There is a difference between God the king, perceived in the land of Egypt, or in the scorching wilderness, and in the new situation of the Promised Land. First, his will would prevail anyhow, whatever resistance one opposed to it would be broken: obedience means subjection. Secondly, a gradual training shows that this king is not an overlord, a slave driver, but a king of goodwill, and that obedience to him transforms all; that we can be not just subjects but his own people, his army in motion. Lastly, we discover the king in the full sense of this word as summed up by St Basil: ‘Every ruler can rule, only a king can die for his subjects.’
There is here such identification of the king with his subjects that is with his kingdom, that whatever happens to the kingdom happens to the king; and not only identification, but an act of substitutive love which makes the king take the place of his subjects. The king becomes man, God is incarnate. He enters into the historical destiny of mankind, he puts on the flesh that makes him part and parcel of the total cosmos, with its tragedy caused by the human fall. He goes to the very depth of human condition, up to judgment, iniquitous condemnation and death, the experience of having lost God and so being able to die.
The kingdom of which we speak in this petition is the kingdom of this king. If we are not at one with him and with all the spirit of the kingdom, now understood in a new way, we are not capable of being called the children of God, or of saying ‘Thy Kingdom come’. But what we must realise is that the kingdom we ask for is a kingdom which is defined by the last beatitudes: ‘Blessed are they which are persecuted.’ ‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you, for my sake.’ If the kingdom is to come, we are to pay the cost which is defined in these beatitudes. The kingdom of which we are speaking is a kingdom of love and it would be superficially, seemingly, so nice to enter it; yet it is not nice, because love has got a tragic side, it means death to each of us, the complete dying out of our selfish, self-centred self, and not dying out as a flower fades away but dying a cruel death, the death of the crucifixion.
Only within the situation of the kingdom can the Name of God be hallowed and receive glory from us; because it is not our words and our gestures, even liturgical, that give glory to the name of God, it is our being the kingdom, which is the radiance and the glory of our maker and our saviour. And this name is love, one God in the Trinity.
As we see it now, the Lord’s Prayer has a complete universal value and significance, expressing, though in reverse order, the ascent of every soul, from the captivity of sin to the plenitude of life in God; it is not just a prayer, it is the prayer of Christians. The first words ‘Our Father’ are characteristically Christian. In St Matthew II: 27 the Lord says: ‘No man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.’ To know God as our father in an approximate way is given not only to Christians but to many people, yet to know him as our father in the way in which Christ revealed it to us, is given only to Christians in Christ. Outside the biblical revelation God appears to us as the creator of all things. A life attentive and worshipful may teach us that this creator is merciful, loving, full of wisdom, and by analogy may lead us to speak of the creator of all things in terms of fatherhood; he deals with us in the way in which a father deals with his children.
~Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer
