Thought for the Week: What love can do
Philip Parratt reflects on what love can do
At Meeting for Worship recently a Friend read from Romans 7 on sin and it got me thinking about the words ‘forgive us our trespasses’… and then ‘thy kingdom come’. The kingdom that Jesus lived in was ruled from Rome by a polytheistic state. His aspiration was a kingdom ruled by God, as he conceived God, and it seems unlikely that the world of his ambition stretched much beyond the lands around him. When the prayer seeks ‘Thy kingdom come’ it seeks a world whose religious dispensation is that of Jesus.
Jesus sought, practically, to obtain that kingdom not through the historic practice of Jews, which was to attempt to conquer and dominate – a way that failed and must have seemed futile living in the Roman Empire – but through an evangelical mission to conquer through convincement. I am not sure quite how Jewish this religion of Jesus is, but we know from history that most of Jewish law was discarded from Christianity at least subsequent to his death, and the control of Christianity passed quickly from Jews to non-Jews of Greek or Roman cultural heritage. The primacy and centrality of a small tribal faith was downplayed even to the extent of the historic hostility of the Christian church for Jews as those who killed Christ.
Once Christianity gained hegemony in Europe the ‘kingdom come’ was a prayer for the second coming, perplexingly imminent but not arriving, and following the Reformation each sect that came about could pray for their own particular version of the kingdom to come. It seems that early Quakers concluded that Jesus had brought with him the kingdom of God and a message: we all live each day in that kingdom.
Let us perhaps remember a man who loved God and thought God and his world would be best served by converting everyone to his way of belief – not through authority but through love; because since then to be Christian has, in general, meant to be subject to clerical authority.
As Jesus might have told his followers: let us see what love can do.
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