October 1, 2020

Jesus gave his followers a prayer, which most Christian traditions use to this day, and which anchors the key points of the Gospel. Speaking The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’ followers pray, not just when a sudden global crisis occurs, but every single day, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. We also pray every day, not simply when a horrible event acts as a trigger, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”.

Being kingdom-people and being penitence-people comes with the turf. That’s part of what following Jesus is all about. Those two petitions – the kingdom-petition, the forgiveness-petition – might just alert us to the real anti- kingdom forces at work in our world, our real “trespasses” (against one another, in our political systems, against the natural world and particularly the animal kingdom, in our farming and food-chain systems) of which we should have repented long ago.

In other words, if we, as Jesus’ followers, are waiting for special events to nudge us into looking for Jesus’ kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven”, or to tell us to repent when we are drifting into careless sin, then we’ve gone to sleep on the job. That is not to say, of course, that Christians never do go to sleep on the job, or that God cannot and doesn’t give them a pinch or a prod from time to time to get us back on track. That, too, is taken care of in The Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. In a sense, learning to follow Jesus is learning to pray The Lord’s Prayer.

How do we apply the Biblical words to any great and disturbing events of our time? The New Testament insists that we put Jesus at the center of the picture and work outwards from there. The minute we find ourselves looking at the world around us and jumping to conclusions about God and what God might be doing, but without looking carefully at Jesus, we are in serious danger of forcing through an “interpretation” which might look attractive – it might seem quite “spiritual” and awe-inspiring – but which actually screens Jesus out of the picture. As the old saying has it, “If he is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all.”

So, what might trust in Jesus mean in practice? There is after all only one Jesus: the Jesus of Nazareth who came into Galilee saying “Now is the time for God to become king. Now is the time to repent and believe the good news.” At every point Jesus was redefining all the ancient promises about God becoming king, about the good news that God was coming back at last to set everything right. He was redefining it all around his own vision when he told parables – vivid stories which said “Yes” to the kingdom of God and “No” to the ways in which most of his contemporaries were seeing that “kingdom,” that “sovereignty,” that “divine control.”

That’s not just a first-century issue. It is vital for our own reflection. There is a lot of the talk about “What is God doing in the coronavirus pandemic?” Maybe it would be better to ask what Jesus would do - and then watch Jesus heal a leper, announce forgiveness to a penitent woman, and celebrate parties (with all the wrong people). Then watch Jesus as he goes up to Jerusalem that last time and solemnly announces God’s final judgment on the city, the system, and the institution of the Temple that had refused God’s way of peace. We could watch as he washed his disciples’ feet before he broke bread and passed the cup around on Maundy Thursday with his friends. And comfort his mother as he hung on the cross. Three days later he appeared alive to his astonished friends in the upper room. All these are part of the ultimate announcement: God’s kingdom is now!