Reflections on the Lord's Prayer - 2/21/10 11:10am
I’ve been thinking about prayer a lot lately. Next Saturday, February 27, 2010, we’ll be holding our first daylong seminar, “Praying the Psalms,” in our new Logos classroom; the seminar filled within 24 hours of being announced. And the following weekend, March 5-7, we’ll be conducting our annual Lenten retreat at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, Arizona (www.thecasa.org), and the topic will be, “Conversations with God”; the retreat is also sold out.
Clearly, prayer is on a lot of people’s minds these days.
In thinking about prayer I inevitably gravitate toward the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6: 9-13, which Jesus offers as part of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: 3-7: 27. The Sermon on the Mount is a simply structured, brilliant work of a master teacher. It is built in four parts: 1) a memorable introduction, 2) six propositions that exceed the Law, 3) six concrete actions that implement the Law; and 4) a call to action. Part three—six concrete actions that implement the Law—begins with Jesus discussing the three pillars of devotional Judaism: almsgiving, prayer and fasting.
Discussing prayer, Jesus says:
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6: 1-8)
This is the context for the Lord’s Prayer that follows. In Judaism prayer was—and is—a fundamentally communal expression, not a private one. Jesus is not condemning such prayer; rather he is condemning prayer when it becomes an exaggerated form of pious ostentation. People who pray like this, he says in a tone of scathing sarcasm, are “hypocrites,” and they “have received their reward in full.”
Instead, he says, “go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.” And then he gives us a model for such prayer: “This, then, is how you should pray”—
Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be your name,
Your kingdom come,
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread,
Forgive us our debts,
As we also have forgiven our debtors,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from the evil one.
Notice that Jesus says this is “how you should pray,” not this is “what you should pray.” In fact, Jesus condemns those who pray, “babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.” Indeed, the constant repetition of the Lord’s Prayer in public and private worship has eroded its originality and urgency almost to the point of vanishing. Perhaps a closer, in-depth look at the Lord’s Prayer may allow us to hear it anew and experience something of the stunning affect it had on its first audience.
As with all Jesus’ statements in the Sermon of the Mount, he says nothing new in the Lord’s Prayer; rather, he takes what everyone knows and has heard repeatedly, and he casts it in a new light, snapping it into focus and displaying its dazzling colors and textures. First, look at the Prayer’s structure. It is short, consisting of only 56 words in the Greek, a sharp contrast to the prayers of those who “think they will be heard because of their many words” (Matthew 6: 7). Second, the prayer has two parts: 1) the first 23 words focus on God; and 2) the final 33 words focus on our needs. The basic 2-part structure suggests that prayer should focus first on God, then on us.
Part 1 begins: “Our Father in heaven.” When Jesus says, “Our Father,” his listeners would immediately recall other names for God in the Hebrew Scriptures: YHWH (pronounced Yahweh or Jehovah, 6,823 times), Elohim (2,570 times), Adonai (300 times), El (250 times), El Shaddai (48 times), as well as other relationships such as king, lord, husband, bridegroom, and so on. In biblical times a person’s name does far more than denote the individual: one’s name embodies the very nature, substance and essence of a person—who he is, in the most profound sense. When Jesus says, “Our Father,” the term resonates with other names and relationships with God, enfolding them into the most personal and intimate of all relationships, especially in a patriarchal, biblical culture: Father.
“In heaven” elevates this personal and intimate relationship to a transcendent plain. In the Greek, “in heaven” is en tois ouranois, “heaven” being a dative, masculine, plural noun; it is correctly translated “in the heavens.” Scripture speaks of at least three heavens: 1) “the birds of heaven,” referring to the atmosphere surrounding the earth; 2) “wonders in the heaven,” speaking of the stellar spaces, and 3) “the third heaven,” which is beyond the stellar spaces, the very dwelling place of God. The simple phrase “in the heavens” suggests both transcendence and immanence: God is beyond our comprehension; he is in the air we breathe; he is within the smallest detail; he is beyond the infinite; he saturates all that is.
Having opened with “Our Father in heaven,” Jesus’ prayer continues by invoking the traditional Jewish Kaddish, hallowing the name of God: “Hallowed be your name” (“May his great name be exalted and sanctified in the world, which he made according to his will . . .”). Given the extreme importance of God’s name, honoring that name is the very essence of piety and a right relationship with God. Interestingly, “hallowed be” is grammatically a third person imperative verb in the passive voice, so it does not indicate who is doing the hallowing. We may rightfully, then, read the command, not as referring solely to us, but to all of creation reflected “in the heavens.”
