Your Kingdom Come

4 Your Kingdom Come

Thy kingdom come. Matthew 6:10, KJV
Your kingdom come. Matthew 6:10, NRSV
Hesiod was a Greek pessimist for whom the wineglass of history was half empty—and getting emptier. Around the start of the seventh century BCE his Works and Days proposed that humanity had gone through five great ages or stages—but in ever descending order. The Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Heroic Ages yielded finally to his own contemporary Iron Age. “I wish that I were not any part of the fifth generation,” he said. “It has no place for the righteous and the good,” but instead “gives praise to violence and the doer of evil” (175, 191)…