For the past three Thursday evenings, a group of
parishioners has been undertaking a study of the Lord’s Prayer. Now, some might
think that six weeks’ study of a short and familiar prayer is overkill, but I
believe that any of those who have been participating will tell you that it is
not. Each petition that we have considered so far has led us into wide-ranging
and stimulating discussion.
We have been looking at the prayer not so much as a
plea for God to act, but as a collective pledge to work with God for the
fulfillment of each petition. The prayer is the prayer of the church—Jesus’
disciples, who asked me to teach them how to pray. The prayer that Jesus taught
them is entirely in the plural—there’s no “I” or “my” anywhere, only “us” and
“our.” I would also suggest that this prayer is intended more as a model for
our prayer life—how we as a people relate to God—than as a fixed formula for
liturgical prayer.
A week ago, we considered the second petition:
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Some translations of the Lord’s Prayer put a period
after “come,” but most use a comma, linking the first two clauses to the last
phrase. When we talked about heaven the week before, we discovered that we had
different visions of heaven within the group. Nonetheless, we could agree that in
heaven God’s kingdom is found in its fullness and God’s will is done perfectly.
Then we asked ourselves the question: “What will it
look like when this petition is granted completely? How will we know that God’s
kingdom has come on earth as in heaven?” In one respect, the question is
unnecessary, because Jesus tells us at other times that the signs will be
unmistakable. All will see and know when the time comes.
As John wrote in the Revelation:
He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him…
On the other hand, Jesus goes out of his way
throughout the Gospels to tell us about the Kingdom. The
The time is fulfilled, and
the
On this last Sunday of the church’s liturgical year,
we join in the proclamation of the
On this Sunday, we acclaim Jesus as our king, and so
we ask ourselves what it would look like if we acted as if that were a complete
reality. We need look no farther than our Gospel lesson, as Jesus stands before
Pilate, asserting that his kingdom is not “from this world.” Some of us will
recall this phrase (per the KJV) as
“of this world,” which tends to move Jesus’ reign out of earth and into heaven
(wherever that may be…). The word “from” used in the NRSV makes it clearer that
he is referring to the source of his authority, and not the location of the
kingdom.
The source of Jesus’ authority is the truth to which
he came to testify, the Word of God, the God whom he called “Abba.” As Jesus
told Pilate:
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.
To belong to God and his truth means to listen to
Jesus: to hear him and follow him, to obey him, acknowledging him as our Lord
and saviour, the “ruler of the kings of
the earth.” Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we testify to the fact
that we still have divided loyalties. The world we live in does not fully
display God’s will being done, and neither has God’s kingdom not come in its
fullness. Jesus has given us a glimpse of what his eternal reign is like—in his
person, in his teaching and preaching, in his death and resurrection, in all
that he was and is and is to be.
Jesus was brought before Pilate, a brutal tyrant, quite
prepared to toss his unruly subjects a political bone. He stood there calmly
and claimed an authority far beyond anything the governor could imagine, an
authority based not on the power of the sword but on the power of love. In
Jesus—the incarnate Word of God, divine truth walking on earth—we find our
model for true humanity, and also our model of a true king.
When the study group began to ask what God’s kingdom
looked like, we came up with ideas like these:
·
Everyone eats enough.
·
The world is at peace.
·
All are housed and protected.
·
Creation is cared for by all
·
All people live without fear.
These are great and holy ideals, but not yet
reality. Some will call them impossibilities, but as it has been said: “Just
because something is impossible is no reason not to do it.”
In Jesus’ name, we turn our hearts and hands to what
is impossible for humans, keeping in mind what Jesus told us: “For God all
things are possible.” When we acclaim Jesus as King and Lord, we are accepting
the call to live as if God’s kingdom had already come—as if Jesus were already
the ruler of all the nations. We are accepting the call to live in hope, which
the American writer and political activist Jim Wallis has defined this way:
Hope is believing in spite of the evidence,
and then watching the evidence change.
So let us say “I believe that God’s people
everywhere can live without fear, whether of hunger, disease, oppression, war,
or any other injustice.” And then let us live as if we truly believed it,
watching in awe as God’s people help God build this kingdom on earth.
And let this be our prayer:
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven. Amen
