Naród w diakonii Królestwa Niebieskiego

Abstract

In the past a custom had set in treating persons, peoples, and nations as being in the service of the Kingdom of Heaven (Divine, Messianic), of God’s truths and ideas. According to my research, it turns out that in St. Matthew in fact it is the other way round: namely, the Kingdom of God, of Heaven, serves to personal beings, that is to individual persons and nations of persons. For the nation consists of two spheres linked with each other: the sphere of nature and the sphere of persons. The created persons serve to the Divine Persons, but the Kingdom of Heaven as a kind of institution, salvational means and eschatological situation is the ministry to a personal reality. This means an infinite dignity of the individual and collective person. In the Gospel of St. Matthew the nation functions as a kind of “collective person”, which like the Chosen Nation constitutes from that moment onwards each nation “baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit” (Mt 28, 19). This is an exceptional lesson which has underestimated up to now and which has a profound character of a “social doctrine” of Christ and the Church. In this light the Kingdom of Heaven is neither an abstract nor a pure idea, but a complete action of God. It is God who performs social salvation and fulfills empirical and contemporary life of the Messianic People. Thus the living man enters the Kingdom of Heaven through repentance, life-giving and transforming faith, God’s law, new justice in Christ, universal love and putting one’s whole life in the position of being a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven.