Say Jesus

The shoes do not fit.
Despite everything that God had done with his chosen people, despite calling them out of obscurity, despite consistently elevating the most unlikely candidates: younger brothers, foreign women, slaves, even prostitutes, into being important characters in his story.  The people had still crafted this vision for themselves of a God who is the picture of might and power, who is surely working towards some victorious future, where the people of God are elevated into their rightful place as rulers of the world.
Except it never happened.
Babylon happened.  Rome happened, but never the vision of Zion that is seemingly promised by the God of Abraham.  Some would say this means that God was false in his promises.  I think it's just a matter of poor interpretation and no small amount of wishful thinking.
Jesus spent his life battling this wishful thinking.  His most powerful enemies were people who firmly believed that if they just followed the rules well enough, God would finally come through on the promise.
And so they missed the very embodiment of the promise.
Because God was doing something that they never expected, even though they should have.
When he came he did not inaugurate the Kingdom of Heaven in the way that everyone expected.  Instead, he showed God's absolute dedication to this covenant that calls the least, the sick, the broken, the sinful, the poor and the outcast into new way.  If you believe in the incarnation, and you look at the life of Jesus as a full and faithful expression of God's love for the world, you must see that God is willing to die for his principles.
The goal from the beginning has been to create a universe that is founded on love.  Creation is an act of love, not of necessity.  When we use our creative powers to fulfill a need, it is called invention.  God did not invent the universe, God created the universe, actually it appears he may have created a lot of them.  Why?  There is so much emptiness and wasted potential in the vastness of space.  The parts of it that we have studied to some extent are large enough to boggle our minds, and we learn, as we explore that there is more and more to learn about.  On an enormous scale that we can really only know through mathematics and imagination, we are really alone.  This is not to say that there are not other sentient beings out there, but there is an awful lot of wasted space too.
And so the question arises: is a God who can do all that, really terribly interested in ruling the world?
In Jesus we find the answer to that question is no.  He's not interested in that at all, Caesar, or whoever wants it, can have it.  What he's interested in is a relationship with a couple dozen people, and the web of relationships that can stretch out from those couple dozen people through thousands of years and through the rise and fall of empires.
God wants to be sovereign in our hearts, and in our lives, he wants us to follow him.  God wants disciples not vassal lords.  The language of worldly power is a distraction and a mistake for those who would seek to follow Jesus.  If for no other reason than the fact that Jesus himself so strenuously avoided those who would make him king.  Beyond that, there is also everything else in the Bible, which points to a God who is not so much interested in our allegiance, as in our love.
It stands to reason that if God desired the sort of absolute obedience that humans often demand in the Name, Creation would have been ordered somewhat differently.  If God really wanted to be king of this little drop of rock and water floating through a vast universe that was all God's doing in the first place, then there wouldn't be much we could do to prevent it,  Even eating a really special apple could not prevent God's sovereignty, unless of course, for some reason, God decided to let us go on doing things that ran contrary or across his plans.
If one puts any stock in the idea of a Creator, further, if one subscribes to the notion that the Hebrew Bible aptly describes that God, then Jesus of Nazareth is not a surprising twist in the plot, but the absolutely predictable revelation of the God who loves enough to forbear, forgive and redeem.
That we sometimes understand and proclaim him as though he is the ultimate deus ex machina, or even perhaps some formulation of magical trickery is a testament to our peculiar and persistent way of misapprehending God's motives.
It's no secret that our ideas about God or gods often put us at odds with each other.  In the course of our history religious folk, including Christians, have not exactly been the light of the world.  You can trace these episodes of violence directly to these misapprehensions of God, to moments when we though that God's will was for us, whoever "we" happened to be at the moment, to employ violence in his name in order to usher in some sort of promised land scenario.
But violence never wins.  It may be necessary at times and it may produce momentary results, but in the wide angle of history violence only ever produces a moment of peace, and power is notoriously difficult to wield with justice and so it never lasts very long.  Joshua led the people into the promised land on a wave of "God sanctioned" violence, but the Canaanites and their gods didn't simply melt away, eventually they led to the corruption and idolatry that destroyed the unity of the twelve tribes.  David and Saul fought a bitter war for control of the kingdom, but eventually the sins of the people caught up with them and Babylon destroyed them... then Rome... then... well the list kind of goes on and on.
God is there through it all... weeping for Jerusalem and waiting for the day when his wayward children will allow themselves to be gathered under his protective wings.  This has become a story about much more than just the sons of Abraham, Jerusalem is a symbol of what we all should be waiting and working for.  A city where God rules our hearts, with justice and mercy and most importantly steadfast love.  It has nothing to do with a geopolitical scheme: not Israel (the place), or Rome, or the United States of America, when will we stop making the same mistakes over and over again?