment.
Religious hatred can be called faithfulness.
The accumulation of wealth can be celebrated while suffering remains invisible.
The desire to dominate others can be described as strength.
When this happens, the patient no longer recognizes the illness.
The first requirement for healing is therefore awareness.
Jesus' call to repent may be understood in this context.
Repentance is not simply an expression of regret.
Nor is it merely the performance of a religious ritual.
It involves a change of mind, direction, and life.
The person must stop moving in one direction and begin moving in another.
The essential question is therefore:
From what must we turn, and to what must we return?
According to the hypothesis developed in this study, Jesus called people to turn away from every form of life that contradicts the character of God and to return to a life ordered by God's reign.
This means turning away from:
- hatred toward love,
- revenge toward forgiveness,
- domination toward service,
- greed toward generosity,
- self-righteousness toward humility,
- exclusion toward fellowship,
- fear toward trust,
- and alienation toward reconciliation.
Repentance, therefore, is not merely negative.
It is not simply:
“Stop doing bad things.”
It is a movement toward a new way of being.
The patient does not merely want the symptoms to disappear.
He wants to become healthy.
5.2 The Kingdom of God: The Environment of Healing
What, then, is the Kingdom toward which Jesus calls people?
This question has produced an enormous range of interpretations.
Some understand the Kingdom primarily as a future event.
Others understand it as a heavenly reality after death.
Others interpret it politically.
Others interpret it inwardly or spiritually.
The Gospel traditions themselves contain material that has been interpreted in more than one way, and any historically responsible study must acknowledge this complexity.
Nevertheless, one feature of Jesus' teaching is difficult to ignore.
The Kingdom is not always spoken of as something entirely remote.
Jesus also speaks as though God's reign is becoming present.
The sick are healed.
Those excluded are welcomed.
Sins are forgiven.
Enemies are to be loved.
The poor are given special attention.
The first are called to become last.
The greatest are called to become servants.
In these actions and teachings, the Kingdom appears not simply as a future location but as a different order of life.
This does not necessarily settle every theological question concerning the Kingdom.
But it suggests an important interpretation:
Where God's will becomes effective in human life, the reality of God's reign becomes visible.
The Kingdom, in this sense, is not established merely by changing political rulers.
It begins when human beings themselves begin to live differently.
A kingdom cannot exist without subjects who recognize its rule.
If human beings acknowledge God verbally but continue to live according to greed, hatred, domination, and fear, then the rule of God has not yet become effective in their lives.
Thus the question is not merely:
“When will God become King?”
It becomes:
“When will we begin to live as though God is King?”
This is the point at which the metaphor of healing and the proclamation of the Kingdom meet.
The environment of healing is created when the patient begins to leave behind the forces that produced the illness.
5.3 A Change of Allegiance
The Kingdom of God may therefore be understood as involving a change of allegiance.
Every human life is governed by something.
It may be governed by God.
Or it may be governed by the desire for wealth.
It may be governed by love.
Or by fear.
It may be governed by service.
Or by the desire to dominate.
It may be governed by forgiveness.
Or by revenge.
Jesus repeatedly confronts this question of divided allegiance.
A person cannot serve both God and wealth.
A person who seeks greatness must reconsider what greatness means.
A person who desires to judge others must first examine himself.
A person who wishes to enter life must be willing to lose the life built around selfishness.
The prescription is therefore radical because it does not merely demand the correction of isolated behaviour.
It calls for a change at the centre.
The question is:
Who is sitting on the throne of human life?
If greed occupies the throne, the person's decisions will be shaped by greed.
If fear occupies the throne, fear will govern his actions.
If hatred occupies the throne, hatred will determine his relationships.
If the desire for power occupies the throne, other human beings will become instruments of domination.
The Kingdom of God begins with the removal of these rival rulers.
The person returns to God and allows God's character to become the guiding principle of life.
5.4 The Central Command: Love
If Jesus' prescription can be summarized in one word, that word is perhaps love.
When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus joined love of God and love of neighbour.
The two cannot finally be separated.
A person who claims to love God while hating his neighbour lives in contradiction.
Similarly, love of neighbour is not merely a secular ethical principle added to religion.
It is presented as an expression of the relationship with God.
This has major implications for our understanding of healing.
The patient is not healed simply because he acquires correct beliefs.
Nor is he healed merely because he performs the correct rituals.
The evidence of healing appears in his relationships.
How does he treat the weak?
How does he treat the stranger?
How does he treat someone who has offended him?
How does he use power?
How does he use wealth?
How does he respond to an enemy?
