Let's look more closely at it: There is the intimate opening, 'Father', typical of Jesus, but untypical of the religion of his day. There is its brevity - just five requests. And there is the absence of religious palaver - no monumental or mystical flattery of God, just five short 'asks'. And what are we asking? Only for an apocalyptic cataclysm. Jesus is assuming that you are very dissatisfied with the present state of affairs; that you can see the immense harm that human evil is doing to the world and in the world; that you want justice to be done at last; that you long for the present world order to cease and a new age be ushered in; that you want to be there when it happens, even though you contribute to the evil; that you want the present world political system, to give way to the kingdom of God; that you want the meek to inherit the earth. We are saying 'bring it on'!

I know we also pray for mundane things like daily bread. Even this is not as straightforward as it seems. An odd word is used here; it possibly means not, our 'daily bread', but something more like 'tomorrow's bread' - let us eat today, the bread which we will consume in the coming kingdom. But if the Lord's prayer has this ominous, apocalyptic edge to it, why we continue to use it? More to the point, has all this fervent prayer for the end of the world, amounted to anything? Here is a demonstrable and monumental failure. How can we in all seriousness continue to pray for the end of the world? Why bother with Jesus?

In these lectures, I am raising the question of the future of Jesus. Will he have any part to play in our future? Why should we take any notice of him? To answer this, I am trying to give you a picture of him as he was, and especially to explain what he was on about. In the first lecture, I made the point that Jesus is often thought of today as though he was a sort of moral teacher, a source of values, perhaps even a religious genius. But he was in fact one who announced the immediate coming of God's kingdom. He was a prophet of the End; like a man with a sandwich board: 'Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!' If that is so, however, how did we come to think of him mainly as a moral teacher?

What happened was this: This transformation of Jesus is the legacy of the 18th and 19th centuries. When modern critical history was born, one of its first projects was to look at the Bible from the point of a human reason. It was no longer regarded as infallible; the miracles of Jesus were treated as incredible dross; and his life was studied without the aura of divinity.

Where did all this get to? Take one highly influential 19th century book, Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus. In the hands of this French intellectual, Jesus became the man - but still only a man - who introduced true religion to the world, just as Socrates introduced philosophy, and Aristotle, science. Renan was a brilliant, romantic stylist, (if you like that sort of thing): 'His preaching,' writes Renan, 'was gentle and pleasing, breathing nature and the perfume of the fields. He loved the flowers, and took from them his most charming lessons. The birds of the heaven, the sea, the mountains, and the games of children furnished in turn the subject of his instructions.' There were no miracles. For Renan, the power of his personality may have cured some, from some illnesses. Of his death, Renan gushes: 'Rest now in thy glory, noble pioneer. Thy work is completed, thy divinity is established...For thousands of years the world will extol thee.'

As to the cause of his alleged resurrection, Renan attributes it to the impression he had made on his disciples, and especially Mary Magdalen: 'Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of one possessed gave to the world a resuscitated God! Of course Renan knew that Jesus' expectation of an apocalyptic kingdom of God was a problem. His approach was to see it merely as the outward form, the husk of Jesus' teaching. He concluded that, as far as the apocalyptic was concerned, Jesus was simply wrong, and shown to be wrong within a generation: 'The world has not ended, as Jesus announced and as his disciples believed'.

Why then still bother with Jesus? A good question. Renan made two key moves. He transferred the kingdom to the heart, and he made it the work of men: 'each one silently creates this kingdom by the true conversion of the heart,' he says; it is 'only the highest form of the good,' he says; it is 'the reign of justice which the faithful, according to their ability, ought to help in establishing....', he says.

But not all were convinced. I will never forget first reading the opening words of one of the most important books ever written about Jesus. The author lays it down that in the future, '...German theology will stand as a great, unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life of our time... And the greatest achievement of German theology is the critical investigation of the life of Jesus.' The publication date was 1906; the author was the famous and multi-talented Albert Schweitzer - philosopher, historian, theologian, musician, medical missionary, Nobel peace prize winner - and German. The book, in its English title, was, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. And Schweitzer was highly critical of Renan. And he was right.

