This sets the stage
for what is to come, especially when one considers that it seems to have been well
understood by the followers of Jesus that it was the Spirit of God at work to
animate Him following His Resurrection, with that Spirit then animating His
church (as evidenced by the church working to be kingdom-bringers---bringing
heaven to earth---bringing to earth that which looks like the rule of the
Creator God through His Messiah).
If this is the case,
then when Jesus goes on to say “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of
heaven” (Matthew 16:19a), the kingdom of heaven being the hoped-for and
expected reality of the covenant God’s rule on earth through His Messiah, which
was foundational to Jesus’ message as well as that which His ministry embodied
as the hoped-for reality to which it pointed, then Jesus, when speaking of the
“keys,” speaks of the church. Talk of
keys is then not necessarily an abstraction.
At the same time,
believers must always be careful to not confuse the church with the kingdom of
heaven. Those who compose the church are the representatives of the
kingdom of heaven, but the church is never to be thought of as the kingdom of
heaven itself. The church is to be the herald of the Creator God’s
kingdom come to earth, and is to be the place of the overlap of heaven and
earth. It is to be the locus of binding and loosing. That binding
is the binding of the operative powers of death and the many forms that it
takes in this world, whereas that loosing is the loosing of people and the
creation from those same destructive powers. Can such an assertion be
made?
What can be seen in
Jesus from the very beginning of His ministry? The Gospels report that He
“went throughout all of Galilee… preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and
healing all kinds of diseases and sickness among the people” (4:23). Here
Jesus is acknowledged to be performing operations of binding and loosing.
It is possible to take a look at all of Jesus’ pronouncements concerning the
kingdom of heaven to be found in Matthew and drawing out the analogies of
binding and loosing, but rather than do that, it would be more worthwhile to
point out that such binding and loosing, though some tend to see it only as
acts of healing from physical sickness, were actually social healings as
well. This social healing allowed for
the recipients of the merciful compassion of the covenant God, through Jesus,
to be re-admitted as full participants in the community.
Everywhere that Jesus
enacts the kingdom of heaven, thus creating the overlap of the two realms of
existence, binding and loosing is occurring. As Jesus is heard saying
“Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven” (16:19b), He needs
to be understood to be saying, “Whenever you act on earth in a way that defeat
the powers that attempt to continue to mar the Creator God’s good creation, you
have introduced the power of the Creator God’s realm of existence (heaven),
into the world.”
Bearing in mind that
talk of heaven and earth in this context is not locative but demonstrative and
practical on the part of believers, then likewise, when Jesus is heard to say
things like “and whatever you release on earth will have been released in
heaven” (16:19c), rather than hear this with some sense of a vast gulf between
heaven and earth, He needs to be heard saying, “Whenever you act on earth in a
way in a way that liberates your fellow man, affirming their humanity and
bringing them closer to rightly bearing the divine image in which they were
created, you enact the power of heaven in the world.”
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