Prayer 3: The Lord’s Prayer

Don: The Lord’s Prayer was given to the disciples in answer to their request to be taught how to pray. There are two versions, one in Matthew and one in Luke. Matthew provides more prefatory material. Different denominations use different versions: Catholics tend to use the Luke version; evangelicals tend to use the Matthew version. They have small differences, but they are essentially the same prayer.

The prefatory material in Matthew 6 concerns personal piety. Jesus addresses three elements central to all religions: Prayer, fasting, and the giving of alms. Jesus downplays these elements and makes it clear that our relationship with others is more important than personal piety. He spends much more time developing the concept that one’s relationship with others, rather than personal piety, is the touchstone of religion.

In regards to fasting, Jesus alludes to Isaiah 58:3-6, in emphasizing what a fast really is:

‘Why have we fasted and You do not see?
Why have we humbled ourselves and You do not notice?’
Behold, on the day of your fast you find your desire,
And drive hard all your workers.

“Behold, you fast for contention and strife and to strike with a wicked fist.
You do not fast like you do today to make your voice heard on high.

“Is it a fast like this which I choose, a day for a man to humble himself?
Is it for bowing one’s head like a reed
And for spreading out sackcloth and ashes as a bed?
Will you call this a fast, even an acceptable day to the Lord?

“Is this not the fast which I choose,
To loosen the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the bands of the yoke,
And to let the oppressed go free
And break every yoke?

In so doing, Jesus is putting the fast in a completely different context from what was and is commonly supposed. Instead of personal privation, his focus is on reaching out to those who are oppressed.

He also downplays the giving of alms by saying you should not let your left right hand know what your right hand is doing. Keep it quiet. Keep it private. Don’t be ostentatious about it. Similarly, he says prayer should be personal, private, brief, and meaningful, and it should acknowledge that god already knows what we need.

Perhaps the Lord’s Prayer is a pithy summation, a declaration, a mini constitution of the kingdom of heaven. It encompasses all the pillars of community we have been discussing from Matthew 18. Most importantly, all nine personal pronouns in the Lord’s Prayer are plural. It’s “our father,” not “my father.” It’s a prayer of community.

The opening line juxtaposes the two extremes of god: God as “daddy” (abba, a very personal and endearing term) and god as the mighty and hallowed ruler of the universe (“who art in heaven; hallowed be thy name.”) Perhaps Jesus intended this juxtaposition to deter us from treating god too much as one or the other; to tell us that god is neither an indulgent celestial Santa Claus who will give us whatever we want nor an entity so remote as to be unapproachable and so mighty that he has no interest in us.

The prayer brings out the grace that we must repay by giving it to others; and it is a community prayer and a tool for conflict resolution and kingdom government. Hence, it is a constitution, a set of bylaws, to understand what it means to be part of the kingdom of heaven.

It was suggested last week that even this prayer is too demanding. A better translation of “Give us our daily bread” might be “Grant us our daily bread,” in recognition that god is the source of our daily bread, and forgiveness, and so on, without sounding too demanding. Isaiah 33 says that our bread and our water are assured. In Exodus, there is manna from heaven. Our daily bread is guaranteed; the Lord’s Prayer acknowledges that.

Harry: It is a lesson in how the kingdom community works—through forgiveness and so on. In Matthew 22 Jesus said the greatest commandments in the law were to love god, then to love one’s neighbor as oneself. This is contained in the prayer, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Robin: Reading beyond the Lord’s Prayer portion of Matthew 6, Jesus makes the point that we need to put others before ourselves.

Ada: The commandment to put no-one before god takes the onus off oneself. The Lord’s Prayer tells us what to do to lead a better life, and how to communicate with god.

Alice: Every phrase in the Lord’s Prayer is packed with significance.

Harry: What a difference it might make in the world if all peoples applied the lesson implicit in “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”? For that to happen, there would need to be mutual understanding, and that alone would be revolutionary. Asking to be “led not into temptation” would mean being asking to be able to understand the other side and to be led to forgive.

Alice: If we do not forgiven one another, god will not forgive us.

Robin: “Thy kingdom come” suggests that Jesus is not talking about a physical, geographic place.

Harry: Jesus said that the kingdom is here and now. It is not geographic. It is just a matter of community, but we are unable to create it.

Robin: Religious denominations want to define the kingdom, but in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus is pre-empting such claims.

Jason: We are taught that prayer is individualistic, not communal. It is difficult to break free from those lessons.

Harry: The “Children’s Prayer:”

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep:
May God guard me through the night
And wake me with the morning light.

used to terrify me as a child. I did not want to think about dying! It must have given me a complex—I have really struggled with prayer ever since.

Michael: Didn’t the disciples realize that they didn’t need to pray at all, when they had Jesus with them in the flesh? The extraordinary thing is that Jesus gave them the Lord’s Prayer anyway! Was it for their benefit, or for ours?

Jason: The reason for the Lord’s Prayer has to be beyond the disciples’ question. I am drawn to Harry’s notion that this is a prayer intended for the community, not the individual.

Harry: People pray because they are afraid or because they think god wants them to talk to him. Does god really need us to talk to him? No! His message was simply to apply his lessons to one’s relationship others.

Alice: The Lord’s Prayer says: Father, you are the one and only, and you are the king, and I want you to come and reign over us and do whatever you want to do and we will accept it. We realize that the kingdom has an enemy, the devil, from whom we need protection, but we trust that you will provide for us.

Don: Prayer is an exercise, an event, an occurrence, or a phenomenon, or all of the above, the outcome of which is not getting what we are requesting; rather, it is to see that all things come together for those that love god. Prayer brings us to the mindset that all things work together for the common good. Throughout the scriptures, the answers to prayer sometime seem to be real; but on the other hand, what we ask for often does not materialize or is answered with an unexpected response, as in Paul’s case. By persisting in prayer in the way Jesus taught, our mind becomes more aligned with the mind of god and we see that all things will work together for good. There are many passages in scripture that talk about the outcome of prayer, but nowhere does it say that if you pray in a certain way you will get whatever you want.

As a medical student, when I was consumed by anxiety over exams, I found the following passage from Philippians 4:6-7 most comforting:

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

In this passage the result of prayer again has nothing to do with what one is asking for. Instead, the result is peace of mind, a recognition that god is in control and that good things will happen. Prayer enables us to understand the meaning of the statement in Ecclesiastes 3:11 that God “has made everything beautiful [sometimes translated as “appropriate”—DE] in its time.” So the answer to “How should I pray?’ is “I should pray so that I might see that all things work together for good.” When should I pray? Whenever I don’t see that all things are working for good, whenever I see that all things are not beautiful. What should I pray for? I should pray that my mind becomes aligned with the mind of god so that I come to understand this. Where should I pray? Anywhere that we do not see god’s hand at work making all things beautiful in their time.

Essentially, this tells me that God does indeed have a plan for our lives, and it is a good plan, but it is in the long term. Maybe this is what we are missing in our context of prayer. I suggest we think about the end point of prayer as being the alignment of our minds with that of god, and a serene contentment with whatever circumstance we find ourselves in, at peace and free from fear and anxiety.

Harry: If you measure the results of the Lord’s Prayer in “celestial Santa Claus” terms then it would clearly be a fraud. God demonstrably does not give everyone who prays their daily bread, not even those who are starving. But in the context of Jesus’s life and goals, he was driving us to love god and to love our neighbor. God has never been in the business of providing humanity with food and shelter.

Jason: The idea of alignment with god’s mind is appealing but seems to me to contain some pitfalls, such as the definition of “beautiful” and “working for good.” How can we be sure we know what god’s definition of these terms is? Our definition and god’s definition might be so far apart that our minds cannot be aligned with his. But the statement in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done” absolves us from having to understand god’s mind. The alignment is more a matter of faith than of enlightenment, it seems to me.

David: I would agree with Jason. “Thy will be done” says all that needs to be said. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be said, because god knows what we think. I also share some of Michael’s puzzlement about why the Lord’s Prayer is necessary. I get the sense that Jesus handed out the Prayer in some frustration at the disciple’s unnecessary request. He told us not to be repetitive, yet the Lord’s Prayer is the most repeated prayer of all time! Catholics, as Ada has told us, are made to repeat it over and over again in penance following Confession. I agree that it serves as a sort of mini constitution for the kingdom of heaven and is useful as such, but a constitution does not amount to prayer. I agree absolutely with Don about the outcome of prayer, and I think that accepting that god’s will be done is tantamount to opening the mind, like Buddhist meditation, making it receptive to the vibrations of god’s mind and giving us an understanding (that peace and serenity) we cannot possibly explain in words.

Don: Prayer is a form of listening, not necessarily of asking. But we tend to focus on the latter.

Michael: I’ve always thought of the bread in the prayer as flour and water, but I am starting to think it is really the bread of eternal life—the word of god. This again shows that we need to be listening.

Ada: As soon as I think I have god figured out, I don’t. It’s a journey that sometimes does not lead to where I expect.

Don: Harry has noted that there are many places in the Old Testament where god hid from mankind as soon as people thought they had pinned him down. This has relevance to prayer, in the sense that prayer keeps re-connecting us with god.

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