The Lord's Prayer - 3 May Thy Name be Hallowed, Thy kingdom come...

 

The Lord’s Prayer – 3: “May Your Name be Hallowed, Your Kingdom Come and Your Will be Done…”

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You’d think after 50+ years of reciting the “Lord’s Prayer” - most often in the King James Version (or BCP) - I would know what comes after “Who art in Heaven”! So, yes, we will get to the “as-in-heaven-so-also-on-earth” part next time, God willing.

Many of our Bible translations, and in various printings of the Prayer in Common Prayer Books, Alternative Service translations, and so on, the matter of punctuation is inconsistent and can leave us without guidance as to emphasis and the correlation of phrases. Commas, semi-colons, even full-stops get in the way of our following Jesus’ train of thought. Because the Hebrew and Aramaic languages as written originally had no punctuation, it has been left to generations of scribes and translators to insert their own according to their reading and interpretation of the text. This has led to the situation of a rote-learned, ritualistic reciting of the Prayer that doesn’t allow for meaning, empathy or engagement with the text, or personal experience to guide our praying. The pray-er has no clues, in this respect.

Personally, I find I am spiritually guided and enlightened most of all as to Jesus’ probable, original intention by praying through as: “May Your name be hallowed, Your kingdom come and Your will be done – as in Heaven, so also on Earth…” It prompts me, then, to spend a few moments in contemplation of God’s holiness and to offer praise and worship concerning Their character, attributes, and grace-actions, for example. (Miriam-Webster defines Hallow as: 1) to make holy or set apart for holy use; and 2) to respect greatly to venerate. To venerate is rendered: 1): to regard with reverential respect or with admiring deference, and 2): to honour (an icon, a relic, etc.) with a ritual act of devotion.)

So that’s the first of a three-part declaration.

The second is: “[May] Your Kingdom come…” For some reason this phrase has incited a theological rats’ nest of interpretation, misinterpretation, misguided anticipation, and downright heresy!  Let’s sort out what we mean, then, by praying that God’s kingdom “may come.”

Psalm 103:19 states: “The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.” One of many such assertions in Scripture and, in particular, the Psalms, we are clearly to understand that God is God! Furthermore, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, and all that dwell therein.” The Kingdom (of God) therefore means the domain over which God is sovereign and, indeed, The Sovereign. As we saw before, there are two distinct areas of responsibility. Tom Wright, in his book The Lord and His Prayer,(SPCK, 1996) makes the distinction very clear: “’Heaven’ and ‘earth’ are the two interlocking arenas of God’s good world. Heaven is God’s space, where God’s writ runs and God’s future purposes are waiting in the wings. Earth is our world, our space.” (op.cit. pp 24,25)

That the two will be reunited is made clear in many ways, but one example is in the Book of the Revelation. Wright continues: “The holy city, new Jerusalem, comes down from heaven to earth. God’s space and ours are finally married, integrated at last. That is what we pray for when we pray ‘thy kingdom come.’”

The way this is enabled was inaugurated by Jesus the Christ through his ministry: preaching, teaching, healing and exemplifying in himself what it looks like when God and man – heaven and earth – are united in being and function. The crucifixion and resurrection took this to ‘higher’ and ‘deeper’ levels by actually effecting the reunion of man and God, heaven and earth. Astonishing though that is in itself (and a scandal to Jews and foolishness to non-Jews), Jesus’ message was even more mind-blowing, for he simply told people the gospel (“good news”) of the kingdom: “Repent [change your way of thinking and being], for the kingdom of heaven is within you.” (Luke 17:20-21). This was described by Paul as a mystery: “…the mystery that was hidden for ages and generations but is now revealed to His saints. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. We proclaim Him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ.…” (Col. 1:26-28).

But here’s the thing: Jesus wasn’t talking to “believers,” he was talking to Pharisees, tax-collectors, prostitutes, “mafia” bosses and their bar-owning, drug-dealing pawns. He was talking to them, about them; and to us and about us.

    “Our beloved Lord says the Kingdom of God is at hand,” writes Meister Eckhart. He continues: “Indeed, the Kingdom of God is within us; and St Paul says that our salvation is nearer to us than we think…

    …If I were a king, and were not aware of the fact, I should not be a king. But if I were sure that I was a king and everybody else shared this conviction, and I knew that people everywhere thought so and believed it, then I could be a king and all the wealth of the kingdom could be mine. Yet if I lacked even one of these three, I could not be a king at all. Even so, man’s [sic] blessedness depends on his awareness and recognition of the highest good: God himself.” (From Sermons: 6. The Kingdom of God is at hand, in Meister Eckhart – a modern translation, Raymond Blakney, Harper Torchbooks, my emphasis)

Indeed, so Universal, Cosmic and Eternal was Christ’s mission, message and mediation that Paul, quoting a popular hymn of his day, could announce: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil. 2:9-11 ESV)

That seems clear enough!

Or not. As we watch the news, read the newspapers and listen on the radio (or all these online) we cannot but lament that the Kingdom of God seems pretty invisible and, on the contrary, we live in a realm of unimaginable evil, destruction and death. All the more reason, therefore, to live and pray this world-changing prayer! In the face of all that causes us indignation and outrage it is precisely by aligning ourselves with God and God’s will for us – personally and as a people – that what is will be. Wright encourages us:

“What then might it mean to pray this kingdom prayer today? It means, for a start, that we look up into the face of our Father in Heaven, and commit ourselves to the hallowing of his name, that we look immediately out upon the whole world that he made, and we see it as he sees it. Thy Kingdom Come: to pray this means seeing the world in binocular vision. See it with the love of the creator for his spectacularly beautiful creation; and see it with the deep grief of the creator for the battered and battle-scarred state in which the world now finds itself. Put those two together, and bring the binocular picture into focus: the love and the grief join into the Jesus-shape, the kingdom-shape, and the shape of the cross…We are praying, as Jesus was praying and acting, for the redemption of the world; for the radical defeat and uprooting of evil; and for heaven and earth to be married at last, for God to be all in all. And if we pray this way, we must of course be prepared to live this way.” (Op.Cit. p30 my emphasis.)

This is our mission and purpose: to be peacemakers between heaven and earth, spirit and matter, person to person. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” Finally: “Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

      Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Cor. 5:18-21)

Let us pray!  

Grace and peace; Go well, Wayfarers.