The petition is a command and English has no way to say it. What survived the translation looks like a wish, and everything built on the wish is a calendar.
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Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
The line is not a request for a place and not a description of one. It asks that a jurisdiction take effect.
In the Greek the three opening petitions are all third-person imperatives in the aorist: hagiastheto, let the name be hallowed; eltheto, let the kingdom come; genetheto, let the will be done. An imperative in the third person is ordinary Greek and has no equivalent form in English. English can command you and cannot command it, so a translator has two options, an auxiliary, let it come, or the bare verb standing alone.
The King James translators took the bare verb, and in 1611 the bare form still carried imperative force in English. It no longer does. The same four words now read as an aspiration, because the only modern English that uses a bare verb this way is the language of wishes. The mood was lost in a gap between two grammars rather than in a doctrine, which is why nobody had to decide to lose it and nobody is on record as having done so.
[See TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS · OUR FATHER]
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WHAT AN IMPERATIVE HAS THAT A WISH DOES NOT
A wish and a command differ in two ways that matter, and both of them are the reader's to lose.
An imperative has an addressee. Something is being told to do something, which means the instruction can be carried out, refused, or deferred, and in each case there is a party who did it. A wish is addressed to nobody. Nothing follows from it and no one is implicated in its not happening.
An imperative also has a term. A command not yet obeyed is outstanding, and being outstanding is a condition with a duration that can be measured and complained of. A wish has no term at all. It can remain unfulfilled for four hundred years without ever once being unfulfilled, because there was no moment by which anything was due.
A wish cannot be disobeyed, which is the whole advantage of receiving a command as one.
[See CAPTURED WORD · EXOUSIA]
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THE ASPECT IS AGAINST THE SCHEDULE
The mood is not the only thing the verb carries. The aorist presents an action as a whole. The present imperative presents it as underway, continuing, to be kept up.
So the gradual reading has a grammar available to it and that grammar is not the one used. Eltheto does not describe a coming that is in progress and does not supply an interval to be inside. It gives no duration to administer.
And the alternative is not hypothetical, because it appears in the same prayer. Luke's form of the bread petition uses the present imperative, didou, keep giving, day by day, while Matthew's uses the aorist, dos, give today. The mood that presents an action as continuing is in this prayer's own vocabulary and is not the mood the kingdom is asked in.
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COME IS MOTION TOWARDS THE SPEAKER
Come and go are not interchangeable and the difference is not emphasis. Come is motion towards the position of the one speaking. Go is motion away from it.
A kingdom that is somewhere else, entered later, by those who qualify, is asked for with go. It is not what the petition says. The petition locates the arrival at the position of the creature praying, which is whatever ground she is standing on when she says it, and that ground is already under a jurisdiction.
The petition does not ask to be admitted somewhere. It asks that the ground under the one asking change hands.
[See HOME RULE FOR THE SOUL · THE GIVEN]
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TWO JURISDICTIONS CANNOT BOTH BE IN FORCE
A kingdom is jurisdiction: ground over which a word is law. Two of them cannot be in force over the same ground at the same time, which is not a theological claim but the ordinary meaning of jurisdiction.
That is what makes the petition expensive to answer. Granted where it is prayed, it puts the law of the books out of force there, and it can be prayed by anyone, out loud, with no institution required and nothing to apply for. A denial would have to state a ground for denying it, and the ground would have to be said in front of the one asking.
So the answer could not be a refusal, and it was not one. It was a tense. The kingdom was granted in the future, affirmed without reservation, preached, sung, and placed beyond the present, where it takes nothing out of force.
[See LAW OF THE BOOKS · FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM]
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ALL DELIBERATE SPEED
The same conversion is on the record in United States constitutional law, performed in the open, by a court, in two steps a year apart.
Brown v. Board of Education declared the right in 1954. The following year, in the decision on relief, the Court sent the cases back to the district courts and directed admission to public schools on a nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed. Nothing was taken back. The right stood, cited, unreversed, and the remedy became a calendar held by other people.
What that produced is in the report. In Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, decided in 1964, the county had closed every public school it operated rather than desegregate, kept them closed for five years, and funded private schooling for white children through tuition grants and a tax credit. Ten years after the right was declared, the Court wrote: The time for mere "deliberate speed" has run out, and that phrase can no longer justify denying these Prince Edward County school children their constitutional rights to an education equal to that afforded by the public schools in the other parts of Virginia. Four years after that the deliberate speed formula was replaced with an affirmative duty to act.
The right was never withdrawn, which is exactly why there was nothing to appeal, and the calendar did in fourteen years what a reversal could not have done in open court once.
[See GRAMMAR OF ADMISSIBILITY · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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THE CALENDAR IS AN OFFICE
Once an arrival has a date, somebody holds the date, and holding it is a position with duties, discretion and tenure.
The office is not a gatekeeper who refuses. It is narrower and more durable than that. It affirms the petition in full, agrees that the kingdom is coming, and retains the competence to say when. Nothing in the role requires a single denial, and no term ever arrives at which the holder has failed, because the holder was never the one who set the term.
An office that administers an arrival it never has to produce cannot be caught not producing it.
[See THE HALLOWED HOLLOW · THE PRAYER OF TWO WILLS]
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The petition cannot be said in the future tense. Whatever the calendar holds, the saying happens now, by whoever is saying it, on the ground that person is standing on, and the verb is in the imperative at the moment it leaves the mouth.
A calendar can hold an arrival for a generation. It cannot reach the mood of the verb.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
