The Lord will have mercy; the Lord has had mercy

  • Hopko_LordsPrayer CDsMy 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.)


    Related posts:

    1. Begin­ning to Pray by Anthony Bloom
    2. If you wish to be called wise …
    3. Two thoughts about time
    4. Inward peace
    5. On curios­ity

    April 26th, 2006 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • Jim N. 04.26.2006

    I added your image to the Ama­zon selec­tion for this CD set. Hope that’s alright! :)

  • Grace

    Oh, good call. I was hav­ing trou­ble find­ing this on Ama­zon and went off to SVS Press to get it.

  • Mimi

    I shall look for it, thank you.

  • Deb

    Thank you for sug­gest­ing these tapes. I bought them, and you are right, they are quite excel­lent. My dh’s first ques­tion was, “Why is Mary on the front?!”

    Deb

  • Grace

    That’s a good ques­tion. I was guess­ing that this is part of a big­ger series on prayer and that she’s there by virtue of her role as con­stant inter­ces­sor. But I’m not sure.

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