The Lord's Prayer E-Book

Wesley Hill

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Christian Essentials
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 103

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

You pray it. But do you understand it?The Lord's Prayer has become so familiar to us that we don't think about what we're praying. It's a portrait of Jesus' heart. And in it Christians from different times, places, and traditions have been united. We pray it, but do we actually believe it?When Jesus taught his followers how to pray, he emphasized how uncomplicated it should be. There's no need for pretense or theatrics. Instead, simply ask for what you need as though you were speaking with your earthly father. This opens a window into Jesus' prayer life and presents us with a portrait of his heart for his followers.Wesley Hill re-introduces the Lord's Prayer. He shows us a God who is delighted to hear prayer. Petition by petition, in conversation with the Christian tradition, he draws out the significance of Jesus' words for prayer today.

Leseprobe

THE LORD’S PRAYER

A Guide to Praying to Our Father

CHRISTIAN ESSENTIALS

WESLEY HILL

The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father

Christian Essentials

Copyright 2019 Wesley Hill

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission.

Email us at [email protected].

“Coda: Praying the Lord’s Prayer with Rembrandt” is adapted from Wesley Hill, “Praying the ‘Our Father’ with Rembrandt,” Covenant blog, September 23, 2015, https://livingchurch.org/covenant/2015/09/23/praying-our-father-rembrandt/. Used by permission.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), copyright © 1989, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked (NEB) are from the New English Bible, copyright © Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1961, 1970. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (REB) are from the Revised English Bible, copyright © Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1989. All rights reserved.

Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son on page 98 is located at The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Public domain.

Print ISBN 9781683593188

Digital ISBN 9781683593195

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Abigail Stocker, Danielle Thevenaz

Cover Design: Eleazar Ruiz

CHRISTIAN ESSENTIALS

The Christian Essentials series passes down tradition that matters. The ancient church was founded on basic biblical teachings and practices like the Ten Commandments, baptism, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Supper, the Lord’s Prayer, and corporate worship. These basics of the Christian life have sustained and nurtured every generation of the faithful—from the apostles to today. The books in the Christian Essentials series open up the meaning of the foundations of our faith.

To Felicity, with all my love

CONTENTS

Series Preface

Introduction: “Your Father in Secret”

INVOCATIONOur Father in heaven

PETITIONIHallowed be your name

PETITIONIIYour kingdom come

PETITIONIIIYour will be done on earth as in heaven

PETITIONIVGive us today our daily bread

PETITIONVForgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us

PETITIONVISave us from the time of trial

PETITIONVIIAnd deliver us from evil

DOXOLOGYFor the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and forever. Amen

Coda: Praying the Lord’s Prayer with Rembrandt

Acknowledgments

Translations Used

Works Cited

Scripture Index

Name Index

SERIES PREFACE

The Christian Essentials series passes down tradition that matters.

The church has often spoken paradoxically about growth in Christian faith: to grow means to stay at the beginning. The great Reformer Martin Luther exemplified this. “Although I’m indeed an old doctor,” he said, “I never move on from the childish doctrine of the Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. I still daily learn and pray them with my little Hans and my little Lena.” He had just as much to learn about the Lord as his children.

The ancient church was founded on basic biblical teachings and practices like the Ten Commandments, baptism, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Supper, the Lord’s Prayer, and corporate worship. These basics of the Christian life have sustained and nurtured every generation of the faithful—from the apostles to today. They apply equally to old and young, men and women, pastors and church members. “In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith” (Gal 3:26).

We need the wisdom of the communion of saints. They broaden our perspective beyond our current culture and time. “Every age has its own outlook,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” By focusing on what’s current, we rob ourselves of the insights and questions of those who have gone before us. On the other hand, by reading our forebears in faith, we engage ideas that otherwise might never occur to us.

The books in the Christian Essentials series open up the meaning of the foundations of our faith. These basics are unfolded afresh for today in conversation with the great tradition—grounded in and strengthened by Scripture—for the continuing growth of all the children of God.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4–9)

INTRODUCTION

“Your Father in Secret”

At the center of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, He offers to His disciples a model for prayer. This would not have seemed at all unusual to Jesus’ followers. Many teachers who attracted crowds in Palestine, like Jesus did, were expected to pass on their insights about how best to beseech God, and Jesus wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows by conveying His. In the Gospel of Luke, for instance, Jesus’ disciples are the ones who prompt His instruction: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John [the Baptist] taught his disciples” (11:1).

