«Un reino que no es de este mundo»

“A kingdom not of this world” names a promise of redemption that exceeds ordinary political life, but the novel gives that promise a double edge. Judas hopes for a kingdom beyond death and suffering; the others’ arguments about messianism, national leadership, and war show how the language of salvation can also become entangled with earthly power and its costs.

The promise and its source

In the crucifixion scene, Judas watches from the edge of the crowd, drawn toward the grieving women but stopping beside the remains of an earlier cross. He believes a miracle is about to occur and anticipates the coming of a kingdom not of this world. The phrase arises at the moment when his expectation of sanctification and redemption is most intense.

Judas later explains that he urged Jesus toward promises of a new heaven and a new earth, a kingdom beyond this world, redemption, and immortality. In Judas’s account, these promises went beyond what Jesus himself intended: Jesus wanted to continue walking the earth, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and planting love and compassion in people’s hearts. Judas’s devotion thus transforms practical acts of care into a vision of final, supernatural change.

Judas’s faith and the hoped-for miracle

Judas says that he loved Jesus as God and believed that death could not reach him. He expected Jerusalem to witness the greatest miracle, after which death would disappear and love alone would reign. The kingdom is therefore not merely a spiritual abstraction: for Judas, it is bound to a specific hope that Jesus’s death will be overcome and the world permanently remade.

That hope shapes Judas’s account of his own role. He says he pressed the authorities toward Jesus’s crucifixion because he believed the end of time was near, and because he believed more strongly in Jesus than Jesus believed in himself. The promise of a world beyond death is inseparable from Judas’s decision to bring Jesus to Jerusalem and from the consequences he later acknowledges. The phrase carries both his longing for redemption and the tragic weight of the act he believes will bring it about.

Political messianism and national power

The novel places Judas’s religious expectation alongside modern arguments about political leadership. Gershom Wald praises David Ben-Gurion as a leader of unusual breadth, arguing that Jewish separation from other nations is a curse rather than a blessing. His admiration makes national leadership a matter of survival and political judgment, not a sacred destiny.

Shmuel challenges that outlook. He objects that Ben-Gurion now leads a nationalist state and surrounds it with biblical language about restoration and the fulfillment of prophecy. In this criticism, the promise of historical redemption can lend religious authority to the project of national power. Wald, by contrast, defends Ben-Gurion’s realism: he believes the Arabs will not willingly share territory or power, and that Jews must secure for themselves what will not be freely given. The disagreement exposes how political necessity and messianic language can converge even when the speakers assess their consequences differently.

Shaltiel Abravanel offers a sharp counterpoint. He opposed establishing a Jewish state and proposed an arrangement in which Jews and Arabs would share power, a position that led to his expulsion from the Zionist leadership. He later described Ben-Gurion as a false messiah whose course would bring disastrous bloodshed, warning that the oppressed might dream of becoming oppressors in their turn. His condemnation recasts messianic politics as a cycle in which liberation can reproduce domination rather than end it.

Redemption and the refusal of certainty

Wald’s broader distrust of redemptive ideologies gives the phrase a skeptical counterpart. He argues that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern movements may preach kindness and deliverance, yet become instruments of persecution when their followers hold power. He rejects the idea that the world can be redeemed, reasoning that those who set out to redeem it have repeatedly become involved in bloodshed. His position does not make suffering unreal; it questions whether a promised final transformation can be pursued without violence.

The phrase consequently remains suspended between two possibilities. For Judas, it is the hoped-for end of death and the arrival of a world ruled by love. In the political debates, the language of promised deliverance can authorize national ambition, while Abravanel and Wald warn of the violence such certainty may conceal. The novel does not settle the promise into a political program or a doctrinal answer; it shows how the longing for a kingdom beyond this world can inspire compassion and, when attached to power, deepen the very suffering it claims to abolish.