While he was still speaking a crowd came up, and the man who was called Judas, one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”

When Jesus’ followers saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear.

But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And he touched the man’s ear and healed him.

Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple guard, and the elders, who had come for him, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs? Every day I was with you in the temple courts, and you did not lay a hand on me. But this is your hour—when darkness reigns.” (Luke 22:47-53)

The Kingdom of Heaven is not like the Roman Empire. Or David’s kingdom. Or Solomon’s kingdom. When Jesus taught what the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom of God, was like, he never compared it to the Roman Empire or any other earthly government.

But his disciples, the crowds that followed him, and the religious establishment only thought in terms of earthly politics. They expected the Messiah to restore the Davidic monarchy, to overthrow the Roman hegemony, and to make Israel the most powerful kingdom on Earth. When the soldiers came to arrest Jesus, his followers assumed that the war of liberation had begun. Instead, Jesus ordered surrender. The one act of bloodshed, Jesus corrected. He healed the victim of his disciple’s sword.

Then he asked those who had come to arrest him if they really thought he was leading a rebellion. Of course they did. But he was telling them by the question and the words that followed, that they were mistaken.

Jesus was not about politics or government. The Talmud, an ancient Jewish commentary on the first five books of the Bible, states that saving a single soul saves a universe. Jesus was all about just that. He was about the Kingdom of Heaven, not the kingdom of man. And where was the Kingdom of Heaven being established? In the human heart. Change the heart, Jesus knew, and you changed the individual. And changed individuals can change the world more profoundly than any political restructuring or conquering army ever has.

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