We live in an age where everything is packaged, marketed, and sold—including salvation itself. The Kingdom of God has been reduced to a commodity, advertised like any other product on the shelf: "Buy now, save later." Religious entrepreneurs peddle the divine in readymade cans and packets, promising delivery of what can never be transported because it has never left.
How attractive the drama of a distant future becomes—the Second Coming, the Last Day, the final vindication where we emerge as winners! Business-minded preachers have built empires on this postponement, keeping the Kingdom perpetually out of reach, always just beyond the horizon. Where there are dead bodies, vultures gather. And where there is spiritual hunger, middlemen multiply. But Jesus spoke a sentence that demolishes this entire commercial enterprise: "The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17: 20-25).
Consider the design of our existence: eyes that look outward, noses that smell outward, legs that walk outward. Our entire sensory apparatus is oriented toward the external world. We are built for exploration, for conquest of the outer territories. But perhaps there's another way to understand this design. Perhaps we once had eyes to look inward, noses to smell inward, legs to walk inward—and through millennia of disuse, these capacities have atrophied. We've become experts at the external and amateurs at the internal, masters of the world and strangers to ourselves. And today we are in the predicament of musk deer, searching everywhere for what we have with in us—the kingdom of God.
We dream of ascension—of going up to meet God in some celestial kingdom. But the entire message of the Incarnation is that God is coming down. He has come down historically in Jesus. He comes down daily as friend, as stranger, as the poor person in need, as the sacred within the ordinary, as sacraments woven into the fabric of everyday life. Those who miss the first coming—the historical Christ who walked dusty roads and touched lepers—will likely miss the second coming as well. And those who miss the repeated coming—the daily descent of divinity into the mundane—will find the second coming irrelevant.
Thousands of years ago, Buddha diagnosed the human condition: desire. Not just bad desires or sinful longings, but all desires—because all desire is fundamentally outward-facing. Jesus expressed the same truth differently: The Kingdom of God is within, and what blocks us from experiencing it is our craving toward the outside. Our addiction to success, money, fame, validation, achievement. Our constant projection of fulfilment onto external circumstances. Don't take the outside noises seriously: peace is an entity within, love is an entity within, justice is an entity within, the Kingdom of God is an entity within.
A group of workers lost a watch in a mountain of sawdust at their mill. They searched frantically for hours, sifting through the debris, growing increasingly frustrated. Finally, exhausted, they left for coffee. A small boy who had been watching quietly approached the pile. Within minutes, he found the watch and brought it to them. Astonished, they asked: "How did you do what we could not?" The boy smiled: "I simply stood near the sawdust in silence. Then I could hear the tick-tick sound of the watch." This is the method of the Kingdom. Not frantic searching, not exhaustive analysis, not arduous striving—but silence. In silence, we can hear the tick-tick sound of the divine within, the pulse of God's presence that has been there all along, drowned out by the noise of our outward pursuits.
That which is inside us empowers us. Jesus is empowering. The Gospels are empowering. Every sacrament is empowering. We are empowered to stand up—in our own authority as bearers of the divine within; we are empowered to stand with—in solidarity with all who suffer; we are empowered to stand for—justice, truth, love; we are empowered to speak up—for the voiceless. We are co-pilgrims, co-travelers, co-workers in the unfolding of divine consciousness on earth.
The claim that the Kingdom of God is within us would appear as a cultural heresy. You will be resisted by those who are up above the ladder of hierarchy and those who have been making money as the middlemen between God and humanity. Jesus himself acknowledged this: "I must suffer at the hands of this generation." The one who announces the Kingdom within threatens every power structure built on the Kingdom without.
There is a shadow side to this inner sovereignty; If we take the argument to its logical conclusion—if the Kingdom of God is within us—then we must also acknowledge the possibility that the kingdom of the devil is within us too. You are the deciding factor between goodness and evil. You are the battlefield where heaven and hell wage their war. You cannot pass responsibility of having either divine or demonic qualities to any outer factors. No one to blame, no one to credit but yourself. The light and the darkness both emerge from the same inner depths; water it, give it some sunshine, and nurture it.
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