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 Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done,

  On earth as it is in Heaven.

These words from what we call The Lord’s Prayer, are familiar, more or less, to all English-speaking people, familiar, yet, for most of us, not all that significant.  Kingdoms are mostly out of style on earth these days, the will of God is not always clear, and why it should be the same on earth as it is in Heaven is simply an incomprehensible premise. But we don’t need to talk about incomprehensible premises. We need to comprehend the incomprehensible because we are dealing with the words of Jesus (Matt. 6:9-13), and we had best take them seriously, very seriously, and try to understand them as best as humans can do.

First, kingdom.  A kingdom  is a place where everything belongs to the king, including the lives of his subjects. When these words were first spoken to crowds of people, there were good kingdoms and bad kingdoms, kingdoms where people suffered less and kingdoms where people suffered more (Still are.), and   those who heard Jesus knew what a kingdom was. They may not have had a very clear notion of what the Kingdom of God was like, (but some may have), but they very well knew what an earthly kingdom was like. They knew that a kingdom had a king, and that the king was all powerful. One of those kings, for example, some thirty years earlier, had every  male child under the age of two in an area of his kingdom killed just in case one of them could someday be a problem for him. (Something to think about also is that the soldiers who did the killing were just doing their duty!) The power of a king, therefore, and the structure of a kingdom were well known to all those who were listening to Jesus, so when Jesus used the word “Kingdom”,  it was not a vague, literary reference.  It was life as all knew it.

Now there were, actually, two kings when Jesus spoke these words. One was called Antipas. He was the Jewish king. The other was Pilate, the Roman governor. He was, in fact, if not in title, the real king because Rome ruled the land.  But Jewish or Roman, the land (and the whole world) was a long way from what Jesus was talking about. He was talking about a kingdom where all was good,  That Kingdom was where God was King, and where the will of God was the will of everyone. That’s why Jesus said “Thy” Kingdom. “Your” Kingdom. God’s Kingdom.

Jesus’ conception of the Kingdom of God, or at least as much as our minds can take in, is found  in the stories he told and the comments he made to friends and enemies. All of them are important, and some have found their way into our daily life. For example, everyone knows what a “Good Samaritan” is even though they have no idea what a Samaritan is.

The Golden Rule is accepted if maybe not practiced by everyone. You can think of others, perhaps, for His teachings, acknowledged or unacknowledged, are woven into our life.

Jesus did not necessarily originate all that He taught. Some of his teachings appear in the early stages of human culture, and much shows up in other religions, but Jesus brought them together to guide us into the Kingdom of God, now and hereafter.

Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God whenever he could, to whomever would listen, wherever a crowd gathered, and as he moved around and told his listeners what life in God’s Kingdom would be like, the crowds got bigger and bigger. In time the local earthly kings became increasingly nervous about his popularity and influence and finally took steps to limit the threat he posed. He was arrested, tortured, and crucified. It was a terrible death, and if that had been the end of it, we would never have thought about “The Lord’s Prayer.”

But that was not the end of it.  That horrific execution was the beginning of a Kingdom that was to come. After death came life; after the crucifixion came the Resurrection. and after the Resurrection people talked more about his life and teachings. At first, those who claimed to follow Jesus were called ‘Followers of the way’. In time they were called Christians, a label that now, unfortunately, means a great many different things. The teachings of Jesus were recorded and written down decades after he died and came to life again, and eventually different writers gathered them together into what we now call ‘Gospels’, ‘good news’. There are four Gospels,  and they  tell us about the first few years of the life of Jesus, then skip over many years, and then we have accounts of the last three years of His life.

Many of the teachings of Jesus during those years have been gathered together into a section in the Gospel of Matthew called “The Sermon on the Mount” even though Jesus doubtless told them on a mountainside, on an open plain, in a valley, in the synagogues, visiting in the market place. Wherever people would listen, He would tell them about ‘Thy Kingdom’, the Kingdom of God. It is here we find the Lord’s Prayer and the line quoted above. God’s will should or will prevail in His Kingdom, here or elsewhere.  The next line is what is hard to comprehend.

“On earth as in Heaven.”  How on earth can life on earth be anything like life in Heaven?  But consider that they would be the same if God’s will ordered both the Heavenly life and the earthly life. We cannot imagine what life in Heaven is like, but God’s will on earth would be living according to the teachings of Jesus. Carefully read those few chapters in Matthew’s ‘good news’ (Matt. 5,6 & 7).  Think about what you could do to move your thoughts and words and actions to be more in accord with those teachings. If you are anything like most people, I think it is safe to say, you’ve got a long way to go. In fact, you will never get there in this life, but those words tell you and me what to aim for, and the target is not far off in the distance.  It is here and now.