The kingdom of God, or reign of God, is God’s dream for this human, historical, material world: "on earth as in heaven."
The Hebrew prophets were captured by the dream of the kingdom, a vision of the world where God’s justice and peace would reign:
Jesus came preaching the nearness of the kingdom with its glad and urgent invitation to us all. "The kingdom of God is in you, among you - entos you in the Greek - in your midst" (Luke 17:21). The kingdom is here not there, near not far, as close as your own breath, closer.
But the kingdom requires a turning, a metanola. "You must change your life. . ." is its insistent call. There has to be an entering in, a letting go, for the kingdom is near but not fully come.
Think of the kingdom as a circle which overlaps the circle of our earthly existence, but only partially. The petition "Your kingdom come" prays for the reign of God to overtake our existence, make it new, make it right and make it whole.
It is a dangerous prayer: Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, in me, as in heaven. It lets God loose in us and in the life of the world.
The Celtic Christian symbol for the Holy Spirit is the "wild goose." What a startlingly different image than that of the "heavenly dove"! When we pray this prayer we pray for the wild goose of a Spirit to lead us out to where we need to go -- and where God needs for us to go. We will not return unchanged.
The poet Mary Oliver writes: Tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?1
So God asks us, and so we pray this prayer with all its hidden wildness: "Your kingdom come!"
II
"Give us this day our daily bread." Here is not a selfish prayer, but one of the greatest simplicity. It does not say, "Give us this day our filet mignon with béarnaise sauce." Or, "Give me today bread enough to last me the rest of my life." Rather, "Give me bread sufficient for this day."
There is an echo here of the manna miracle in the wilderness when God provided the Hebrew people a curious white substance for food on their journey from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. ("Manna" literally means, "what’s that?") Manna spoiled after one day. It could not be stored, only eaten the day of its provision. So we pray, "Give us this day bread for today."
Our prayers can become anxious and greedy. The spiritual etiology of greed is often anxiety. But Jesus taught and lived a more trusting, less grasping way:
There is a connection between the simplicity of this prayer and the call of the kingdom for justice and compassion. As Gandhi is quoted: "There is enough in this world for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed." Our anxiety-fed greed can close our hearts to our neighbor. I like very much the Argentine blessing set to music:
III
"Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us."
[A note on translations. We take an excursion off the main road. Should we use "debts, trespasses" or "sins"? All three words are found in the two versions of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and Luke.
[In Matthew the Greek says, "Forgive us our debts (opheilemata), as we forgive our debtors." This is probably closest to the word Jesus used: the Aramaic hoba. "Debts" was an Aramaic metaphor for sin which emphasized the debt that sin causes in relationship, a debt which cannot be repaid, only forgiven. But Jesus might also have voiced in this prayer the kingdom’s call that we forgive each other’s financial debts too because indebtedness was so wrapped up in the exploitative economic conditions of his day.2
[Verses 14 and 15 following the Lord’s Prayer comment on the forgiveness petition and use a Greek word, paraptomata, normally translated "trespasses." When William Tyndale embarked on the first English translation of scripture (1526), a monumental and formative achievement, he decided to use "transgressions" for both Greek words, so the prayer read, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." He probably felt "debts" would not be clearly understood as "sins" and used the more general "trespasses." The Book of Common Prayer (1548) followed Tyndale, and the rest is history.
[The King James Version (1611) retained the more accurate word "debts" -- "Forgive us our debt, as we forgive our debtors." Many Protestants other than Anglicans followed the King James Version.
[Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer was a general word for sin, hamartiai, in the first part of the petition and the word for debts in the second part: "Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us." He wanted a word more generally understood for sin in the Greek world for the first part but wanted to retain Jesus’ understanding of sin as "debt" in the second. So he both translates and preserves. Smart man. He is like a man restoring a historical house who in one place leaves evidence of the original. (Is this more than you wanted to know? Did you ask for the time and I told you how to make a clock? Did you even ask for the time?) Back to the main road.]
"Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us." As much as daily bread we need daily forgiveness - - the forgiveness we give as well as the forgiveness we receive. So Jesus follows the petition for daily bread with one for forgiveness. We can die from a lack of forgiveness -- the kind we need to give and the kind we need to receive -- as surely as from a lack of bread. This prayer can save our lives. A paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer set to the African folk tune Kum ba ya connects bread and forgiveness and the dailyness of our need for both:
There was a startling gratuitousness, a radical giftedness to the forgiveness that Jesus taught and gave. It went out to all people, many of whom Jesus’ religion and culture had placed beyond the reach of God’s mercy. And it came not requiring repentance as a pre-condition, but bringing it in its healing wings.
Jesus pictured the forgiveness of God as the prodigal love of a father running, running to welcome home a wayward son. And before the boy can get his carefully rehearsed speech of repentance out of his mouth, his father is kissing and kissing him, wrapping his arms around him and calling for a homecoming feast. (Not all are pleased.)
God’s forgiveness is already on the way to us. Our prayer flings open the door to God’s healing mercy: "Forgive us our sins."
What about that next phrase: "As we forgive those who sin against us." Is there a conditionality about this prayer? It is not a legalistic conditionality: God waiting to see if we forgive before forgiving us. If so, who would be forgiven?
There is, however, a spiritual circle of conditionality: God’s forgiveness loosens our hearts to forgive others, but if we refuse to forgive others we stop the flow of God’s forgiveness to us.
Picture the heart with a double-hinged door that swings in and swings out. As the door swings in, God’s forgiveness flows in. But if we shut the door so that forgiveness does not flow back out to others, the door is frozen not only to the forgiveness we give but also to the flow of God’s forgiveness to us.
Forgiveness is learning to live in the free mercy of God. It is a letting go of our compulsion to control. Our refusal to forgive another who has hurt us may be the last bit of control we think we have over them. But this kind of thinking binds us as much as the other, maybe more.
Forgiveness is also a letting go of the past which binds us. It is the step when once and for all you give up your attempts to make the past different! The past cannot be changed; it can only be forgiven.
Forgiveness may be the most difficult and most complex of life’s spiritual challenges. C. S. Lewis writes of discovering one day he had finally forgiven someone who had hurt him badly, a person he thought he had forgiven thirty years before.
"Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us." As we pray this prayer day by day, we learn to swing the door more fully and freely in and out, letting more of God’s forgiveness in and letting more and more forgiveness flow to others.
So we come to this table today, the table of the kingdom, a table of bread and forgiveness. We come with our need only and with this prayer on our lips.
1. "The Summer Day," New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press,
1992), p. 94.
2. Gerd Theissen, The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest for the Historical Jesus in
Narrative Form (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), pp. 68-71, 148, 210.