What Schweitzer saw with great clarity was that the l9th century re-translation of Jesus into a model moralist or even a religious genius, was impossible. The futurist elements of Jesus' thought were not incidental to it; it was not a husk to be discarded in favour of the spiritual essence. His treatment of Renan was devastating: 'There is scarcely any other work on the subject,' he writes, 'which so abounds in lapses of taste - and those of the most distressing kind...It is Christian art in the worst sense of the term - the art of the wax image. The gentle Jesus, the beautiful Mary, the fair Galileans who form the retinue of the 'amiable carpenter', might have been taken over in a body from the shop-window of an ecclesiastical art emporium...'

But that leaves us with the original difficulty. I will put it as baldly as I can. If you approach Jesus as a mere figure of history - no miracles, no resurrection, no death for all mankind - and if you want to explain why he is so important, you have two options.

With Renan, you can leave history behind and simply re-package him as a religious and moral teacher. Or, with Schweitzer, you can save history by seeing him as an apocalyptic prophet. With Renan you save Jesus, but lose your integrity; with Schweizer you keep your integrity, but lose your Jesus. If this is the choice, the honours go to Schweizer. That was the verdict of the twentieth century. Schweizer, of course, did attempt to 'save' Jesus, and that remained the task of the twentieth century, how to resurrect Jesus. A rather galling fate, for Jesus to be saved and resurrected by academics, of all people.

What are we left with? Why should Jesus, a first-century failed prophet, be of any interest to us at all? I have been asking, has Jesus Christ a future? It is hard enough now to wonder why he had such a great past. And yet, that is not fair. Jesus is better than that. After all, even an unbelieving HG Wells said, 'Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history'. For this there must be a reason.

Recently, I simply sat down and read the gospels again. What is clear - and I invite you to try the same experiment, say with Luke, the third gospel - is that, at the very least, we are dealing with a powerful mind and a strikingly original, prophetic voice. Over and again, he says things which are arresting, utterly memorable, challenging, penetrating, provocative, and - I can think of no other description - simply true. He utters words full of consolation; words full of hope; words full of razor wire; words full of health, words full of wisdom. So that immediately raises the problem again: If he was merely a failed prophet, why are his words so potent even today? I guess one reason is that he lived what he said.

We have no portrait of Jesus; we do not know what he looked like. We have ample recordings of my sermons; more than enough; we have no sound recording of the Sermon on the Mount. We do not know what his accent was like. We have no idea of his voice or gestures.

Presumably as a baby he had nappy rash and sore gums, and we know that he ate and drank and talked and slept and had a family and close friends, and emotions, and that he touched people and took children on his knee, and once his eyes looked at Peter after he denied him, and that look has been remembered ever since, and we know that you could crucify him.

Without even a word-portrait, we have to look at him 'indirectly', so to speak. We look at his actions, his words; we observe how people reacted to him. We can say that he provoked very strong emotions. We see people responding to him with fear, anger, emnity; we see others crowding him, often amazed at something he has said or done; we see love for him, faith in him, passsionate gratitude to him. He strikes me as having been an awkward, uncomfortable, demanding, liberating, inspiring, extraordinary leader.

Indeed he established by word and deed, a fresh model of leadership - the strong but humble servant-leader - a model which has forever endowed service of others with honour, self-sacrifice with praise, undeserved love with glory. 'Greater love has no-one than this,' he said, 'than to lay down your life for your friends' (John 15:13). His insight at the same moment affronts our instinctive selfishness and compels our moral agreement. We know that he is right.

You catch a glimpse of something else in the responses of people. They were aware of a sort of moral otherness about him; don't get me wrong - love for others was so much part of his person that I am not talking as though he was a gloomy wowser. But he set a standard for what humans could be like and somehow what God is like at the same time.

Not surprisingly, he crossed some of the toughest human boundaries to touch people and change their lives. He touched those with leprosy; he spoke with the despised and entertained the outcasts. Encounter with Jesus often led to transformation of life; a new liberty and joy; a sense of acceptance, of forgiveness. Often but not always: Not all could pay the price, and one of his closest friends betrayed him to death. Where to now? You know that Jesus often spoke in parables. I think that these little masterpieces can also help explain this riddle: If he was not a religious genius but a failed prophet, why has he been such a great success?

