When Jesus was born, a number of people seem to have had an inkling of what his vocation was to be; but he himself, a tiny baby, cannot have had the remotest idea of what his vocation was, unless we are living in a world of Magic. And sadly, we have only one small glimpse of his spiritual development, before his baptism; and that is the story of his being in the Temple talking to the Elders for three days, while his parents looked for him in vain.
When Jesus was in the desert, he must have worked out what kind of a kingdom he wanted. There was no earthly point in his preaching that “the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand”, unless he had a clear idea in his mind of what that kingdom would be like. So there is no harm in our doing the same. It is commonly said that His was to be a kingdom of Love; and the Romans could be relied on to maintain Law and Order. But that raises so many problems now that We have to maintain Law and Order (the problems that had faced Confucius and the Chinese legalists five centuries earlier); suppose we leave those problems aside, and imagine instead that Jesus believed that He was immortal, and was confident in that belief? One finds, I think, that everything in the Gospels falls into place. Of course He would have wanted to share that immortality with everyone who believed in Him. So the Kingdom of Heaven, which was “at hand”, was a kingdom of immortal men and women. But He could not say this outright; firstly no prophet dare be egotistical, because the traditional penalty was death, but also secondly because if He was egotistical, his followers could not in psychological truth have followed Him. His followers could only follow Him, if what he said was unselfconscious. Hence his exhortation that faith can remove mountains. Hence his calling on Lazarus to come out of the tomb, and telling Jairus’ daughter to get out of bed. If he had simply believed he was going to die a natural death, if he were not murdered first, he could not possibly have called on someone who was dead to come back to life. Just imagine you yourselves doing it! To be able to do it, you have to believe or imagine that you yourself are the master of life and death. Hence also, once he knew he was going to be murdered, his proclamation that anyone who believed in Him must eat his flesh and drink his blood. In other words, they must be replicas of Himself, immortal. Anyone remotely interested will find an extended discussion of this in the second Chapter of my Thought of Jesus on this website “Religion Rewritten”.
However through the centuries the Church has preached a different Gospel; and so we have had the Inquisition, the Counter-reformation and the Wars of Religion, justification by faith, and the modern Gospel that “Love solves all Problems”, which is so fatuously untrue that it is no wonder that people are leaving the Churches in droves. “Love” would not, and did not stop Hitler; and anyone who remembers the last war knows that “Love solves all Problems” is the biggest lie in creation, because it is the perversion of the biggest truth. As Shakespeare wrote, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”.