My priest, Fr. Elias, loaned me this series of CDs to listen to. It’s a 10-lecture series from Fr. Thomas Hopko on The Lord’s Prayer, and I’m hooked after listening to the first three lectures. (I think that everyone already knows this, but if you ever have a chance to borrow a Fr. Hopko lecture series — or, y’know, buy it — do it. It doesn’t even matter what the subject is. Orthodox Haiku. Rock Gardening. Phlebotomy. Doesn’t matter. I’ve never heard a single talk by him that wasn’t fascinating.)

So of course, trying to write down one point is like trying to get one recipe from a 9-course banquet. All the same, this one seemed fairly revolutionary to me and I promised myself that I would try. The subject once again is time, and in the context of understanding the Lord’s Prayer, what does it mean that Christians live always in a tension between the present Church Age and the future Marriage of the Lamb? We know we’re in this world, but we know we don’t belong to it. So knowing that that would be our destiny, how did the Lord teach His disciples to pray?

We pray already as members of the Kingdom that is to come … The petitions are for the age to come, and they are for us to live already now according to the age to come. You’re praying literally for the Lord to come and establish His Kingdom in the universe, and you’re praying — we’re praying — that we would live by that reality already now until He comes in glory.

In other words, Christ didn’t give the disciples a prayer that allowed for requests for health, wealth or any of the other interests and concerns of this temporal world (Not even with regard to “our daily bread” apparently, but I haven’t gotten to that part of the series yet). But it did start with “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.” Is that prophecy of the future or a declaration of the past and present? It’s all of the above, according to Fr. Hopko. We live as physical beings who inhabit the present time and place, but in our faith we live eschatalogically — we already affirm the Kingdom which is to come, we already worship in the heavenly Holy of Holies, we already partake of the Bread of Immortality.

And since every rightful prayer is some variation or abbreviation of the Lord’s Prayer, this affects even the liturgical petitions “Lord, have mercy.” We aren’t asking God to do something; we aren’t even speaking penitentially. We are calling it to our attention that God has had mercy. In granting mercy to civil authorities, armed forces, poor and needy, this land in which we live, we are expressing recognition that God has had mercy and that He will have mercy (or “steadfast love,” which Fr. Hopko feels might be a better translation from the Greek) in this age and the next.

Like I said, it was just one point, but I thought it was profound and I wanted to try to express it before it slipped away. (I’ll see if I can’t find that part of the lecture again and fill things out just a little more.)