Rector’s Reflections
Monday 11th November 2024
Thy Kingdom Come, O God
In the current series of reflections, we are looking at what we might when we talk about the “Kingdom of God”. The phrase is used in the New Testament, and of course it features in the prayer that Jesus himself taught his followers to say: “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come….” And in recent years, some churches have chosen to keep November as the Kingdom Season, culminating in the Feast of Christ the King on the last Sunday of the Church’s year. But amidst all this talk of the “kingdom of God”, there is often little opportunity to reflect what we might actually mean when we use this phrase.
In last week’s reflections, I shared the thoughts of the Revd Lewis Hensley, a 19th century English clergyman who wrote a hymn which is still sung today : “Thy Kingdom Come, O God, Thy rule, O Christ, begin”. I think Hensley’s views a fairly representative of a what I shall call a “traditional “ view of the kingdom of God.
In essence, a traditional view of the “Kingdom of God” goes something like this. When we look around our world, we see plenty of things which cannot be pleasing to God. We see the suffering and destruction brought by war. We see exploitation, poverty and injustice. And when we look into our own hearts, so often we see selfishness, cruelty and a lack of compassion. Something needs to change: in our own hearts, and in our world. Of course, we can try to make changes for the better through our own efforts. But our own efforts, however well-intentioned, will never achieve the transformation we seek. Only God can bring about lasting transformation of ourselves and our world, because only God has the necessary insight and wisdom, and only God has the power to achieve the result we seek. Human beings are too self-seeking to bring out significant change for the better: they may try and implement plans for betterment, but these human-made plans will always fall short, and they will probably cause much unnecessary suffering. We only have to think of the suffering which has been a feature of many Communist regimes. So the transformation we seek must be left in God’s hands.
If we are Christians, we can take the argument a step further. For Christians, any talk of God necessarily involves talk of God the Holy Trinity, and so the “kingdom of God” in practice means the kingdom of Jesus Christ. This belief has its missional consequences. Because the coming of the Kingdom of God is necessarily the coming of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, we can promote and perhaps hasten the coming of Kingdom by telling other people about Jesus, and encouraging more people to become members of the Church. We can expect that the Kingdom of God will be found most strongly in the life of the Church, and so the more we can expand the size of the Church, the better.
I should add that this also means that there are always two aspects to the Kingdom of God. There is the Kingdom as it is present now, and the Kingdom as it will be in the future, and especially the Kingdom as it will be when Jesus return at His Second Coming.
This is, I think, a fair summary of a traditional doctrine of the “Kingdom of God”- the doctrine expressed in Hensley’s hymn, “Thy Kingdom Come O God”.
Does this still make sense today? Some Christians are content with the traditional doctrine. However, other Christians would wish to raise some questions. We shall look at some of these questions in the days ahead.