I refrain from using "devotional life" or "spirituality," because these carry too much baggage. Both are dipped too deeply into the facts-versus-feelings / outer-versus-inner / numbers-versus-language / science-versus-history / matter-versus-spirit dichotomy that is modernity. Thus, I say "compass of Christian practice" because a compass assumes a kind of action--wayfaring. A compass guides one’s hopeful wayfaring to a destination. There is the wilderness one goes through (say the wilderness of Exodus-Numbers) and the destination one bushcrafts one's way to (say the Kingdom of God). Sure, I could say the Lord’s Prayer is the cooperative yes of messianic disciples to the on-the-way of the restored, priestly missio Dei in this age. I could say the Lord’s Prayer is like a Christian Pledge of Allegiance. But let’s stay with our compass for now and say that the Lord's Prayer is the compass that guides the bushcraft of the church. But is it only a compass?
A compass determines location and plots direction. The Lord’s Prayer is certainly interested in that. But it goes further. It doesn’t desire only to direct effort but also to define what efforts are needful. It directs the hopes of the church and defines its activities. Therefore, we learn a great deal of the character of Christian living as we learn about the Prayer. And that is what I aim to do: to dive briefly but deeply as far down as the Prayer can take me.
Context of the Prayer
Back in 2005, I preached a sermon on Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer (Matt. 6:9-13; the prayer also appears in Luke's gospel). In that sermon, I spent a great deal of time contextualizing the prayer. I didn't want to read the prayer as a spiritual tool disconnected from history (asynchronously is how I think the technical language would call it). The prayer is, I said, the prayer of a people who long to belong in a new home, in this case the Kingdom of God. Jesus as the new Moses is, Exodus style, fitting the people out for the new land they are to possess. He is the shepherd who will lead the people, like Moses, through the wilderness to the promised land, the Kingdom. And the Kingdom is God's work for them, not their working their way into it. It is the Father's good pleasure to give the people the Kingdom. And, finally, I reword Jesus's introduction "This, then, is how you should pray," to "This, then, is how you disciples should pray for the Kingdom come." All of that is great, but I never got to the meat of the bone. It took so long to set it up, that I never went on into a close reading of the prayer itself. That is what I want to do here.
More material describing the context of the Sermon on the Mount may be necessary here
Divisions of the Prayer
The prayer divides into two halves.
The first half begins humbly at the very source of discipleship itself, which is the purpose of the triune God, the missio Dei, God's gracious desire to redeem his people and the very cosmos. (I wonder if there are parallels here to the first tablet of the law or to Jesus's greatest commandment, his summary of the Torah.) God is addressed or named in two ways: as father and as the one in heaven. Afterward, God is humbly petitioned to do three things in a rhetorical tricolon: to hallow his name, to bring in his kingdom, and to bring his will to fruition on earth as in heaven. I cannot tell if these necessarily add anything different from each other or whether they trump the same note in different keys. It is helpful to see them together.
ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου | hallow your name or make your name respected (here and now)
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου | bring in your kingdom or manifest your rule (here and now)
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου | beget your will or realize your will (here and now)
[In this section, parse the Greek Text]
[And now, some random notes stuck here for later]
"God's name" is a distinctive Hellenistic Judaistic periphrasis employed to avoid pronouncing the tetragrammaton. the fulfillment of this petition requires the interaction of God and creation.
NET Bible on "your kingdom come" -> "the fulfillment of this petition requires the interaction of God and creation"
Note Jesus's identification with us in need of forgiveness, anticipating his bearing upon himself the sin of all mankind at the cross, as did his baptism at the beginning of his public ministry). Jesus himself would become the answer for his prayer
The Lord's prayer presents not only a model prayer, but a summary of Jesus' priorities embodied in a pattern for all true prayer
The order of appeal repeats the order of revelation given to Moses: first God's name and nature, then his deliverance.
God's prophetic will, so often spurned and mocked on earth (which, incidentally, is the theme of much intertestamental literature), is already being carried out in the heavenlies. The implied argument is therefore from greater to lesser; fulfillment is just a matter of time.
The "as in heaven, so on earth" section invites the rule or kingdship of God, which is another way of talking about what God's redemptive plan is up to: to usher in the Kingdom until all things are put under his feet. Praying that is a priestly act that puts one in the correct orientation to the missio Dei. This is a prayer of warfare, because hostile powers that deny God's rule are exercising dominion on the earth. It also hearkens back to the creation of human beings as imago. Human beings are the imagers that bring God's will to fruition on earth. That is what humans were made to do.
