Finally getting around to the Lord's Prayer in Matthew

Gary Parrett, a respected teacher of mine, summarizes the catechetical task around three poles: the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostle's Creed. Each one provides in microcosm a piece of the foundation of a Christian mind. The Ten Commandments are a catalyst for ethical thinking. The Apostle's Creed outlines theological development. And the Lord's Prayer encompasses Christian practice. But what is meant by Christian practice?

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."

Exegeting the Widow's Mite: A first look at the story in English

The story of the widow's mite is a cash cow for workaday ministry. Thanks to this story, the needy pastor need not fear when the once-a-year stewardship campaign or a building fund fundraiser comes due. He or she has it covered. Yes, from the very lips of Jesus himself drops money talk heaven-sent to open the wallets of the faithful. It is textual. It is orthodox. It is guilt free.

The story of the widow's mite is simple enough. Jesus is sitting near the treasury on the temple grounds. He with his retinue are watching people toss money into an offering box. A widow comes in. She tosses in a few mites--a tiny amount of money and probably the last bit of cash she had. Jesus sees it and says something like, "See! This widow is better than these other people. They give from their extra, but she gave even the last few coins she had to live on." And so the usual conclusion is to be like the widow. Dig deep. Give much. "The widow cast but two brass coins into the treasury and yet she shall be preferred before Croesus with all his wealth." said Jerome.

But is it really that simple? I confess to feeling a twinge of suspicion whenever I've heard this passage preached. Not to say that I felt the sermon wicked or the speaker a villain--not at all! Good people do they best they can at hard texts. I just knew that there was more to it, hearing as it were a kind of distant echo. And, sure enough, there is more--a lot more.

The best way to find out what is there is to dive deeply into the story itself.[1] There is a fecundity to scripture. Even the most obvious bit of story, if you sit with it, will slowly widen out into a satisfying tableau. This story, or pericope, (A pericope /pear-ICK-oh-pee/ is a set of verses that forms one coherent unit or thought. Pericopes are the bits of scripture read aloud in liturgical worship.) is found in Mark 12.41-44 and Luke 21.1-4. I am going to focus on the Marcan instance. Mark is the earliest gospel, and Luke does not use the periocope any differently than Mark. The goal is to arrive at a defensible, understandable, and meaningful interpretation that gives it reason in its lexical setting and makes its teaching available to us today. I will be using the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), as it is the critical English text used in universities and seminaries. I also want to stay with English as far as possible before consulting the Greek. So the text reads

He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

When I begin to examine a pericope, I always start with two techniques: observation and structural analysis. Observation is what it says: focused looking. It is helpful to make a list of what is observed. Observation is all about the details, and each should be listed on its own line. Doing so helps the mind dismiss assumptions and see what is there. Like pulling up carpet, one sometimes finds new layers underneath. Structural analysis is different from observation in that it is not concerned with what is being said, the meaning of content, but with how it is said. Structural analysis uncovers the framework in which content is presented. The reader is after the purpose of a text. He or she wants to know the main idea and how other ideas are arranged around it. The structure usually tells you that. To do structural analysis, I use grammatical techniques like sentence flowing or sentence diagramming. You can also underline parallel constructions, highlight verbs with a highlighter, and so on. Any technique is useful. Here is the diagram I made of this pericope. I do not use verse numbers or include chapter headings. The point is to discover grammatical and rhetorical structure.

Beginning with observation, here are several written in the order they were made. The more observations one makes, the better.

• The people in the story are the crowds, rich people, Jesus, his disciples, temple benefactors, and the widow
• The place is the temple treasury (Where is that?)
• Why is each person there?
• Money is important to the story and how much or little of it there is
• Economic class is part of this: some have "abundance," but the widow lives in poverty
• The story has Jesus going through a series of postures: he sits, he watches, he calls, he speaks.
• Jesus praises the largest gift, but based on a value completely other than the currency values of the day
• No one is concerned about what happens to this widow after Jesus's pronouncement
• The author makes a point to tell the reader how much the widow's coins were worth
• There is a lot of the verb "put" in this story
• The dramatic engine of the story is fueled by compare and contrast: wealth and poverty, large and small, the crowd and the individual, Jesus and the disciples, a wide view versus a narrow view, the value of the crowd and Jesus's value, watching silently and speaking aloud
• The story doubles up on its description of the amount the widow put into the treasury: everything she had, all she had to live on
• Are these two adjectival phrases about the widow's gift meant to give us more information about the widow, or is this just repetition for emphasis?
• Jesus begins his teaching with "Truly, I tell you." Is this important?
• The disciples are not present in the story until Jesus calls them
• The reaction of the disciples nor of anyone else is unrecorded
• Why are all the verbs in the simple past tense save the ones in Jesus's pronouncement. Those are all in the perfect tense?
• Is there a reason Jesus contrasts the verbs "have contributed" and "has put in" in the final comparison?
• Does their giving to the temple equate to our giving to the church or to charitable giving today?
• What did this story mean to Jews or God-fearing gentiles circulating it twenty years before the temple's destruction?
• What comes before this story? What comes after? How does this story "work" between then?
• What status or position in society did widows have in first-century Palestine?
• Who is Jesus at this point in the gospel?
• What does this story say about Jesus? How does this story advance the story about Jesus that Mark's gospel is telling?