First I'm going to explain what parables are. Then I'm going to show how they answer the question, 'why was Jesus' apparent failure as a prophet such a success?'

Parables are little choice-makers. They may or may not be stories, allegories or proverbs. But they reach out and pull you into the picture, show you for what you are, force on you, a choice. A parable is a moral and spiritual device for sorting us out.

Take the most famous of all. A lawyer asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. Jesus forced the man to answer his own question: he must utterly love God and utterly love his neighbour. He riposted, 'And who is my neighbour?' Jesus saw an evasion; did he really care who the neighbour was, or was he trying to avoid utter love? Jesus' answer is a miniature masterpiece, a compressed, choice-making story; a similitude in which the lawyer is exposed; and then, to our dismay, so are we.

First, he sets it up: 'A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.' Then it becomes like a classic, three-men-went-into-a-bar story: 'A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So, too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came to where the man was; and when he saw him,' (he went into compassion overdrive) 'he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, "look after him," he said, "and when I return I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have."'

In those days, Samaritans and Jews were like the Protestants and Catholics of recent Belfast. Now here's a nasty moment for the lawyer: 'Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?' Strangely, not as we might expect, that the victim was the neighbour, but who was the neighbour to him? In this amazing finale, Jesus does two things at once. He creates both verb and noun. He both shows what it is to be neighbour, and forces his questioner to admit that the Samaritans are neighbours. You can almost hear the clench in the voice of the lawyer as he avoids the word 'Samaritan': 'The one who had mercy on him'; and then the stilleto word of Jesus - 'Go and do likewise': be like a Samaritan, of all people. This is a self-involving moral masterpiece. On its own it confirms our view of Jesus as the great teacher. The story has done immense good in human history; if this was the totality of the legacy of Jesus, it would be enough to establish his greatness.

But even this story in its context reminds us that Jesus is not a mere moralist. The original question of the lawyer was not, 'who is my neighbour', but 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?' that is, 'what must I do to enter the kingdom of God, and so have life in the age to come?' It was a kingdom question, a question of the end of all things, which created this story.

At one level, this shows us why Jesus was no failure. His powerful moral insights were powerful precisely because they put the present moment in touch with the future. We tend to think that moral insights are mere values plucked from the air, perhaps inspired by some edifying tale such as Simpson and the donkey. Jesus comes from the past, but his words project into the future. They force us to examine the present in the light of what has been, and what is yet to be.

What Jesus is showing us is that morality depends on a particular view of human nature, and human destiny. If he is a master moralist, it is because he understands both human nature and human destiny. He understands who we are and where we are.

What did he say about that destiny, that coming kingdom? The picture that Jesus painted of the end involved the great things which we would all long for: the defeat of evil and the triumph of good; the death of death; a future of justice and yet forgiveness; intense, overflowing human happiness and joy. He called the coming kingdom a banquet, a wedding, a feast, a resurrection, a robust and loving community, in which every tear would be wiped away, and we would live joyously as we were meant to, under the rule of the Father-God.

Mind you, entry into the kingdom is not automatic. If it is to be a future without evil, something will have to be done with us. Jesus was completely clear-eyed about human nature; he did not regard it as inherently good, and worthy of praise. He announced the kingdom in advance in order that we may repent. Integral to the healing power of forgiveness, is the repentance which is involved in it.

Even coming judgement contains a sort of good news. It warns us that every word, thought and deed will be scrutinised on that day. Everything about you matters to God. Even here, Jesus establishes your unique, individual significance. And yet, what of the crucial difficulty, that the kingdom he announced never arrived? That is the crux of the problem for Renan. for Schweizer and for us. 'But that is not true. The kingdom has arrived,' Jesus would reply. Listen: 'What (is) the kingdom of God like; what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.' (Mark 4: 30-32). Do you see? You may have thought that the kingdom was going to be a final big bang. In fact, like a seed, it has now been inserted into history. For now, it is a growth, not an earthquake. In other words, the kingdom has come in essence; it is still to come in completeness.