The basic need for survival strikes at the heart of Israel's desert wanderings and Jesus' own temptations in the Judean wilderness
Since the time of Tertullian, interpreters have distinguished these two broad areas of concern as the "heavenly" and "terrestrial."
Ethics is all about imaging God's action. Human righteousness finds it pattern in God's character and acts. I'm thinking of Exodus 24 where you rest because God rested.
Is there a way that the position of the Lord's Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount parallels Moses's ascent in Exodus 24. This, by tradition, might connect to Gregory of Nyssa's mystical treatise, The Ascent of Moses or even the entire tradition of ascent, from Climacus to Cruz
To say "Father" assumes one is in the family. (Provide a short response to the erroneous and maudlin notion that Jesus's is saying "Daddy" when the novelty is not the possible meaning of the term but its use. Jesus uses Abba as an heir would use it. Abba is unique to Jesus's prayer from other prayers of his time.) To say "Father" is not to self-assume. It is the result of God's invitation, God's choosing of a people for himself. Father orients one to God's redemptive economy or, rather, inside that economy.
[end of random notes stuck here for later]
These are the foundations of discipleship itself. Discipleship is a participation with the divine in hallowing his name, in bringing his kingdom into being, in exacting the divine will here and now in this praying soul, in this one who would be a disciple of Jesus, in this one who hears him say "follow me" and follows after.
Augustine highlights the existential nature of these first three three petitions in his Letter to Proba (130.11.21):
When, therefore, we say: Hallowed be Your name, we admonish ourselves to desire that His name, which is always holy, may be also among men esteemed holy, that is to say, not despised; which is an advantage not to God, but to men. When we say: Your kingdom come, which shall certainly come whether we wish it or not, we do by these words stir up our own desires for that kingdom, that it may come to us, and that we may be found worthy to reign in it. When we say: Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we pray for ourselves that He would give us the grace of obedience, that His will may be done by us in the same way as it is done in heavenly places by His angels.Finally, the first half closes in an important way. The Greek of the last line, "On earth as it is in heaven," flips the order of the English translation. The Greek line begins not with "earth" but ends with it: ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς (note also the German: wie im Himmel, so auch auf Erden). Thus ending the first half, the action moves from God's transcendent heaven to the rude earth. To this patch of creation, the disciple in his or her Sitz im Leben, the way of prayer has come. The inclusio of the prepositional phrase en etc. It is unmistakable that grace alone, God's gracious missionary act, is the sole foundation of the journey. And now the disciple may begin the prayer's second half.
The second half addresses the life of the disciple. (And, again, I wonder if there isn't some distant correspondence to either the second tablet of the law or Jesus's second greatest commandment, which is the love of neighbor.) As in the first half, the second contains three requests. But these do not build upon each other. Instead, they address a disciple's different needs: the need for the necessities of life, the ethical primacy of living in forgiveness, and the dependence of the disciple upon God in the face of trial and demonic attack.
The first line can be spiritualized; daily bread (τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον) can easily refer to the manna that sustained Israel in its wilderness sojourn. And the last line also has interpretive subtleties. It can be read in three ways. Either trials and the evil one (The Greek text is plain that evil should be substantival--the evil one--not metaphorical due to the articular τοῦ πονηροῦ. The hermeneutical difference is a thunderbolt.) describe the buffets of disciple in the compass of a day's living. Or, they speak of the disciple's entire pilgrimage and the malevolent charges of the adversary on the last day. Or, they speak of both, which to my mind captures best the already-but-not-yet nature of a discipleship in this age.
There is not only the ethical side of the Prayer but also the spiritual warfare portion of the prayer. God comes as a warrior. This is a warrior's prayer. Here is where Michael Heiser's insights come to bear.
The Prayer is unique and cannot be unique. It is unique in one aspect: that Yahweh is called Father. [By the way, how should the careful removal of gender from such language done by the church fathers be read into this term -- or should it be?] But it cannot be unique in that it has, behind it, the entire devotional history of the Old Testament.
[more random thoughts]
Note Psalm 41:11-12: "By this I know you are pleased with me, / that my enemy does not triumph over me. / In my integrity you hold me fast, / and shall set me before your face forever." (BCP)
Note also this article by D. B. Hart: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-prayer-for-the-poor/
I'm willing to bet that th is an ark which assumes the floodwaters of the psalms. The evil one, for example, is that figure or figures that come up again and again, such as in Psalm 71.4 "Deliver me, my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the clutches of the evildoer and the oppressor." The evil one is like a stock character from Commedia dell'arte. And perhaps the entire Prayer is a kind of play with the praying disciple as a kind of protagonist.