And now for the structural analysis.

The fun begins when structural analysis is finished (to whatever degree one desires). And it is fun! Sometimes I find it hard to complete an analysis for the insights jumping off the page! Highlighting structure words like then, therefore, and, but, etc. reveal the machinery of the text. It becomes easy to see how each piece, each paragraph, each sentence, fits together. And, in doing so, it guides the reader toward the main idea.

The main idea of a pericope is the pearl inside the grammatical clam. Discovering it not by whimsy or by guesswork but based on grammatical structure is one of the most important tasks of the exegete. Grammatical structure tells the hearer or reader what is important and what is not. It communicates the choice of meaning that a writer or speaker is making. Grammatical structure is a treasure map. And following it means that the exegete will not only emphasize what is meant to be emphasized, but make correct decisions about the importance of other parts of a story. Exegesis is not only understanding the words and sentences; it is understanding how the author has structured information for meaning.

The main idea is discovered by looking at the structure. So one begins looking for words that reveal it, such as relative pronouns or conjunctions that begin sorting material into independent and dependent clauses. In this case, the temporal adverb "then" divides the pericope into two halves. The first half comes before Jesus speaks and the rest follows after. Before is the factual world of action and after is the mental world of interpretation. The transition movement makes dramatic suspense. A division can also be made in the first half to create the diagram above. This pericope is a story in three acts: the opening scene at the temple treasury; the cast of characters, rich people and the widow; and the teaching that results from it all. I labeled these the Scene, Introduction of Characters, and the Lesson. But does this help to discover the main idea? Yes it does.

The main idea of a pericope will be located in structures that are supported by everything around them. It will not be found in dependent material beginning with because, for example. It will not be found in introductory material. In this pericope, then, the main idea is not to be found in the first two acts. It is located in the third.

In the third act, too, some digging for the main idea is required. The act is divided into three parts: Jesus's assembly of the disciples for instruction, Jesus's surprising announcement, and the reason for the announcement. Now, the main idea cannot be in the first subdivision because it is introductory. So, it must be in one of the other two parts. Again, structure comes to the rescue. The third portion begins with the subordinate conjunction for. That section, then, supports the second section and depends grammatically on it. Thus, the main idea can only be in the second section of the third act: "this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury." But this is a comparative clause. And so, of the two, the first assertion is favored. Thus, the main idea of the pericope is "this poor widow has put in more."

Now, there is another structure in the pericope that deserves investigation. It involves a rhetorical device called syncrisis. Syncrisis is a kind of comparison or antithesis. And it is easily observable in the A B B A structure of the third act.

     A   this widow has put in more
     B   than those
               for
     B1  all have contributed
     A1  but she has put in everything

Ancient rhetoricians used syncrisis to contrast people in order to evaluate their relative worth to society. Syncrisis is a subset of a larger genre called epideictic rhetoric which is designed to publicly praise (or shame) someone for the purpose of emulation (or shunning). Jesus's speech in the temple treasury is certainly an example of epideictic rhetoric, of a sort called an encomium, and syncrisis forms a major part of the way he structured his speech. But Jesus did not begin its use in the story. The gospel writer employed syncrisis in the second act of the pericope before Jesus's encomium. The story is built around them. I should also say that epideictic rhetoric would sometimes include some introductory narrative information. One was, after all, about to praise or damn someone, and so some factual information to set up the story might be helpful. This factual warmup is called by rhetoricians the narratio. So, then, Mark's story of the widow's mite is a three-part, dramatic, epideitic narration that begins with a bit of narratio and then uses syncrisis to publicly praise one of two contrasted people. Its hero is a widow. Its main idea is "this poor widow has put in more."

The temptation now is overwhelming to apply this as a kind of moral of the story. The sermon writes itself: "Just as this widow gave all she had out of her poverty and was praised, so you have no excuse, out of your abundance, to give to the work of the kingdom." But consider: almost none of the observations made above have been satisfied. The setting and action of the first two acts of the tale are ignored by this conclusion, as are any criticisms made by the story about class and wealth. Structural analysis has provided a framework. But there is more work to be done later in another post.

__________

[1] Exegesis /ex-uh-JEE-zis/ (from the Greek verb ἐξηγεῖσθαι, "to lead out") is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. The interpreter allows the text to "lead out" the meaning. The antonym is eisegesis /AI-suh-jee-zus/ where an interpreter "leads in" to a text a preconceived meaning.