Citizen Responsibility

But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you.  Matthew 6:33 NASB

Kingdom – What does it mean to seek the Kingdom of God?  The answer might surprise you because it depends on a shift in paradigms that occurred more than two millennia ago.  In the early days of Hellenism, there was a major change in the idea of “citizen.”   Hans Jonas describes it:

“The sophistic enlightenment of the fifth century [B.C.E.] had set the individual over against the state and its norms and in conceiving the opposition of nature and law had divested that latter, as resting on convention alone, of its ancient sanctity: moral and political norms are relative.  Against this skeptical challenge, the Socratic-Platonic answer appealed, not indeed to tradition, but to conceptual knowledge of the intelligible, i.e., to rational theory; and rationalism carries in itself the germ of universalism.  The Cynics preached a revaluation of existing norms of conduct, self-sufficiency of the private individual, indifference to the traditional values of society, such as patriotism, and freedom from all prejudice.”[1]

“The last step on this road was taken when the Stoics later advanced the proposition that freedom, that highest good of Hellenic ethics, is a purely inner quality not dependent on external conditions, so that true freedom may well be found in a slave if only he is wise. . . To be a good citizen of the cosmos, a cosmopolites, is the moral end of man; and his title to this citizenship is his possession of logos, or reason, and nothing else—that is, the principle that distinguishes him as man and puts him into immediate relationship to the same principle governing the universe.”[2]

In other words, ancient cultures before Hellenism believed that citizenship demanded social obligation.  My participation as a citizen of a kingdom meant that I was directly involved with governance and governance meant I was responsible for the well-being of all citizens.  This is the biblical, Semitic view.  What happens to you, happens to me, and vise versa.  We find this idea throughout the Tanakh.  Suffering is communal; so is joy.  Paul reiterates the same idea in his letters.  And Yeshua makes it a priority, because seeking God’s Kingdom means loving your neighbor as yourself.

But Greek philosophy, particularly Stoic philosophy, changed all that.

“The classic city-state engaged the citizen in its concerns, and these he could identify with his own, as through the laws of his city he governed himself.  The large Hellenistic monarchies neither called for nor permitted such close personal identification; and just as they made no moral demands on their subjects, so the individual detached himself in regard to them and as a private person (a status hardly admitted in the Hellenic world before) found satisfaction of his social needs in voluntarily organized associations based on community of ideas, religion, and occupation.”[3]

What Jonas makes clear is that the private individual was an invention (perhaps unintended) of large government.  And the private individual no longer was intimately connected to social obligation.  Now any connection was voluntary, detached, arbitrary.  The detached man is whole in and of himself.  He volunteers to become involved in society and social networks.  His commitment to community is a choice, not an obligation, even for his own consciousness.  Loving your neighbor as yourself is an option, not a requirement.  In fact, the private individual probably doesn’t even know his neighbors.

Our world, twenty-five centuries later, is saturated with privacy.  Detachment is a way of life.  Social obligation is entirely a matter of choice.  The “kingdom” is my household, and I take care of my own.  We are the products of a very long transition from Semitic social culture to Hellenic independence.  Our governments are not the function of citizens concerned with each other’s well-being.  They are detached, even from those who elected them.  Everywhere we see fragmentation, separation, and prejudice—often purposely.  We are a long way from Amos 5:14-15:

Seek good and not evil,
That you may live;
So the LORD God of hosts will be with you,
As you have spoken.
Hate evil, love good;
Establish justice in the gate. 

Or Isaiah 1:17:

Cease to do evil,
Learn to do good;
Seek justice,
Rebuke the oppressor;
Defend the fatherless,
Plead for the widow. 

But how we got here isn’t simply a matter of human depravity.  It’s a matter of departure from the Kingdom, a silent revolution of ideas.  What it means to be human no longer starts with seeking.  Now it starts—and ends—with me.

Topical Index: kingdom, private, neighbor, social obligation, Hellenism, Matthew 6:33

[1] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity, p. 5

[2] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity, p. 6.

[3] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity, p. 7.