I've been wondering how the Lord's Prayer fits into the framework of Jewish piety. It doesn't erupt from nowhere. (One might even wonder why it was needed, given that a longstanding tradition of Jewish spiritual practice was already in place. Jesus and the disciples were synagogue-attenders.) The obvious place to begin is the psalms; how do the psalms inform the Lord's Prayer. Bonhoeffer's framing of the psalms as the prayerbook of Jesus informs this direction.
The devotional life of Israel exists along a continuum from lament to supplication to praise. You can hear and expect the next one always in the other. So, if a psalm is a supplicatory psalm, there is a praise psalm for God's deliverance already in the can. At times, the two ends step on each other in the same psalm. So the genre of the prayer is a lament and supplication "bring your kingdom in!" (another way of saying "How long, O Lord?") "save us from the trial" (the psalms area always full of please for Israel to be saved from plague or the hand of the fowler). Having defined the problem with lament, the problem can be changed. Lament does not stay, but moves on to supplication and to work. In lament, we should never ignore the eschatological undertone of eventual praise and thanksgiving just waiting in the wings. There is a jubilation burning in the heart of the disciple, and that is why he prays for deliverance. In this case, then, that little bit about forgiveness is sort of akin to those psalms that say things like "I have kept my hands from evil" or "I have kept your law." Also, read this for some relationship between the prayer and pentecost. https://www.pastortheologians.com/articles/2020/5/28/the-spirit-of-pentecost-suffering-and-bearing-witness
Like lex orandi, lex credendi the Prayer is meant to form the praying disciple in certain key ways that are a direct consequence of the new situation Jesus has made in himself. Praying it launches the disciple into a certain, eschatological arc.
OT prof, Dr. Carmen Joy Imes, makes the connection between the daily requirement for brick making that the enslaved Israelites were required to produce for their Egyptian masters, that quota called the Dabar Yom B'Yom, and that same descriptor being used by how much manna Israelites were commanded to gather each day in Exodus 16.4. This, of course, makes a straight line to Jesus's discussion of our daily bread in the Lord's Prayer. I'd like to look this up in the LXX and see if Matthew isn't making a lexical connection as well. Dr. Imes's comments are confirming a suspicion of mine which is that the Lord's Prayer is a kind of prayed Torah. I can almost transform the two tablets of the law into the two halves of the prayer.
Also, picking up on the work of Dr. Imes, this time in an interview (Remnant Radio, March 31, 2020) about her book Bearing God's Name. She maintains that the commandment to not take the name of the Lord in vain is about not bearing God's name in vain. It is about living as God's priestly imago. So the request to "make your name honored," is the disciple's request that he or she will, that day, imago God rightly, thus fulfilling God's Sinai command. And only covenant people can bear Yahweh's name.
On the "forgive our sins": how does this play into our systems of justice? We are incarcerating at an amazing rate. Children are being incarcerated. I was listening to a TED Radio Hour segment that featured Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School. She was speaking about turning to reconciliation rathern than blanket incarceration. It made me think more deeply about sins. Again, I hear this as an individual -- sins against me -- but it is our -- sins against us.
Recently learned that in the Odyssey 18.70 Odysseus is called the "shephered of the people." So in Ancient Greek as well as in the Near East, kingly rule is equated to shepherding. This is implicit in the "lead us not into overwhelming temptation but deliver us from the evil one," to my mind a nod to the rod and staff of Psalm 23.
Abba is NOT a diminuitive for daddy. That was a conjecture made by nineteenth-century German scholar Joachim Jeremias and it is incorrect. Dale Allison writes about this in his book Constructing Jesus. Allision argues that it was originally Jesus who used "Abba" when praying in Gethsemane. The other instances in the NT (Rom 8/Gal4) in which we see Abba are recalling this Gethsemane tradition of the way Jesus prayed during his passion. [[Mopre work needs to be done on this. Abba may have been, in Christian settings, referring to martyrdom. Also, it was no unique to Jesus. A little digging demonstrates that the Jewish tradition used that address for God. As Allison has observed, "A Jew wanting to have nothing to do with Jesus could still pray the Our Father."]
https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/41/41-3/41-3-pp353-365-JETS.pdf"Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is all about."
