The political angle on Jesus is a red herring. Elsewhere, I talk about the abomination of right-wing American “Christianity,” but that’s not the target of this article. The clash, rather, is between the canonical gospel Jesus’s uncompromising otherworldliness, and modernity in general (liberalism consumerism, secular humanism, technoscientific progress, etc).
You seem to be seizing on the Gospel of Thomas’s mystical image of the kingdom of God (I know it’s in Luke too), the point being that some accommodation could between made between the divine and human societies. That’s quite a slender reed, though, in comparison with the mountain of evidence of Jesus saying that the two kingdoms are antithetical to each other.
The first will be last, and the last first. That reversal of expectations is shown in the death and resurrection of the lowly Jesus. The last became first. To succeed in God’s terms, or to become Christ-like, means failing according to human standards. It means sacrificing your earthly shot at happiness by helping others ahead of yourself. It means leaving friends and family, and loving strangers as yourself. It means surrendering to standards of righteousness which can have no home in nature, the latter having fallen to demonic hordes (as Paul’s quasi-Gnosticism emphasized, and as Jesus illustrates by having to cure demonically possessed persons).
Anyway, however you want to minimize that, the question is indeed the one you ask, which is whether there must inevitably be a conflict between Jesus and modernity. The more you make the two compatible with each other, the less reason you give anyone now to worship Jesus. If Christian ideals are perfectly modern (liberal, capitalistic, democratic, materialistic, naturalistic, humanistic, progressive, rationalistic), Christianity would take its place beside a thousand other ideologies that are consumed as dispensable products.
But this is the gambit of liberal Christianity. You see it all over the place at Backyard Church. I’m pretty sure it would disgust Jesus even more than it disgusts me. Remember how many times Jesus condemned hypocrisy?