What would have been surprising to the crowd listening to Jesus that day was the way Jesus spoke about prayer. He rejected the ostentatious style of prayer with which His listeners would have been familiar. Instead, He emphasized how uncomplicated prayer should be:

And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that 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. (Matt 6:5–8)

With these words, Jesus dismisses at a stroke the unusual prayers of the experts in the Jewish law as well as the elaborately theatrical models of the pagan gentile world. There’s no need for pretentious displays, Jesus insists. Prayer shouldn’t be calculated to impress, whether one is seeking to attract the attention of God or other people. Why? Because God doesn’t need our prayer. In effect, Jesus says: God isn’t looking to have His arm twisted or to be cajoled or bargained with or manipulated. God doesn’t require a flawless recitation of certain phrases, as if He were poised to fly into a rage in the absence of the right formula or performance. No, Jesus says, God is “your Father,” and He already is disposed favorably toward you. “Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear” (Isa 65:24). Go find a quiet place where you can relax, Jesus seems to say. Unclench your fists. Breathe deeply. Let your heart rate decrease. Know that you’re already bathed in the Father’s love, and ask simply for what you need, in the assurance that the One to whom you’re speaking is already cupping His ear in your direction. That’s what prayer should be.

It’s no wonder, then, that when Christian liturgies introduce the Lord’s Prayer in the context of worship, they often use a formula like this: “And now as our savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to say …” We can, in other words, give up all our anxious efforts to pacify, convince, or haggle with God. We can trade in that performative style of prayer for one that is more homely and familial. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes: “We have the nerve to call God what Jesus called him, because of the Spirit we share with Jesus as a result of being baptized, ‘immersed’ in the life of Jesus.”1 What Jesus—and later Paul, following in His footsteps—offers to believers is a picture of a God who is eager, indeed, delighted to hear prayer. Unlike human fathers, who are often engrossed in their smartphones and have to have their attention captured in some creative way by their children, God is already and always attentive to His children. It is with that in mind that Jesus says to His disciples, “Pray then in this way …” (Matt 6:9).

The Lord’s Prayer, often called the Pater Noster (Latin for “Our Father”), is a kind of template, a “Here, try it this way” sort of prayer. It’s a model for approaching God with childlike confidence that He will hear. Depending on who you ask, it is composed of six or seven petitions, the first three focused on God’s holy character and rule and the latter three or four concerned with invoking God’s help in some way.2 In what follows, we will inch our way through each petition, drawing on the writings of the church fathers, the Protestant Reformers, and more recent Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant theologians and preachers to draw out the significance of Jesus’ words for Christian prayer today.

Above all, I want to show that the Lord’s Prayer is first and foremost about Jesus Himself. Each petition is not only His instruction to His followers about how they are to pray. More fundamentally, each petition is a window into Jesus’ own life of prayer—His reliance on and manifestation of the One He called Father. As Dale Allison has put it, “Jesus embodies his speech; he lives as he speaks and speaks as he lives.”3 The Lord’s Prayer is a portrait of Jesus Christ—the One who addresses God as Father, who sanctifies God’s name, who announces and bears God’s healing reign, who submits to God’s will, who gives His flesh as daily bread for the life of the world, who provides for the forgiveness of sins through His death on the cross and thus inducts His followers into a lifestyle of forgiveness, and who ultimately delivers believers from the power of death and the devil. Jesus embodies and enacts the prayer He taught His followers to pray.4 Jesus is “the invisible background of every one of [the Lord’s Prayer’s] petitions”—all of them are arrows that point toward Him, though He isn’t mentioned by name in any of them.5

A brief word about translation and inclusive language. I have chosen to use the English Language Liturgical Consultation’s 1988 translation of the Lord’s Prayer as the primary text that I will comment on here. But I will also reference the familiar King James Version (how could I do otherwise?) as well as newer versions, such as Sarah Ruden’s arresting translation.6 I will also reference, on occasion, my own reading of the Greek versions found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

I have also decided to retain masculine pronouns for God throughout, though I explain at the end of chapter 1 why this must not be understood in a literal way, as if God were male. I also follow the time-honored practice of capitalizing divine pronouns (“He,” “His”), in part to signal my belief that while “He” may appropriate our masculine language for His self-communication, God transcends our creaturely categories, and we should not suppose that God’s employment of our language is anything other than analogical.7

INVOCATION

OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN

The God of the Bible creates simply by speech