The three synoptic agree that the proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God was central to Jesus' message. While Jesus spoke often of the Kingdom of God, he never defined it. He often said, "The Kingdom of God is like...," but he never said, "The Kingdom of God is..." The Kingdom of God is a way of talking about God's working that requires earthly consequences. It forces us to talk about what the earthly consequences of God's working in his people will be. When Jesus made the working of God in human relationships and society central without defining what God's reign in human affairs would look like, he left us with something very fluid.
In "The Kingdom of God in America," Richard Niebuhr wrote about the way that the Kingdom of God had been variously understood as American religiosity had adjusted its understanding of how God would work in the nation and its people. The Puritans envisioned America that would be a "city set on a hill," and ideal Christian community that would live out the commands of the Gospel in the way its culture, institutions, and laws were established, one that would serve as an example of a godly community for all the nations of the world. During the revivalistic frontier 19th century, the Kingdom of God came to be understood as a moral transformation in the culture that would result of transformed individual hearts consequent to personal conversion. Following the excesses of industrialization, the Social Gospel envisioned the Kingdom of God as the institutionalization of Jesus' teachings in laws and practices that were compassionate towards that poor. Niebuhr recognized that our understanding of the Kingdom of God had as much to do with us as it had to do with what Jesus meant to communicate through the parables.
I grew up with very little reflection on the Kingdom, but I've found the Kingdom of God to be increasingly central to my thinking of God's work and intention. N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope talks about how we often think about God's place ("heaven") as far removed from our place ("earth"). The proclamation of the Kingdom of God means that God's place and our place are interlocking and interchangeable, that God's working and God's reign are always breaking through and transforming our world.
I think that the Sermon on the Mount is a great place to begin to reflect on the Kingdom of God. We often approach the Sermon on the Mount as a religious and ethical treatise that tells how Christians ought to act. I think it's more than that--it's a description of life in God's world, the way that things work in contrast to the way that we've learned that they work in the "real world." In God's world, a world that lives and breathes and breaks forth in human interactions and may be approximated in Christian communities and societies inspired by the citizens of heaven, things function differently than we have been conditioned to believe. The poor are rich, the merciful receive mercy, people absorb the evil of the world rather than reacting to it and spreading it. The Kingdom of God is a picture of what life looks like when the love of God rules in the affairs of people.
Niebuhr certainly had some sense of this. Generations before the "missional" movement, he said that Christianity is always a movement, never an institution. The institutions follow the movement and exist to serve it, but the story of Christianity is always a story of a people living together and interacting with the world God loved enough to send his Son to die for it. History is always told with a focus on the institutions, but the institutions always follow what God has done among his people.
Whatever the Kingdom of God is, I think that if our telling of the Gospel is to be true to the message of Jesus, it must be centered in conversation about the Kingdom of God. As Christians are continually debating how we must be citizens of our nation and what the political consequences of our faith ought to be, a fresh reflection on the Kingdom is urgent. The Kingdom of God is a way of talking about how the Gospel hits the ground in the way we interact with each other and the culture around us--perhaps a primary cause that our effort to be "relevant" has focused on pop culture references, snazzy graphics, Christian hipsterism, and edgy music is our failure to reflect clearly on what Jesus was getting at in all those parables of the Kingdom.
I can't define the Kingdom of God. That's probably a good thing, since Jesus never did. But I find myself thinking about it and talking about it more and more. I can't help but feel that a focus on the Kingdom can't do anything but lead me in the right direction.
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