Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
1^st of March 2026

Deuteronomy 6:1-8
Matthew 6:7-15

Today, we listen to the part of the Sermon on the Mount that we all have memorised. The Lord’s Prayer is so universally relevant that it might seem unnecessary to contextualise it. After all, billions of Christians through time and space have prayed it, and we pray it every week here in a church two thousand years and half a world away from Jesus’ first teaching of it. It is our prayer as much as it is the prayer of Jesus’ first followers. And yet, when reading it, we still need to remember that Jesus was living in a land under Roman occupation, and that one thing he is doing in the Sermon is telling his followers how to respond to their Roman overlords.

Last year, we heard Luke’s version of this prayer, which is shorter than the version we heard today. It is the version in the gospel according to Matthew that we pray each week, with a concluding doxology or song of praise: ‘For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and for ever. Amen.’ As I said last year, the shape of the prayer is an example of the Jewish parallelism that we see so often in the psalms: ‘what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?’ (Psalm 8:4) or ‘the heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork’ (Psalm 19:1). The two parts of this prayer are in parallel; the first part, about God, balanced by the second part about us. There is also parallelism within each part. The core of the prayer is the petition ‘your kingdom come.’ ‘Hallowed be your name’ and ‘your will be done’ are parallel ways of saying the same thing. The hinge of the prayer is ‘as in heaven so on earth’ or ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ This is what we are praying for: that we may live in God’s kingdom here on earth.

‘Kingdom’ can be a difficult word for us; Australia currently has a king, but we describe our country as a commonwealth, not a kingdom. But Jesus spoke about the kingdom of heaven to distinguish God’s rule from the kingdoms of the world, imperial kingdoms with all their potential for violence. And by speaking of God’s kingdom, we are referring not so much to where God rules (which is everywhere) as to how God rules. When we pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth, we are asking that the earth be ruled as God rules.

How does God rule? The Hebrew Scriptures are clear. In the Torah, we read, ‘The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.’ (Deuteronomy 10:17-8) The psalmist sings, ‘O Lord, you will hear the desire of the meek; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed, so that those from earth may strike terror no more.’ (Psalm 10:17-18) The prophets tell us that ‘the Lord of hosts is exalted by justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy by righteousness.’ (Isaiah 5:16) God rules with justice, the justice that is love in action; God’s kingdom is a kingdom of justice and righteousness.

The second part of the Prayer, about us, shows what justice looks like in practice. It begins with everyone having enough to eat. When we read or hear ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ the simple word ‘bread’ includes all the meals that Jesus shared with others during his life and after his resurrection. It contains the multiplication meals, the Emmaus meal, the lakeside meal, and the Eucharistic meal. It is also the simple sustenance that we need to stay alive. This prayer reminds us that when God directly distributes bread in the Scriptures, as manna in the desert, for instance, there is enough for every person for every day. (Exodus 16) We know that this is true of the world, too. There is enough food on this planet for every person on this planet, if it is taken, blessed, broken, and given out, if we see our food as a consecrated gift.

Like the bread, the debts in ‘forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,’ are to be taken both metaphorically and literally. In the biblical world, being in debt was how people lost their land or became slaves. Debt slavery still exists today as one of the most common forms of modern slavery. Being forgiven debts enables people to stay free. So, this petition is to be taken literally. But Matthew’s text involves both debts and sin. The only petition in the prayer that is elaborated is this one: ‘For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ Those of us who do not have any financial debtors still need to forgive others their trespasses or sins against us.

The final petition on our side of the prayer is ‘do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.’ This is where we need to read the prayer in historical context. John Dominic Crossan suggests that this plea refers to the temptation felt by those living under Rome’s violent domination to respond to that occupation with violent resistance. We are asking God to deliver us from the Evil One who tempted Jesus, as we heard last Sunday, to gain all the kingdoms of the world by worshipping him. We pray that we are not tempted to do violence, even to hallow God’s name or to establish God’s kingdom. The Gethsemane story shows us that even when opponents use violence to attack Jesus, his disciples are not to use violence to defend him. When a disciple took up the sword in the Garden, Jesus told him, ‘Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will die by the sword.’ (Matthew 26:52) Crossan says that we face the same choice as Jesus did in his temptation, and as his disciples did on the night Jesus was betrayed, a choice between God and the Evil One and their respective kingdoms, between nonviolent justice or violent injustice.[1]

The idea that Christians are always called to nonviolent justice seems almost impossibly naïve. But as I said a fortnight ago, some studies have found that civil resistance, non-violent conflict, succeeds more often than violent conflict.[2] Crossan points out that while the Jewish violent resisters of Jesus’ time often won the first round against Rome’s local troops, they and everyone around them were subsequently massacred when the imperial reinforcements arrived.[3] Jesus died as an unarmed martyr, like so many other nonviolent activists, but his nonviolent campaign was ultimately much more successful than the rebellion that led to Rome’s destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

Can we help God’s kingdom to come? I think so. When we pray to our Father in heaven, we are reminded that we have been called to be the ‘heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ’ (Romans 8:17), that we have been made ‘in the image of God’. (Genesis 1:27) We are the heirs of God the Creator, called to care for the world; we are the heirs of God the Liberator, called to bring justice to the world. The Apostle Paul said that we can only pray, ‘Abba! Father!’ because God’s Spirit is in us. If it is God’s Spirit that is praying to the Father within and through us, then, asks John Dominic Crossan, are we praying for God’s intervention or is God praying for our collaboration?[4] He argues that when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are being empowered for our participation with God in the establishment of God’s heavenly kingdom on earth, because God will not do that without us. To quote Desmond Tutu, ‘God, without us, will not; we without God, cannot.’ If we want God’s name to be hallowed and God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven, then we need to share bread, forgive debts and sins, and refuse to collaborate with violence, even if that violence seems righteous.

The Israelites were told, ‘Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.’ In some places, the first followers of Jesus prayed the Lord’s Prayer three times a day. What would it do to us if we stopped and prayed the Lord’s Prayer morning, noon, and night? Would we be more willing to share our bread and forgive our debtors? Would we be reminded that all who take the sword will die by the sword, and so refuse to participate in or endorse violence? I encourage us all to try the experiment.

[1] John Dominic Crossan, The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of The Lord’s Prayer (New York: HarperOne, 2010), pp. 163-182.

[2] Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephen, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)

[3] Crossan, The Greatest Prayer, p. 165.

[4] Crossan, The Greatest Prayer, p. 28