Saturday, March 19
“For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power and the Glory forever.”
I have read enough about theology to know that this verse is something called a “doxology,” but I’ll be honest: I have never given much thought to what it means.
That’s partly because it wasn’t part of the prayer I memorized as a child – Catholics end their recitation of the Lord’s Prayer with “deliver us from evil.” The way we are taught the faith as children shapes us profoundly, even if our faith journey takes us far from those roots.
It’s also partly because words like “kingdom,” “power” and “glory” don’t mesh with how I think about my faith. The Gospel of Matthew contains seven parables that begin: “the kingdom of heaven is like…”; one shared theme of these parables is that the kingdom doesn’t conform to our notions of power and glory. I know this calls us to change how we think about power and glory – but I’m not there yet. It’s a lot easier to mumble through the doxology than to wrestle with how my thoughts are still formed far more by society than by the Gospel.
On top of that, the most important word in the doxology is the archaic “thine” – which sounds a lot like “mine,” but means the exact opposite.
So when I unpack this verse I hadn’t thought much about, I find it’s a tidy bundle of some of the hardest-to-accept ideas in the Gospel – that God is in charge, that I’m not the center of the universe, and that I need to change the way I think. It’s no wonder that I gloss over this! But that won’t be quite as easy to do now that I’ve seen the challenge that lurks in these words.
Jesus, let your words work on me and change the way I think. Amen.
–Matt Aufman