I’ve been giving some thought to the Lord’s prayer. After all, if you are not sure how to pray, it’s the go to model Jesus left us. Though we sometimes veer away from the “should” word (so bossy) Jesus is happy to use it, and in Matt 6:9 instructs us, “This, then, is how you should pray.” Immediately before he had been warning against prayers that are too showy (Matt 6:5) or too wordy and too long (Matt 6:7-8).
I don’t intent to go into a detailed unpacking of the prayer – as simply praying it a few times is likely to be more useful. And please don’t leave this blog without doing what Jesus said we should, which is to pray this prayer. You probably don’t need a reminder of the words but here they are anyway!
“This, then, is how you should pray:
‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.’
It’s the intriguing request made in v10 that strikes me, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
If you consider thinking about heaven to be an escapist pursuit that is of no earthly use, note that Jesus disagrees. To the contrary, Jesus suggests that thinking about heaven should help set our agenda for the earth. He instructs us to urge God to implement the priorities and ways of heaven on this planet. That’s hardly escapist.
Now to be clear, history has seen many attempts to implement this prayer, and the vast majority have been deeply problematic. Frame it in a certain way and you have an immediate justification for Christian Nationalism, which almost without exception has seen the favouring of the second word over the first, the nation (whichever one it is) quickly becoming an idol, the first word (Christian) being selectively used to justify whatever was considered to be in the national interest. Be it slavery, war, economic or environmental exploitation, somehow nations have managed to do the gymnastics required to fit this into a “Christian” agenda. And this is not simply something that happened centuries ago – you know as well as I do of some of the contemporary attempts to squeeze Christianity into a very ill fitting political agenda.
No, I don’t think that is what Jesus was urging us to pray…
But that does not mean we should relegate this prayer to the too hard basket. Because it is a prayer about priorities and our ultimate allegiance – about the deep desire that the priorities of heaven would be demonstrated on earth. And naturally this makes sense. Why else would God have created humans in God’s image? Humans are called to reflect or mirror something of the character, nature and goodness of God. True, we are tarnished image bearers, but not so tarnished that Jesus doesn’t entrust us with this prayer. He is essentially saying, pray that something of heaven will be tangibly visible on earth.
No – you don’t see it in the power squabbles of Christian Nationalism. After all, Phil 2:5-8 is a permanent rebuke to that approach. We are called to have the same attitude of Jesus who “made himself nothing” and through that radical descent, transformed everything. And if we believe that it is at Jesus’ name that every knee will one day bow, it is Jesus’ model that we should follow. How else can we know the priorities of Heaven if not from the one who came from the heavenly realm to live on earth with us.
In that model we see kindness, courage, mercy, integrity, sacrifice, wisdom, compassion and a deep commitment to restore things to the way they are meant to be. It is why Jesus’ opening call to us is to repent… to do the U-turn back to who we were always created to be, bearers of God’s own image.
So what are we praying when we pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”? I suspect we can’t pray “your kingdom come” until we are willing to pray “my kingdom go… my kingdom, with all its petty idols, fears and insecurities.” And when it starts to go, then I can begin the journey of descent to follow the one who took on “the very nature of a servant” so that the goodness and grace of God could be experienced by those of us who live below, “as it is in heaven”.
Nice chatting…
Photo by Mallem Amir: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sun-rays-from-cloudy-sky-13556748/
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If you haven’t yet listened to the opening podcast of the Faithfully Forward: AI and the Future of faith and Humanity, where I chat with Rev Dr Michael Jensen about what it means to be human in an AI era, here is a link.
