9 Pray, then, in this way:
Our Father in heaven,
may your name be revered as holy.
10 May your kingdom come.
May your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Matthew 6:9-10 NRSV
Verse 9: Keeping Yahweh’s Name Holy
We begin The Lord’s Prayer by proclaiming that God the Father’s name is holy. Remember the significance of God’s name – Yahweh – as revealed in Exodus 34:6-7 (I wrote about it here). These are not empty words. If God is holy, there are certain things that we must do to acknowledge God’s holiness. We cannot proclaim that Yahweh is holy and go on with our lives like we always have. Christian ethics is, essentially, living a life in response to the Holy LORD God, Yahweh.
In other words, by praying the Lord’s Prayer, we have committed to the ongoing pursuit of forsaking idols, repairing the harm of our sin, and giving all allegiance to God. In both word and deed, Jesus’ disciples declare Yahweh to be holy.
However, just in case the word holy steers our imagination toward something sterile, distant, or removed, please remember that Jesus refers to God as “Father,” and a perfect Father is not any of those things. A redemptive imagination helps us see God as a good, gentle, and merciful Father. If God is perfectly revealed in and through Jesus Christ, then God’s holiness must be incarnational and relational.
Verse 10: A Clash of Kingdoms
The Kingdom of God has mysteriously and suddenly arrived in and through Jesus, but it has landed on top of a thousand other commitments and kingdoms. We must clear the way through daily repentance and releasing of other kingdom commitments. Don’t wait for heaven. Live out the Kingdom now! We cultivate redemptive imaginations – expressed through prayerful ethics – so that this world of pain, separation, and violence would be baptized in the Kingdom of God, and that God’s shalom (healing, relationship, and peace) would reign.
The clash of kingdoms begins in prayer – we must pledge our allegiance to King Jesus. But this allegiance must manifest in our ethics – we must act in allegiance to King Jesus.
Now, a word of warning to those who pray: if you pray for God’s Kingdom to come, but your life is erecting and reinforcing barriers to God’s Kingdom… your prayer life might be compartmentalized from your ethics. If we pray this prayer without the intention to participate in God’s Kingdom-bringing, then we may desire a divine genie more than our divine parent, Yahweh.
Let’s use a metaphor. I work on Wednesday nights (#youthpastorlife), and I’m allergic to seafood (sad, I know). Now, imagine that we see each other, and you say, “Graydon, please come over to my house for dinner!” I’d happily accept! However, the only option you offer is a seafood dinner on Wednesday night. Well, you’ve created barriers for me to accept your invitation. Perhaps you didn’t know – that’s fine! But imagine that, after knowing my schedule and allergies, you kept offering the same invitation (“Graydon, please come over to my house for dinner!”) but you never altered the menu or timing. Over and over, you told me, “Come to my house, you are welcome here!” But your unwillingness to change and your disinterest in knowing who I am communicate the opposite: I am not welcome, and you do not want me to come to dinner.
I wonder if God sometimes receives the Lord’s Prayer like this. We pray for the Kingdom to come but we set up barriers to the Kingdom coming. Perhaps this is what God meant in Isaiah 1:15-17:
15 When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.
16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove your evil deeds
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil;
17 learn to do good;
seek justice;
rescue the oppressed;
defend the orphan;
plead for the widow.
There are many barriers to Kingdom life (greed, violence, selfishness, sexual sin, hypocrisy, etc), but, in light of recent shootings, I’m particularly concerned about gun violence. America is averaging more than one mass shooting per day in 2022. In 2020, 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries. More than numbers or statistics, I’m concerned about what guns do to our character and imagination.
I’ve been asking myself, “Would we resist it if God answered the Kingdom Prayer?” Because Matthew 6:10 doesn’t look like AR-15 rifles. When Christians support gun access at the expense of the “other,” we cultivate inhospitable soil for the Kingdom of God. We do not create space for the Kingdom of God through violence. Gun violence is the fruit of diseased imagination. The belief that guns are the only way to safety and liberty is the fruit of limited imagination. A Christian redemptive imagination, on the other hand, is a path toward the elimination of violence – from Eden to Isaiah and Micah’s vision of the weaponless future to the Beatitudes to Jesus’ rebuke of retributive violence to Paul’s call for forsaking vengeance to the New Heavens and New Earth.
Prayer that keeps Yahweh’s name holy and genuinely invites the Kingdom of God is the type of prayer that moves us to wash our hands of blood and act justly. Today, may our prayer and ethics follow the trajectory of Christian peace with a redemptive imagination.
Part Three will reflect on verses 11-13 and the prayerful ethics of economy, forgiveness, and dependency on God.