Chapter 13
The Petition He Never Prayed
Luke 23:32-43 · Matthew 6:10b
18 min read
At a glance
The petition [thy kingdom come] was made for us — for those who do not possess the kingdom, and may still expect it.
Asked, conferred, promised
1Luke 23:35-39
rulers, soldiers, criminal
three times "save Yourself"; only the last adds: "and us"
2Luke 23:42
the man beside Him
"Lord, remember me when You come into your kingdom"
no rescue asked for, only to be remembered
3Luke 22:29
the table
"I confer on you a kingdom, as my Father conferred it on Me"
no one at that table asked for it
4Luke 23:43
the answer
"today you will be with Me in paradise"
he asked for a someday and receives a today
βασιλεία σουyour kingdom4× the four gospels
given away by Him
said to Him
Twice He gives the word away; twice He gets it back. He Himself never says it to his Father.
CALCULATED, over the Textus Receptus; outside the gospels only Heb 1:8, τῆς βασιλείας σου
- CALCULATED That He Himself never prays for the kingdom: three searches, zero hits. It remains a negative claim: a search cannot rule out a paraphrase.
- CONSTRUED That the places at the right and left "turned out to have been given away": Matthew does not draw the connection himself, he writes the same words twice (Matt 20:21; 27:38).
- DOCUMENTED "When You come" (ὅταν ἔλθῃς): an open, undetermined moment.
I. The man beside Him
The three of them have been led out of the city. Two criminals, Luke says — no names, no crimes, only that one word — and with them a third, to be put to death. At the place called the Skull, each gets his cross. Someone settled the order that morning: one on the right, one on the left, and He in the middle.
So that day a man comes to hang an arm's length from Jesus of Nazareth. What he had done is written nowhere. What he got to hear is written down.
The first thing said on the hill is a prayer, and it is about the men with the hammers: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." The man beside Him does not have to turn his head for it; he hangs close enough. He has just felt the same nails, from the same soldiers — and the Man beside him asks forgiveness for them.
Then the mockery comes, in waves. The people stand watching; the rulers laugh along: "He saved others — let Him save Himself now, if He is the Christ, the chosen one of God." The soldiers step up with sour wine: "If You are the King of the Jews, save Yourself." And above the middle cross an inscription has been nailed, in Greek and Roman and Hebrew letters: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS. It is meant as mockery, and it has been carried out in three languages.
Then the third voice joins in, from the outer cross on the other side: "If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us."
Three times now it has been the same request — rulers, soldiers, criminal: save Yourself. Only the last is hanging there himself, and only the last adds two words: and us.
And the man on the other side hangs in between, and listens to all of it.
II. Remember me
Then he speaks, for the first time. Not to the Man in the middle — to his fellow on the far side, and it is a rebuke: "Do you not even fear God, now that you are under the same sentence?" The same sentence. He counts himself in: three crosses, one judgment, and under that judgment a man ought to fear God.
And then he says what no one else on the hill says about himself: "And we justly — for we are receiving what our deeds deserve. But this Man has done nothing improper." A dying man who signs his own sentence, without softening and without a story to go with it. Himself he condemns; the Other he acquits — from one cross over to the other.
Then he turns his head:
The whole hill has asked the same of Him that afternoon: save. He does not ask it. What he asks is smaller, and it is greater: that he be remembered. Remember me — one verb, and one man who knows that he dies today.
And he adds where he wants to be remembered. To a crucified man, under a mocking sign with "king" on it, he says: in your kingdom.
Your kingdom — two words. Before him exactly one person had ever said them to Jesus in this way.
III. Two thrones
It was a mother.
On the road to Jerusalem — the same journey that has ended on this hill — the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to Him, with her two sons beside her, and she knelt, and she had a request:
She asks the best she can think of, for the two who are dearest to her: the places beside Him. His answer was about something else: "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?" We are able, said the sons. And then they received an answer in two halves: my cup you will drink — "but to sit at my right hand and at my left is not Mine to give; it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father."
Prepared. So the places existed. They simply could not be asked for; the Father had prepared them — for whom, He did not say.
Further on in the same gospel Matthew records who received them, and he records it in exactly the mother's words:
One at the right hand and one at the left. The places beside Him had been given away. And the two who received them had not asked for them.
ExpertRight and left
Matthew 20:21, the mother's request: εἷς ἐκ δεξιῶν σου καὶ εἷς ἐξ εὐωνύμων — "one at your right hand and one at the left". Matthew 27:38, the hill: εἷς ἐκ δεξιῶν καὶ εἷς ἐξ εὐωνύμων. Word for word the same expression, apart from the σου, in the same evangelist, in the request and on the hill.
