Bringing the kingdom—to the "wrong people"!

The whole point of Jesus’s work was to bring heaven to earth and join them together forever, to bring God’s future into the present and make it stick there. But when heaven comes to earth and finds earth unready, when God’s future arrives in the present while people are still asleep, there will be explosions. And there were.

In particular, the people we would today call “the religious right,” led by a popular though unofficial pressure group called the “Pharisees,” objected strongly to Jesus’s teaching that God’s kingdom was coming in this way, through his own work. They were scandalized, not least by the way in which Jesus was celebrating God’s kingdom—another strong symbol, this—with all the wrong people: the poor, the outcasts, the hated tax-collectors—anyone in fact who wanted to join in. It was in response to this criticism that Jesus told some of his most poignant and powerful parables.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 102 (emphasis original)

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Not a whole lot has changed, has it?
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