These questions reveal whether transformation has actually occurred.
Jesus' teaching moves religion out of the narrow sphere of religious performance and places it in the whole of human life.
The Good Samaritan illustrates this powerfully.
The decisive question is no longer:
“Who belongs to my group?”
It becomes:
“Will I become a neighbour to the person in need?”
The injured man is not healed by correct religious classification.
He is healed by compassion.
The story therefore represents the Kingdom as an active way of relating to another human being.
5.5 Love of Enemies: Breaking the Disease Cycle
Perhaps the most radical element of Jesus' prescription is his teaching concerning enemies.
To love one's friends is understandable.
To return kindness with kindness is relatively easy.
But Jesus asks something more difficult:
Love your enemies.
Pray for those who persecute you.
Forgive.
Do not return evil for evil.
This teaching should not be understood as sentimental weakness.
It represents a direct challenge to one of the mechanisms by which social illness reproduces itself.
Violence produces fear.
Fear produces hatred.
Hatred produces retaliation.
Retaliation produces new violence.
The person who was wounded yesterday becomes the person who wounds another today.
Each side remembers its own wounds and forgets the wounds it has caused.
Thus the illness passes from person to person and from generation to generation.
Jesus' prescription attempts to break this cycle.
The injured person is not required to deny that evil has occurred.
Forgiveness does not mean declaring evil to be good.
Love of enemies does not mean pretending that there are no enemies.
Rather, it means refusing to allow the enemy's action to determine one's own moral identity.
The disease stops with the person who refuses to pass it on.
This is one of the most significant implications of Jesus' teaching for a violent world.
The question is not:
“Who began the conflict?”
Every conflict can generate competing answers.
The more important question is:
“Who will stop reproducing it?”
5.6 Service Instead of Domination
Jesus also prescribes a transformation in the understanding of power.
Human societies frequently assume that greatness means being above others.
The powerful command.
The weak obey.
The ruler is served.
Jesus reverses this pattern.
The greatest must become the servant.
The leader must serve.
This principle has profound consequences.
The healing of society cannot be achieved merely by replacing one powerful group with another.
If the new rulers simply reproduce the same desire to dominate, the illness has not been cured.
Only the patient has changed position.
The structure of the disease remains.
Jesus therefore appears to attack the problem at a deeper level.
The desire to dominate itself must be transformed.
Power must be redefined as responsibility for the good of others.
Authority must become service.
Greatness must become humility.
This may explain why Jesus' model of transformation differs from the expectation of a conventional political kingdom.
He does not merely say:
“We must take power away from them and give it to us.”
His teaching raises the more fundamental question:
“What should power itself mean?”
5.7 The Healer Must Touch the Wound
Jesus' method is as significant as his message.
According to the Gospel traditions, he did not remain distant from suffering.
He approached it.
He touched those others avoided.
He ate with those others rejected.
He spoke with people who had been pushed to the margins.
This can be understood as part of his prescription.
A physician cannot heal a patient merely by standing at a distance and condemning his illness.
Healing requires encounter.
The healer must see the patient.
The patient must be treated as a person rather than as a problem.
Jesus' ministry repeatedly restores dignity before, or together with, social acceptance.
The leper is not simply a “leper.”
The tax collector is not simply a “traitor.”
The sinner is not simply a “sinner.”
Each is first a human being.
This may be one of the deepest expressions of Jesus' understanding of love.
The cure begins when we learn to see the person whom our society has taught us not to see.
5.8 The Prodigal Son: A Model of Healing
The parable of the prodigal son may be read as a summary of this entire prescription.
The younger son leaves home.
He seeks freedom.
He eventually finds himself in misery.
The turning point comes when he “comes to himself.”
This is the moment of diagnosis.
He sees his actual condition.
Until that moment, no external command can force genuine transformation.
The recognition must become personal.
Then desire emerges.
He wants to return.
Finally, he acts.
He turns around and goes home.
This sequence closely resembles our metaphor of healing:
Unawareness → Awareness → Desire for healing → Decision → Return → Restoration
But the father is equally important.
The son's return does not create the father's love.
The father already loves him.
The return allows the broken relationship to be restored.
This, according to the central hypothesis of this study, provides an important key to Jesus' understanding of repentance.
God does not first need to become loving.
Human beings need to recognize the love they have abandoned and return to it.
The elder son reveals another dimension of the illness.
He has physically remained in the father's house, but his relationship with the father is also distorted.
He thinks in terms of merit, reward, and superiority.
He cannot rejoice when his brother returns.