The full count: ἐκ δεξιῶν and ἐξ εὐωνύμων together in one verse occur seven times in the New Testament according to the Textus Receptus; SBLGNT reads ἐξ ἀριστερῶν in Mark 10:37 and so counts six: Matthew 20:21 · 20:23 · 25:33 (the sheep and the goats) · 27:38 · Mark 10:40 · 15:27.
The caveat belongs here: the verbal echo lies within Matthew. On the hill Luke writes a different word for "left" — ἐξ ἀριστερῶν (23:33), not ἐξ εὐωνύμων. Whoever hears the echo, then, hears it in the first gospel, from request to crucifixion, within one book and one pen. (The counts CALCULATED; that the places thereby "turned out to have been given away" is CONSTRUED — Matthew nowhere says that 27:38 is the answer to 20:21. He only writes the same words twice, seven chapters apart.)
The man who just turned his head and asked to be remembered is hanging in a place someone once knelt for. He does not know it. He did not ask for it.
IV. Given away
Your kingdom. The mother said it, kneeling; the criminal says it, hanging. No other human being ever says it to Him. And He Himself — He never says it to his Father.
On a mountain in Galilee He had handed out those words. Thy kingdom come — it stands in the prayer He taught us, as the second petition, right after the Name. But in everything recorded of his own praying — the temple court, the table, the garden, the hill — no kingdom appears. He prays for the Name, for his Father's will, for forgiveness for the men with the hammers. For a kingdom He prays nowhere.
One prayer comes close, and it is no small prayer. In the upper room, eyes already lifted up, He prays: "And now, glorify Me, You, Father, with Yourself, with the glory that I had with You before the world was."
It looks like it, and it is not. He does not ask for something that is yet to come; He asks for something back that was there — the glory that I had with You. It is not the petition of someone who expects a kingdom; it is the petition of someone who wants to go home.
And about that kingdom He did speak that same evening — at the table, with the cup in his hand, and it was not a prayer but an appointment: "From now on I will not drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in the kingdom of my Father." The kingdom of my Father. It is not asked for; a day is named, and the wine is already waiting. No one who still has to obtain something speaks like that. That is how someone speaks about home.
Dossier"your kingdom", four times
The expression βασιλεία σου, "your kingdom", occurs four times in the gospels:
Twice He gives the word away; twice He gets it back — and both times from someone asking for a place in that kingdom, or to be remembered in it. Outside the gospels the phrase occurs once more, in the genitive: Hebrews 1:8, ἡ ῥάβδος τῆς βασιλείας σου — "the sceptre of your kingdom", Psalm 45:6, spoken by the Father to the Son. There too it is said to Him, and not by a human being.
That He never prays it Himself has been searched along three routes. First through his prayers: the 38 verses in which He prays (Matt 11:25-26 · 26:39 · 26:42 · Luke 10:21 · 22:42 · 23:34 · 23:46 · John 11:41-42 · 12:27-28 · 17:1-26), searched for the root βασιλει- — zero hits. Then through the word: βασιλεία occurs 162 times in the Textus Receptus, 128 of them in the gospels (Matthew 56 · Mark 21 · Luke 46 · John 5) — none of them in a prayer of Jesus. Then through the expression itself: the four occurrences above. *(CALCULATED, three independent searches over the Textus Receptus. A search cannot rule out a paraphrase — a prayer that asks for the kingdom after all without the word; that is why John 17:5 and Matthew 26:29 are weighed in the main text, and the claim remains a negative claim.)*
V. Conferred
Why He never asks for it was said that same night, at that same table — and it was said to men who had not deserved it.
A dispute had arisen, at their Lord's last meal, over which of them counted as the greatest. He sets it right — the kings of the nations lord it over them, but it is not so among you; whoever is the greatest must become like the youngest. And then, to the same men, with the quarrel still in the air: "You are the ones who have stayed with Me in my trials." And upon that, in one breath:
Conferring. It is no everyday word; elsewhere in Scripture it is the language in which a covenant is made and a testament drawn up. This kingdom is not asked for. It is bequeathed.
And the direction is in the verse itself: as my Father conferred it on Me. The Father did it first; it has already happened, the sentence says, and what has been conferred on Him He confers onward — on men who a moment earlier were still squabbling over rank, that they may eat and drink at his table, in his kingdom, and sit on thrones.
A mother once asked for two thrones and got a counter-question about a cup. These men ask for nothing — they are quarreling — and are conferred thrones.
The one grasps, the Other receives.
ExcursusConferring
The verb of Luke 22:29 is διατίθεμαι, and the count gives it weight: it occurs seven times in the Textus Receptus, and two of those are in this one verse — κἀγὼ διατίθεμαι ὑμῖν καθὼς διέθετο μοι ὁ πατήρ μου βασιλείαν: He, now, and the Father, before. The other five: Acts 3:25 — the covenant God made with the fathers; Hebrews 8:10 and 10:16 — "this is the covenant that I will make with them"; and Hebrews 9:16-17 — "for where there is a testament, the death of the testator must come in; for a testament is in force after death, and it is not yet valid while the testator lives."
