Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us and do not subject us to the final test.” (Luke 11.1-4)
As many of us already know, the Lord’s Prayer is the most well-known and most frequently used prayer by Christians, much the same as the Shema is for people of the Jewish faith. Also known as the “Our Father” because of its opening words, the Lord’s Prayer gets its name because it is attributed to Jesus, offered to his disciples by him in response to their request that he teach them how to pray.
That event is retold to us today in the selection taken from the Gospel of Luke that is provided to us on this Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. It is found in Chapter 11 of Luke’s gospel and fits nicely into one of his favorite themes, that of Jesus at prayer. In at least ten different instances, Luke refers to Jesus in the act of praying.
For example, the first instance occurs in 3.21 following Jesus’ baptism when the evangelist tells us that “after all the people had been baptized and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” The last instance occurs at his crucifixion during his final moments. Luke writes, “Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,’ and when he had said this he breathed his last.”
There are many other examples interspersed throughout the gospel, each one making it clear that Jesus was a man of prayer. So, it should come as no surprise to us that at one point his followers should say to him, after having watched him praying, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.” As a result of that request, Jesus offers them a short prayer that they might say, known forever after as the Lord’s Prayer.
It is not peculiar to Luke’s gospel. The evangelist Matthew also provides for us the Lord’s Prayer, but it appears much earlier in his gospel, placed at a point in the Sermon on the Mount. Also, Matthew’s version is longer, having seven petitions, whereas Luke’s rendition is shorter and simpler, having only five petitions.
It should be pointed out that a very early Christian text that carries the title “the Didache” or “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” possibly written contemporaneously with the gospels or shortly after, but not considered a canonical text, also contains the Lord’s Prayer, a version very similar to Matthew’s. It is introduced into the text in this way, “You must not pray like the hypocrites, but pray as follows as the Lord bid us in his gospel.”
The prayer follows with these words, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name; your Kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven; give us today our bread for the morrow; and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but save us from the evil one, for yours is the power and the glory forever.”
Of course, our concern today is with the version that Luke provides us. A quick look at the text of the prayer shows that the first two petitions concern the holiness of God, found in the phrases, “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.” The final three petitions ask for daily bread, forgiveness of sins, and freedom from testing, the latter phrase a reminder of Jesus’ own ordeal in the wilderness when he was subjected to temptation by the Devil.
Either word, testing or temptation, can be used because it is understood that every temptation is a testing of our moral fiber in some way, requiring us to call upon God’s strength to help us to resist evil in whatever form it presents itself to us in those times when life either throws us a curve or offers us an easy way out, neither means benefitting us in the long run.
Of course, it should not be understood as God snatching away from before us the test or the trial, but instead as providing us with the courage and the fortitude to withstand the assault. It is perhaps best understood in Jesus’ own prayer during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemani when he prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.”
We want to note that the prayer in the Garden contains the phrase “thy will be done,” a phrase that does not appear in Luke’s presentation of the Lord’s Prayer as it does in both Matthew’s version and that found in the Didache. Perhaps Luke preferred to place it in a concrete experience of testing rather than have it simply appear as another petition in the Lord’s Prayer. Regardless, it accomplishes Luke’s understanding of beseeching the Most High God to provide strength in the face of an obstacle or ordeal.
For our study today, I would like to look more closely at what I consider the most overlooked phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, the phrase “may your kingdom come.” Many a sermon has been preached on the other petitions in the prayer, particularly the use of the word Father as the name by which we can address God, or the request for daily sustenance that is found in the petition “give us day by day our daily bread,” or the call to forgive us our sins in the same way that we forgive others their sins.
But far less often do people in the pew hear from the pulpit much of anything about the petition, “may your kingdom come,” an unfortunate fact because it is one of the primary petitions that has to do with God himself, appearing immediately after the introductory phrase, “Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy.” Its appearance at the start of the prayer argues for its primacy and for its importance, something too often neglected in our rush to get to the petitions concerning our own well-being.
When the petition is rightly understood, I would argue that it is one of the most important verses in the Lord’s Prayer. The reality is that the core tenet of Jesus’ preaching was summed up in his proclamation that “the kingdom of God is at hand,” a prediction with apocalyptic overtones, meaning the forces of evil were about to be met with the overwhelming power of good as God reclaims his creation, loosening the grip that Satan had on the world.
In effect, then, the petition “may your kingdom come” is an earnest request that the rule of God would be restored in the world, and that the rule of evil finally would be shattered once and for all. As such, it is the most radical of the five petitions, calling for an upheaval of the world, an upending of the way things have traditionally been done, and a toppling of the tyrants that terrorize the lowly and the forlorn.
If we return to the start of Luke’s gospel, we will find exactly what the phrase “may your kingdom come” means when we review Mary’s words to her cousin Elizabeth in her prayer that we call the Magnificat in which she responds to her cousin’s welcome with the exclamation, “The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich he has sent away empty.”
Of course, the same sentiments will be reiterated in Jesus’ inaugural address when he speaks to the townsfolk of Nazareth, explaining his mission in these words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”
In both addresses, that of Mary and that of her son Jesus, we find the fullness of what happens when the kingdom of God comes upon the earth. It is, to say the least, earth-shattering. Heads roll as the last move to the first place while the first move to the last place. The whole seating chart is changed and beggars are invited into the banquet hall while the stuffed and the spoiled are booted from their seats of honor.
To pray that the Kingdom of God comes is to pray that the world is finally under the rule of the God of the heavens, not under the thumbs of the proud and the powerful of the earth. It gives voice to the fervent hope that the poor will find a place in the world and that the hungry can feast on a full meal once again. If and when the kingdom comes, the widow, the orphan and the foreigner will be treated with utmost respect and the nobodies of the world will finally be seen as somebodies.
Seen in this way–which I would suggest is exactly the way the petition should be seen–it becomes clear just how radical this petition is, calling, as it does, for a reversal of fortunes and a reinvention of the world, orienting the ways we interact with one another with the ways of God who claims all of us as his sons and daughters, and who insists that each of us carries within our chest the very breath of divinity, breathed into us at birth and residing within us so long as walk upon the earth, a spirit that shows us the right way in a world hellbent on the wrong way.
At this point, the question we should ask ourselves is if we truly are praying for a world turned upside down as the petition states, or if we are only mouthing words that are hollow and shallow, all the while wanting nothing to change in a world that allows many of us to profit off the sweat of the poor, to poke fun at the destitute and despised, and to persecute the powerless and the defenseless.
The simple truth is that each time we pray these words we are asking for a change not only in the world, but in our hearts, because the heart is the birthplace of both good and evil. And if the world is festering with evil, then it is because our hearts are infected with it. So, to pray for the kingdom of God to come is to pray that our hearts are changed from hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.
As I said, this petition–more often than not overlooked–is deadly serious business and every time we pray it we should shake in our shoes, especially if we find ourselves comfortable in and conforming to the ways of the world, a place as far removed from the ways of God as the earth is from the heavens. To pray that the kingdom of God becomes the rule of the land is to call for the biggest change this world has seen since the dawn of creation when God breathed his life into the darkness and called forth light.
So, the next time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we may want to pause for a moment at the petition “may your kingdom come,” to consider just what the world would look like under the rule of God, knowing it will require of us a conversion of our own hearts, a painful and godawful process for sure. In other words, the Lord’s Prayer should be prayed with great care and with full honesty, or not prayed at al.
–Jeremy Myers
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