Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§12.4 The Kingdom of God
seem to carry the same force as the engiken sayings: the coming of summer thus
heralded cannot be long delayed. 134
b. The Kingdom to Come
Equally worthy of note is the second petition of the Lord's Prayer: 'May your
kingdom come' (Matt. 6.10/Luke 11.2). This is the prayer remembered as
taught by Jesus to be his disciples' distinctive prayer, the prayer prayed probably
from the first by the tradents in their lives of discipleship. 135 The fact that
this prayer, which was probably firmly rooted in the spirituality of Jesus' disciples,
prays for the kingdom to come, without any sense of it having already
come, cannot but be important. One does not pray for something to come if it is
already present. 136
Moreover, the prayer looks as though it has been modelled on an early
form of the Jewish Kaddish prayer: 137
Exalted and hallowed be his great name
in the world which he created according to his will.
May he let his kingdom rule
in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime
of the whole house of Israel, speedily and soon.
by Matthew and Luke, presumably refers the saying to the coming of the Son of Man (Mark
13.26 pars.). But apart from its present context it resonates more like a parable of the kingdom's
sure coming (Taylor, Mark 520; Pesch, Markusevangelium 2.307-308, 311, who compares
Luke 12.54-56; G. R. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1986] 333). Luke's addition of 'the kingdom of God' is probably redactional, but does
the redaction carry with it an awareness of what the original reference was?
134. Cf. Jeremias, Parables 119-20.
135. See above, §8.5b. Of the five Q kingdom sayings which Schürmann traces back to
Jesus with probability, this is the one of which he is most confident — a 'probability bordering
on certainty' (Gottes Reich 135, 144; see also Schürmann's Jesus 18-30, 45-63). 'Jesus' understanding
of God may best be seen from the Lord's Prayer, in which the essential content of Jesus'
preaching is summarized' (Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie 1.84-85).
136. 'The meaning is not "may thy Kingdom grow", "may thy Kingdom be perfected",
but rather, "may thy Kingdom come". For the disciples, the basileia is not yet here, not even in
its beginnings. . . . Either the basileia is here, or it is not yet here. For the disciples and for the
early church it is not yet here' (Weiss, Proclamation 73-74). Gnilka also observes that the aorist
tense (in the Greek) refers to 'a single future coming' (Jesus of Nazareth 136).
137. Jeremias, Proclamation 198; Davies and Allison, Matthew 1.595; fuller details in
C. A. Evans, 'Jesus and Rabbinic Parables, Proverbs, and Prayers', Jesus and His Contemporaries
251-97 (here 283-94).
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