I have been discovering this year how much the Kingdom of heaven is the central focus of the Christian life.
God is a loving Father, and he wants us to live in the kingdom he made for us, the Paradise of the Garden of Eden. In Eden, God was king, and he made Adam and Eve in his “image and likeness” and gave us “dominion.” But we used our dominion in a terrible way: We rejected God and handed Eden over to his enemy. He has been undoing our action and re-Edenizing the world ever since.
Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer so we would memorize the goal he has set for us.
It begins: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
The Lord’s prayer starts by telling us everything we need to know about God, theologically. God is the Father-creator, the noncontingent cause of everything. His dwelling place is in heaven — which means he is outside time and space, omnipresent and omnicient. As for his name, when Moses asked him what it was, he said, “I am.” He is not a being, but being itself, the ground of all being.
In other words, God is the all-powerful, all-consuming fire, the source of all life. And yet we call him Our Father. That means we are royalty: sons and daughters of the very source of all power.
Next comes: Thy Kingdom Come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
We pray for his kingdom to come, and then we describe what that would look like. It would be a place where “his will is done on earth as in heaven,” in other words, Eden.
God’s covenants have been rebuilding Eden for years, and they were fulfilled when two people came along who truly did his will on earth as it is in heaven. The Blessed Mother said, “Let it be done to me according to thy word,” becoming the Second Eve who freely brought Jesus into the world, and Jesus said, “Not my will but yours be done,” as the Second Adam.
When we pray the Our Father, we are praying that we can join Mary and Jesus in doing his will on earth as it is in heaven.
Then the prayer says: “Give us this day, our daily bread.”
This is a prayer to live once again in a garden of plenty where we always have enough to eat. But notice, Jesus doesn’t say for each of us to pray for my daily bread, but our daily bread. The lesson is that the world has plenty of food — it becomes Christ’s kingdom when we make the food ours, when we share it.
But notice that the wording is strange. “Give us this day our daily bread” is like saying “Give us today our bread today.” That’s because what the Greek original says in both Matthew and Luke, is “Give us this day our epiousis bread.”
This means “Give us this day our super-essential bread,” says the Catechism — and that means we are praying for the Eucharist, the bread of the kingdom. Shortly after instituting the Eucharist, Jesus said, “I confer my kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom.”
So when we pray “Give us this day our daily bread,” we are praying that we can share the food of the earth with each other the way God shares the food of heaven with us in his kingdom.
Next is: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
This is a petition to overturn the Fall, and be returned to the innocence of Adam and Eve before they sinned in the Garden of Eden. This is exactly what Jesus did on the cross. The repentant thief said, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom,” and Jesus answered, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
Last is “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
The last petition speaks directly about returning us to what Eden was like before the temptation and the Fall. If you have ever messed up really badly in life, you probably wished you could go back and relive it and do the right thing. This is God giving us that chance to skip temptation and reject the serpent. And we pray for it every day.
