Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §12.6
in heaven, so on earth', Matt. 6.10b), presumably as an explanatory elaboration
of the second petition ('May your kingdom come', 6.10a). 478 Does this indicate
how the petition for the kingdom to come was understood early on? Either that
the kingdom of God would be recognized (as present) when God's will was being
done (on earth) 479 or that seeking for the kingdom would be unavailing without
striving to do God's will? Matthew himself seems to draw that conclusion
(Matt. 7.21). 480 Either way, Matthew's tradition does not treat the prayer for the
kingdom's coming as an aspiration which can stand alone. As Luke's subsequent
account was to put it: questions about the kingdom's future had their place (and
sky-gazing was all very well), but what mattered now was the mission (Acts 1.5-
11). Or as Lee Keck has more recently put it: 'The real question is not whether
Jesus was right or wrong about the time of the kingdom but whether he was right
about the God whom he imaged as king and father'. 481
e. The Kingdom as Metaphor?
Before we paused to take stock, the preceding line of reflection was leading us
into the problems of conceptuality, where the basic problem is that of language
itself. Language as it were forces us into a linguistic/semiotic box, with words
having to serve (inadequately) as both windows of insight and lines of communication.
In doing both, they do neither very effectively. The basic issue, then, is
how language deals with time, and in particular with the future.
Paul Ricoeur has observed that it is narrative which gives history its temporal
flow, with the idea of beginning and end usually inherent in narrative. 482 Narrative
draws on human experience and in evoking a response from the reader mediates
between what has been and what is yet to be. 483 But if we cannot
478. As already noted (§8.5b), the most obvious explanation for such a difference in the
two versions of the Prayer (Matthew's and Luke's) is liturgical elaboration. The alternative of
taking the first two petitions in parallel (Gnilka, Jesus of Nazareth 137: '"name" is virtually
synonymous with "kingdom"') is less illuminating. The possibility that the explanatory addition
was 'authorized' by Jesus himself should not be excluded (see below, § 16.2b).
479. See also Luz, Matthäus 1.344-45; Davies and Allison, Matthew 1.605-606.
480. Caird, Theology draws a similar conclusion with regard to Jesus: 'For Jesus, entering
the Kingdom was synonymous with the life of discipleship — of submitting to the demands
of the God who is King' (Theology 369).
481. Who Is Jesus? 112.
482. P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1 ch. 3.
483. This is my much too simplified attempt to draw out for my own purposes Ricoeur's
'threefold mimesis', that is, his distinction between mimesisj, mimesis2 and mimesis3, in which
I acknowledge my debt also to D. Pellauer's Foreword to M. Joy, ed., Paul Ricoeur and Narrative
(Calgary: University of Calgary, 1997) xiv-xvi. In correlation with the reflections of the
484