Thus the parable warns that outward religious proximity does not necessarily mean inward health.
The younger son is visibly lost.
The elder son believes that he is healthy.
Yet both need transformation.
This returns us to the fundamental difficulty faced by every physician:
How can a person be healed if he does not know that he is sick?
5.9 Healing Is Not Coercion
A crucial feature of Jesus' prescription, as interpreted in this study, is that transformation cannot ultimately be imposed from outside.
A person can be forced to obey.
He cannot be forced to love.
A person can be compelled to perform a ritual.
He cannot be compelled to repent in the deepest sense.
A government can control behaviour.
It cannot directly produce compassion.
A religious institution can demand conformity.
It cannot manufacture an inward transformation of the heart.
This does not mean that Jesus had no concern for moral behaviour.
On the contrary, his ethical demands are extraordinarily demanding.
But his method begins with a transformation of the person.
The patient must see.
The patient must desire.
The patient must turn.
The Kingdom cannot simply be imposed by placing human beings under external control.
This distinction is central to the present study.
There is a fundamental difference between:
making people behave as though they are healthy
and
helping people become healthy.
The first may produce conformity.
The second seeks transformation.
5.10 The Prescription Summarized
We may now summarize Jesus' proposed remedy.
If the illness is alienation from God, the prescription is return.
If the illness is blindness, the prescription is seeing.
If the illness is self-righteousness, the prescription is humility.
If the illness is exclusion, the prescription is love of neighbour.
If the illness is hatred, the prescription is love, including love of enemies.
If the illness is retaliation, the prescription is forgiveness and the refusal to perpetuate violence.
If the illness is domination, the prescription is service.
If the illness is greed, the prescription is generosity and freedom from false security.
If the illness is religious hypocrisy, the prescription is inner transformation.
If the illness is fear of God, the prescription is trust in the Father's love.
These elements come together in Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom is not merely a reward given to people after they have been sufficiently healed.
It is the very environment in which healing begins.
To live under God's reign is to begin learning a new way of being human.
5.11 The Good News Reconsidered
We can now return to the question with which this study began:
What was the good news that Jesus proclaimed?
According to the interpretation developed here, the good news was not simply that something wonderful would happen in the distant future.
Neither was it merely that a religious system had discovered the correct requirements for salvation.
The good news was that the relationship between God and humanity did not have to remain as people imagined it.
God was not absent.
God's love did not have to be purchased.
The Kingdom was not merely a distant dream.
A different way of living was already possible.
The patient did not have to remain helplessly waiting for someone else to heal him.
He could recognize his illness, turn around, and begin the journey of restoration.
Thus Jesus' message may be summarized, within the framework of this study, as follows:
You do not need to wait helplessly for the world to become the Kingdom of God. Turn away from the forces that destroy human life. Return to God. Learn to see others as members of the same human family. Love instead of hate. Serve instead of dominate. Forgive instead of perpetuating violence. In doing so, begin to live now under the reign of God.
This interpretation must, of course, be tested against the diversity and complexity of the Gospel traditions. It should not be treated as the only possible interpretation of Jesus.
But as a working hypothesis, it provides a coherent connection between Jesus' proclamation, his ethical teaching, his healing ministry, his table fellowship, his understanding of God, and his challenge to conventional power.
The next question is equally important.
If Jesus believed that God's Kingdom was to be embodied through this kind of transformation, how did he himself choose to bring that Kingdom into the world?
This question takes us to the final stage of our physician metaphor.
A physician may correctly diagnose an illness.
He may prescribe the right medicine.
But how is the medicine to be administered?
Must healing be forced upon the patient?
Can a society be made healthy through coercion?
Or must the healer accept the risk of rejection while inviting people freely to enter the path of healing?
This leads us to the next section:
6. Jesus' Method: The Two Possible Paths to Transforming Society
Jesus' message concerned the transformation of human life and, ultimately, the transformation of the world under God's reign.
But there was more than one conceivable way of pursuing such a transformation.
One path was the path of external power:
- gain authority,
- control institutions,
- defeat opponents,
- punish those who resist,
- enforce the desired order,
- and attempt to create a righteous society from above.
The other was the path of inner transformation:
- awaken awareness,
- invite repentance,
- change hearts and minds,
- teach a new way of living,
- build relationships,
- heal the broken,
- serve rather than dominate,
- and allow people freely to participate in the Kingdom.
The next section will investigate whether the temptation narratives and the wider Gospel traditions can be interpreted as revealing Jesus' confrontation with these competing paths—and why he appears to have rejected the use of coercive power as the means of establishing God's reign.
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