NOTES for Luk 11:34-41
The Savior explains spiritual life to His listeners through the example of physical sight. If a person's eyes are healthy, He says, then his whole body is filled with light; otherwise, instead of light, the person is plunged into darkness. But here the point is still not only physical sight, which serves merely as an example for describing the realities of spiritual life.
In the Gospel age, the most widespread ideas about the Kingdom were either religious-political or mystical in character. In the first case, the Kingdom was viewed as a strictly political reality, as an ordinary earthly state, differing from all others above all in that the Messiah would become its ruler and its laws would fully correspond to the Torah. Of course, a special measure of God's presence in the Temple was also expected, as was the renewal of the covenant with the coming of the Messiah, but the matter was still an earthly state that would be created in the way all states of this world are created.
The direct opposite of such an idea of the Kingdom was the idea of it as a mystical Kingdom, existing somewhere in another dimension of being, the way into which the coming Messiah would open for His chosen ones. And if the Pharisees and the Zealots saw the Kingdom above all as an earthly state, then, for example, the Essenes considered it a mystical reality.
Jesus, however, as can be seen, looks at the matter in a completely different way. The fact that the Kingdom is "not of this world" does not at all mean that it exists in some other dimension of being. It is here, nearby; only not everyone is able to see it. To see it, one needs healthy, full spiritual sight, which the fallen person is originally deprived of. But if his sight is cleansed and corrected, the Kingdom will become for him as obvious and certain a reality as the untransformed world is for him in his present state. After all, the Savior brought the Kingdom into the world not so that it would remain something alien and foreign in nature to the world, but so that its power and breath would transform the world, renewing it and making it part of the Kingdom. So that at the end of time the whole of our world would become part of the Kingdom, except for that evil in it which is incompatible with the life of the Kingdom.