Thy kingdom come: living the Lord's Prayer

Christian Century, March 12, 1997 by N.T. Wright

What are we praying for when we pray for God's kingdom to come? The second main petition in the Lord's Prayer -- "thy kingdom come" -- rules out any idea that the kingdom of God is a purely heavenly (that is, "otherworldly") reality. Thy kingdom come, we pray, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Sort out the familiar, but technical, terms. "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. Think of the vision at the end of the Book of Revelation. It isn't about humans being snatched up from earth to heaven. 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."

Jesus, contemporaries were longing for God to become King. Putting it bluntly, they were fed up with the other Kings they'd had for long enough. As far as they were concerned, the Roman emperors were a curse, and the Herodian dynasty was a joke. It was time for the true God, the true King, to step into history, to take the power and the glory, to claim the kingdom for his own.

The prophets had promised it. Ezekiel: YHWH himself will come to be the shepherd of Israel. Zechariah: YHWH will come, and all his saints with him. Malachi (with more than a tinge of warning): The Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple. And, towering over them all, Isaiah: There will be a highway in the wilderness; the valleys and mountains will be flattened out; the glory of YHWH shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. Zion hears her watchmen shouting, "Here is your God!" And ' Isaiah's message holds together the majesty and the gentleness of this God who comes in power and who comes to feed his flock like a shepherd, carrying the lambs and gently leading the mother sheep. This is the kingdom-message Jesus lived by; this prophetic vision is the basis of the Lord's Prayer.

But what will it mean, when Israels God returns to be King? According to the same prophetic passages, there will be a new Exodus: the evil empire will be defeated, and God's people will be free.

How lovely on the mountains are the feet of the messenger who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion "Your God reigns." Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion. YHWH has bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God (Isa. 52:7-10).

Jesus, I think, knew these prophecies intimately, and deliberately made them the theme of his own work. When we sing of Zion hearing the watchmen's voices, we are singing the song Jesus himself had in mind as he told his followers to pray, thy kingdom come.

So was Jesus' kingdom-message, after all, simply about national and political liberation?

At this point Western Christianity has tended to say: of course not. Jesus wasn't into politics; he came with a spiritual message, the timeless and eternal truths of personal salvation. Well, that clearly won't do. We'd have to cut out the telltale phrase, on earth, as it is in heaven. Whatever Jesus, kingdom announcement was all about, it was about something that actully happens, within the space-time world.

But, equally, Jesus' parables regularly challenged the simple one-dimensional liberationist kingdom-vision that his contemporaries cherished. If Isaiah's message is about Gods healing for the nations, about Israel's being the light of the world, this will not be achieved by military victory. To put it crudely, how can the Prince of Peace defeat evil if he has to abandon peace itself in order to do sop

No. Jesus took the three parts of Isaiah's kingdom-message and set about implementing them. Release for captive Israel; the defeat of evil; and the return of YHWH to Zion.

First, release for captive Israel. Jesus tells a story of a son who goes off in disgrace into a pagan country, and who is welcomed back, astonishingly, with open arms and a huge party. For Jesus' first hearers, the story of the Prodigal Son wasn't just a timeless message of repentance and forgiveness. It was, rather, the story of the new Exodus, the liberation of captive Israel. But Jesus, in telling this story, was not issuing a call to arms in the struggle for liberty. He was explaining why he was constantly celebrating the kingdom with the outcasts and misfits. Somehow, he seemed to be saying, through his strange work the kingdom was appearing, even though it didn't look like what people had imagined. This was how the captives were being released.

Second, Jesus spoke and acted as if evil's long reign would finally be defeated through his own work. Isaiah's kingdom-message promised defeat for the evil regime that had enslaved Gods people. Woven into that message in Isaiah we find four poems about a strange character, the servant of the Lord, who will be God's agent in accomplishing this task. The prophecy as a whole (Isa. 40-55) sets out the promise of the kingship of God; the servant-songs within it describe how the promise is to be realized. Jesus volunteered for the job. This, he believed, was how evil would be defeated.