Why is the phrase “Thy kingdom come!” so often associated with the Sacred Heart of Jesus?
I think it’s because the Sacred Heart is the perfect image of Jesus Christ’s kingdom, a kingdom which is “already … but not yet.”
To explain why the kingdom is “already … but not yet,” Father José Noriega recently compared D-Day and V-E Day.
June 6, 1944, D-Day, was when the Allied troops successfully invaded Normandy to free occupied France. Once that happened, all the pieces were in place to gain the final victory against the Axis powers in World War II. But a year of hard battles still had to come first.
In the same way, the Kingdom of God is “already” here in the death and resurrection of Christ, and “not yet,” in the spread of the Church. The Catechism says that even though the kingdom “has come in Christ's death and Resurrection,” it still “lies ahead of us.”
The kingdom is “brought near in the Word incarnate” — in other words, in the Sacred Heart, where God himself is one with mankind. But the Kingdom is "not yet." “It will come in glory when Christ hands it over to his Father.”
To explore exactly what this means for us, consider the first kingdom, the paradise of Eden.
Bishop Robert Barron describes Adam as the first human being to share in God’s kingdom.
“God wants to rule as king but precisely through his viceroys, namely human beings made in his image and likeness,” says Bishop Barron.
Adam was the first such ruler, and he failed. By listening to the serpent instead of God, Adam “becomes a bad king, not defending this flourishing garden of life, and the garden devolves into a desert.”
Paradise was the way God wanted reality to look. When we freely chose a different path, he set about the work of winning us back.
“We are under the lordship of the true king who wants to ‘Edenize’ the world,” Bishop Robert Barron said.
What is the kingdom? We all know the answer by heart.
We pray about the kingdom every day, and so we have memorized what “Thy Kingdom come!” means. It means: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
The mission of Jesus throughout his life was to re-establish an “Eden,” a kingdom, where his Father’s will is done.
First, Jesus became a newborn king; one who would invite us to be “born again” into his family so that we could see the kingdom. He announced that “The kingdom of God is at hand,” taught that the kingdom belongs to the poor and then made it more enticing by comparing it to great treasures, abundant crops, and huge hauls of fish.
In his most dramatic announcement of his identity and his impending death, he gave St. Peter the “keys to the kingdom of heaven” as leader of his new Church, and then was transfigured on Mount Tabor.
All of these images came together when Jesus entered Jerusalem and was hailed as a king by the people. The “New Eden” was being established at last!
The most explicit mentions of the re-Edenization of the world begin on the cross.
As Jesus died for sinners, he turned to the repentant thief and said, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
The early Church hoped to enter that paradise also. “To him who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God,” wrote St. John, describing the Revelation he had from heaven.
St. Paul saw this new Eden when he personally “was caught up into Paradise — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know,” and he found it indescribably beautiful.
It will be fully realized when “a new heaven and a new earth” arrives where “the dwelling of God is with men.”
For now, though, we look to the Sacred Heart to see the kingdom.
Pope Pius XI had a great way of describing it. In his encyclical about reparation to the Sacred Heart, he compared two Biblical passages about the kingdom.
That’s a great rallying cry for us as we storm the beaches for the kingdom that is “already … but not yet.”