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” continues drawing on the Kaddish, so well known to Jesus’ audience: “. . . may his kingdom rule, his redemption spring forth, may he bring his Anointed One and save his people, in your lifetime, in your days, in the lifetime of all the house of Israel, quickly and soon. And you shall say, Amen.” This portion of the Lord’s Prayer anticipates both the establishment of the Messianic Kingdom in the present age (“Kingdom of Heaven,” in Matthew’s usage) and the consummation to come in the end times (“Kingdom of God”). Traditionally, both the Messianic Kingdom and the final consummation are divine gifts to be prayed for, not things to be achieved by human effort. Admittedly, there have always been those who felt otherwise, from the Zealots of Jesus’ day to those who believe today that the Church is to transform the world into the Kingdom of God through justice and social action.
As Jesus goes on to say in the Sermon on the Mount, “seek first [God’s] kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6: 33), so we move into the second half of the Lord’s Prayer, shifting our attention from God to our own needs. “Give us this day our daily bread” moves us from God’s transcendence and immanence to daily life in the here and now: our basic need to eat.
God cares about the larger picture of his will being done “on earth as it is in heaven,” but he also cares about our mundane needs. Requesting our “daily bread” recalls God providing daily manna to his people in the wilderness, granting nourishment and sustenance during their forty-year transit from Egypt to the Promised Land. It also recalls Proverbs 30: 8-9—“Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.” Asking for our “daily bread” rather than our long-term security teaches us to trust God from day to day, rather than ourselves, knowing that God will provide what we need, as we need it. It is a fundamental lesson in trust, a lesson we may rightly apply to our emotional and spiritual needs, as well.
“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” moves us to a second level of need in our day-to-day lives. In Matthew the Greek word translated “debts” is opheilemata, a term typically referring to a financial obligation, but it may also refer to any obligation, as in Romans 13: 8, where Paul writes: “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another.” In Luke 11: 2-4, the parallel rendering of the Lord’s Prayer, Luke writes: “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.” Here, the word is harmartias, “sins” or “trespasses.” Jesus would have spoken the Sermon on the Mount in his native Aramaic language, and the Aramaic word for “sin” and “debt” is the same, perhaps accounting for the difference between Matthew and Luke.
In any case, the focus is on forgiveness, not on what is forgiven. And the first half of the statement (“forgive us our debts”) pales in comparison to the second half (“as we also have forgiven our debtors”). As God has forgiven our sins or debts against him, so are we obligated to forgive other’s sins or debts against us; indeed, God forgiving us is contingent upon our forgiving others. This is a stunning lesson reinforced by Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18: 21-35, where the king forgives his servant’s huge debt, but the servant refuses to forgive a small debt owed to himself. The king then confronts the servant and says: “You wicked servant . . . I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you? In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.” To which Jesus comments: “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”
“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” concludes the Lord’s Prayer. The Greek word translated “temptation” is peirasmos, a word with a wide range of mean, including temptation, testing, trial and experiment. Will God actually lead us into temptation and sin? No. James writes: “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed” (James 1: 13-14). In the context of the Lord’s Prayer we should read peirasmos not as God leading us into temptation, but rather God permitting us to be led into temptation by our own evil desires. Or worse yet, by God delivering us into the hands of the Evil One for him to test us, as God did with Job and with David when David took the census (1 Chronicles 21: 1-30). Whether one should read the Greek word ponerou as generally “evil” or specifically the “Evil One” is open to debate, for grammatically ponerou can be either masculine (the “Evil One”) or neuter (“evil”). Scholars and translators evenly divide between the two. Ultimately, though, as John Calvin concluded, it doesn’t much matter, for the Evil One is the very embodiment of evil itself, and the result is the same.
Although the Lord’s Prayer ends on this note in both Matthew and Luke, traditional Jewish prayer ends with a doxology, and early on the Lord’s Prayer acquired one: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.” The doxology echoes David’s prayer in 1 Chronicles 29: 11—“Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours.” Although the doxology does not occur in the earliest Alexandrian manuscripts of Matthew, it does enter some of the later Byzantine manuscripts, after first appearing in the late 1st century/early 2nd century Didiche 8: 2. Today, Eastern Orthodox Christians and most Protestants include the doxology as part of the Lord’s Prayer, while the 1970 revision of the Roman Catholic Mass attaches it more as an epilogue to the Lord’s Prayer, with the priest interjecting between the main body of the prayer and the doxology: “Deliver us, Lord, from every evil and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” The congregation then responds with the doxology, drawing the prayer to a close.
The Lord’s Prayer is a model of elegant simplicity, masterful in its teaching and memorable in its rendering. Unfortunately, we have heard it repeated so many times in public and private worship that we rarely listen to it. As Jesus warned, we are “ever hearing but never understanding . . . ever seeing but never perceiving” (Matthew 13: 14). Perhaps this exercise of probing beneath the surface of the Lord’s Prayer and lingering over its lines will snap the Lord’s Prayer back into focus, bringing its colors and textures into bold relief.
