There is one more thing that I’d like to say about “Your Kingdom come” before we move on. It seems rather obvious, though in all my years of bible reading, I never saw it until a couple of years ago. I was reading a collection of ancient Greek homilies on the Transfiguration of Christ (in translation, of course—my Greek isn’t that good). What several of these homilies pointed out almost shocked me…
What is the Kingdom that we are to pray come? In one sense, you can say that the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew’s gospel, is the government of God: the fact that God is ruler over all, and the Kingdom of heaven is how God rules all. When we think of the Kingdom of Heaven as the government of God, then one wonders, “What’s to come? Doesn’t God…
I had a conversation recently in which I couldn’t explain very clearly a comment I made several times, and as a result there was a certain amount of misunderstanding. I realize that perhaps many people have this same misunderstanding, and since it has to do with the Kingdom of Heaven, and how it “comes” or how we actually enter and live the life of the Kingdom of Heaven while we are still…
Last time we talked a little about the grammar of the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. We discussed how they were actually commands of a sort: third person imperatives. We talked about the phrase, “Let your name be holy (as in heaven, so also on earth)” and how some church fathers tied this phrase to the verse in Isaiah and Romans that places the blame for God’s name being blasphemed…
Last time, we looked at how calling on God as our heavenly Father is a daring thing to do. Today, I want to look at the little pronoun, “our.” Jesus taught His disciples to pray “Our Father in heaven,” not “My Father in heaven” nor just “Father in heaven.” It’s “Our Father in heaven.” [Yes, I know that Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer omits the “our.” However, the version of the…
Over the past several months, I have been reading up on the Lord’s Prayer. Basically what I have been doing is reading homilies written by ancient and contemporary fathers (and in a couple of cases, mothers) of the Church. As I read, I found it impossible to take notes because, on the one hand, I didn’t know what I was looking for, and on the other hand, just about everything seemed notable. …