My friend wrote recently that she had been reading about the Lord’s Prayer over on the blog of Andrew Arndt. So I clicked, out of curiosity and read some of Andrew’s stuff on the Lord’s Prayer when I remembered an article I read last year on this prayer that we know so well.
So I dug up my research from the paper I had written on the Lord’s prayer and sure enough I found the article written by NT Wright entitled “They Kingdom Come: Living the Lord’s Prayer.” It was a short article and in all honesty, a bit of a cop out for a scholarly article on my passage, but it radically changed how I thought about these words that flow so freely from my mouth when prompted, almost rehearsed. (Okay more than almost…)
Wright dwells on the line of the prayer where we ask “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Wright says that to pray Thy Kingdom come is to see the world as the Lord sees it, with the love the Creator has for his creation and to see the utter brokenness and woundedness that the world lives in today. Then we take this love and this grief and see how that love and grief has existed before–in the death of Jesus on the cross. With that image in our minds we pray, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are praying for the redemption of the world and for the radical uprooting of evil and the final marriage of heaven and earth – for God to be all in all before our eyes.
But if we are going to pray this, we need to ask the question, Are we willing to be Kingdom-bearers? Are we willing to act as healed healers rather than broken bullies? Are we willing to sing the song of redemption loud enough for the world to join in? To fully live as Jesus created us?
We are all broken. We have all fallen short of the glory of God and been dealt bad hands. We have suffered from the evils of this world, the question is, how do we lead from that brokenness? How do we give up the idea of perfect leaders and take up the idea that we can lead and bring healing because we have experienced healing?
With all those questions in view – are we willing to pray this over familiar prayer and truly ask for the Kingdom of Heaven to come here, to meet us in this world. Are we willing to lead the way in this transformation? Are we willing to be Kingdom bearers in our everyday lives.
I’ll tell you one thing, after reading this NT Wright, I find it harder and harder to take this challenge that Jesus handed out in Matthew. Every time I pray that prayer I think about whether or not I am really up for this challenge. What if we were to fervently pray for the Kingdom to come and for His will to be done? What kind of church could we have then?
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