Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer I
“Now as our Saviour Christ hath commanded and taught us,
we are bold to say, Our Father”
Even in a post-Christian age, the Lord’s Prayer continues to be used and remembered. It is probably the only prayer that many know off by heart. Yet we know it mostly, perhaps entirely, from its liturgical use. Somehow it is well-known and, remarkably, in its older English translation, the King’s James version. Somehow it is memorable.
We know it. We use it. But do we think much about it? Do we appreciate its radical meaning and its essential place in the life of prayer? Or do we simply rattle it off automatically and without much thought? Let’s be honest. And yet, there is something compelling about the Lord’s Prayer, as it has come to be called, that somehow stays with us and is part of us. It is the prayer which shapes all and every prayer in our liturgies and in praying. But what is prayer?
Prayer, Richard Hooker, famously tells, signals all the service we ever do unto God. Prayer is about our fundamental orientation to God and to our being with God. It is not just about seeking his will; it signals the profound idea of being with God in his will for us through prayer. “The whole of our life says Our Father,” the great 2nd/3rd century theologian Origen of Alexandria notes. All prayer, as Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests, is about “letting Jesus pray in us.” Prayer in other words belongs to our incorporation into the life of God in Christ.
It will be our Lenten task this year to explore, however briefly, the Lord’s Prayer to appreciate its teaching and meaning and to look at some of the ways in which its teaching has been considered by the ancient Fathers of the Patristic period, by certain medieval writers, as well as reformed and modern writers. The Lord’s Prayer is the living breath of the Church; the breath of the Holy Spirit in us through the words of the Son to the Father. And it is, as Origen so rightly notes, our whole life.
We call it the Lord’s Prayer. Why? And what does that mean? Simply that this is the prayer which Jesus has taught us. Jesus is Lord. “No one can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor. 12.3). We learn the Lord’s Prayer from Jesus himself as presented to us in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. “When you pray,” Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “be not like the Hypocrites… Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask. Pray then like this: Our Father ….” (Matt. 6.5-13).