Outside this one verse, then, the word is everywhere the language of covenant and testament — and the letter to the Hebrews adds what a testament costs: the death of the one who makes it. Whether Luke 22:29 should be read as the making of a covenant or as a testament is an old question, and this box does not decide it. It lets the verb carry its own weight: in the night before his death the Son confers a kingdom on his men, with a word that elsewhere belongs with the death of the one who confers — and He says that his Father first did the same to Him. *(The seven forms CALCULATED; that Heb 9:16-17 clarifies the freight of the verb, DOCUMENTED; that Luke 22:29 is meant as a testament is not thereby said — Luke uses the word, Hebrews explains it, and the letter does not refer to Luke.)*
So it stands, in the night before the hill: a kingdom, conferred and conferred onward, from the Father to the Son and from the Son to his men. No one at that table asked for it.
The next afternoon someone does ask — not for the kingdom, only to be remembered in it.
VI. Today
Back on the hill the request still hangs in the air: remember me when You come into your kingdom. There is one word of time in it, and it is as modest as the rest: when — someday, in due course, no date. The man pushes his hope out over the edge of his own dying, into an undetermined distance. More he does not dare to ask, and less is not possible.
The answer comes without hesitation, and it begins the way his weightiest words always begin:
The answer changes exactly one word. He asked for a someday and receives a today. And it changes something else, unasked: he had asked whether he might be remembered, somewhere, later, by a King in his realm — the answer places him beside that King, today: with Me. Where that paradise is, the text does not say. It says when, and with whom. For a dying man that is enough: a day, and a companion.
In those 24 hours there was one other person to whom He said "today". At the table, to Peter: "the rooster will not crow today before you have denied three times that you know Me."
Within one day and night, that word twice, each time to one man: the disciple is told that he will deny Him today, and the criminal that he will be with Him today. Luke draws no connection between those two sentences; they both stand there, in the same night and the same day.
ExpertThe amen in the singular
ἀμὴν λέγω σοι — "amen, I say to you", said to one person — occurs nine times in the gospels. Five of these are John's double ἀμὴν ἀμήν (3:3 · 3:5 · 3:11 · 13:38 · 21:18). The single ἀμὴν λέγω σοι occurs four times:
Four times He directs his amen at one person. Two of these announce a denial, one concerns a debt that must be paid to the last penny — and one is a promise, to a dying man who had just admitted his debt himself. That his amen almost always comes first — 101 times against five — was measured in chapter 10; this is that amen, in the singular, said at an arm's length. (CALCULATED over the Textus Receptus; the characterization of the four is DOCUMENTED, the contrast within the four is CONSTRUED.)
Of the man nothing more is heard after that. No answer, no last word; Luke does not even tell how he died. Nor did it need telling any more: the most important thing there was to say about this man had already been said — by Another, with an amen in front of it.
VII. What the Father delights to do
So there is one petition in the prayer that the Son Himself never prayed. Not because it was too great for Him, but because for Him it was no petition: the kingdom had been conferred on Him, by his Father, and He knew it. He ascended to receive it from his Father's hand. The petition was made for us — for those who do not possess the kingdom, and may still expect it.
And what held for Him holds in this house for everyone who comes in. The Kingdom does not come as wages earned, but as the gift of a good Lord; no one earns the throne. The place itself cannot be earned and cannot be conquered, and so it cannot be obtained by prayer either. It is conferred.
And how the Father stands toward whoever asks this petition, the Son once said aloud, on the way, to a handful of people who were worried about food and clothes:
It does not say that the Father gives the kingdom once it has been asked for long enough. It says that He delights to do it.
HeartWhat He delights to do
"Do not be afraid, little flock — your Father delights to give you the kingdom." That is how the Son said it, to people who were worried about food and clothing — and it is the verse on which you may rest the second petition.
It does not say that the Father gives because there has been enough asking. It says that He delights to do it. When you pray "thy kingdom come", you do not have to talk the Giver round; you join Him in what He already wanted. A child who asks his father for what that father decided long ago to give changes nothing about the decision by asking — but everything about the waiting: from then on he waits together with his father.
And do not mind that the flock is small; He did not mind it either. The promise was not made to the great, and the kingdom does not have to be conquered — your Father gives it, and He delights to do it.
Two people once said "your kingdom" to the Son: a mother who asked the best for her children, and a man who had nothing left to ask with but his last breath. The one was told that the Father had already prepared the places; the other, that he would be with Him that very day.