Once, having been asked when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, 'The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say "Here it is," or "There it is," because the kingdom of God is among you.' (Luke 17:20-21). The kingdom has come in fact; the kingdom is yet to come in fullness. It is both present and future.

Well, did it? You may rightly expect that Jesus would have to say and do a great deal more to convince us that the kingdom of God has already arrived, even in mustard seed proportions. But he did. He explained what he meant by God's kingdom, and then he did something which, he believed, set it going.

What he did, I will describe in the next lecture. First, we will need to see what else Jesus said about the nature of the kingdom. A number of the parables of Jesus show what sort of kingdom this is - what its ethos is, what its king is like, what it is like to belong to the kingdom. If Jesus is right, I do not have to prove God's existence; he has arrived in our midst. Parables keep forcing us to ask, what are we going to do about this new historical reality? Here are two parables out of any number. The first concerns the cost of the kingdom; the second the concerns the membership of the kingdom. 'The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.' End of story. Not much of a plot here; its not a story, it's an action. Furthermore, it seems like a foolish action; what is he now going to do with the pearl of such great price? Has he reduced himself to penury so that he may gaze on it? The parable has always irritated me with its extravagant, foolish behaviour. But then, as a 'choice-maker', it was intended to irritate. Jesus is provoking us; the kingdom of God is of such value that we should sell all we have to be possess it; cross every boundary, pay any price, make any sacrifice; become fixated, focused, fanatic, obsessive, passionate. To an age which values cool, Jesus says, value hot; make the kingdom everything, or don't touch it at all. This is what Jesus means by 'repent!': entering the kingdom demands a complete reorientation of life, from self to God and then to others.

Disappointing really. He makes it sound so hard; indeed it all sounds impossible; the cost is too high. Furthermore, the kingdom of God is going to be a highly moral place. How am I going to be included? Fortunately for you, and me, the way God runs his kingdom breaks all our preconceptions.

Here is a second choice-maker, with a word for you on that subject: 'To some who were confident in their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: 'God I thank you that I am not like other men - robbers, evildoers, adulterers - or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.' But the tax-collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' I tell you that this man went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."' (Luke 18:9-14).

The pharisee and the tax collector: a sharp, unforgettable message about who gets a place in the kingdom of God. In fact, it illustrates one of the most disturbing elements of both the preaching and the activities of Jesus. He deliberately ate with those who stood no chance; the spiritually unclean, the morally unpleasant, the socially outcast. He was offering them forgiveness and a welcome in his kingdom. He was 'justifying' the unjust ones.

By the way, who do you identify with: the proud pharisee or the repentant tax collector? 'That's an ugly choice. Explain it again...'

Look, although we are morally flawed and lost, God has mercy for us. God is Father to us; he is our Neighbour; he is the Good Samaritan to me and to you. We have no claim on him; we are like a wastrel son who ran away and became a prodigal; we are like a sheep which strayed and became utterly lost, until the Shepherd found it again; we are like a sick person who has found a great Physician, a doctor for the sick soul; together, we are like a fractured family which at last has found its way home for Christmas.

So, pray on Federal Parliament; you have got it right. You are praying both for the kingdom of God to be manifest at the end of history, and inside history: 'your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,' asks the Speaker. You are praying for God's justice, both now, and then. Your prayer assumes that good things from the future kingdom have begun to grow in this world. The kingdom has been introduced into the historical process, as Jesus claimed. In fact many have been inspired to political and social transformation by the ideals of the kingom which Jesus said was both present and future. Both of our great political traditions in this country are inspired to some extent by Jesus and his kingdom.

Remember my question. 'Why was the apparent failure of Jesus such a success?' His answer is that he did introduce God's kingdom. Well then, who was Jesus? Did he do miracles? How did he introduce the kingom, if he did? These are subjects for the next lecture.

--The Rt. Rev. Peter Jensen is the Archbishop of Sydney, Australia.

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