Christ Church

“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).

Two things immediately strike us from Matthew’s account. The first important point is about not being “like the Hypocrites” which means that prayer must be sincere and from the heart as seen by God and not for the sake of being seen by others. Prayer has to do with our intimate relation with “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” another familiar prayer (BCP, p. 67). Hypocrisy is our pretense, pretending to be one thing when we are the exact opposite. Hypocrisy casts a wide net which catches us all. That this is the context in Matthew’s Gospel of the Lord’s Prayer alerts us to the danger of hypocrisy and the need to pray with sincerity and seriously and as thoughtfully as we can.

The second observation is also interesting. “Your Father,” Jesus says, “knows what you need before you ask.” This immediately raises the question, ‘then why pray?’ The answer is that God wants us to seek for what he wants for us. Prayer is about our active engagement with the will of God, our participation in God’s will and the explicit acknowledgement on our part of the truth of God in our lives. In prayer we actively seek what God wants. As such we are “co-workers with him” in his grace given for us. This is especially profound and wonderful. It is, in a way, about letting Christ pray in us and about how “the whole of our life, says Our Father.”

Luke provides another context for the giving of the Lord’s Prayer by Jesus (Luke 11. 1-4). It is the context of Jesus himself praying and then being asked about prayer by his disciples who ask him to teach them to pray. Jesus says “when ye pray, say, Our Father, hallowed be thy name.” The Lord’s Prayer is given in the context of prayer and teaching. It is what we have been taught by Jesus about the activity of prayer which is the meaning of his life to and with the Father.

In the original Greek, Luke doesn’t include the personal pronoun, “our” though it is reasonable to assume this as the King James Version does. It is there in Matthew’s account. The important point is that the Lord’s Prayer makes Jesus’ Father our Father. Such is the radical intimacy that this prayer signifies and which we neglect at our peril.

But as Origen observes, nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do we find the practice of praying to God as Father. There are a few references to God as Father and, some, even fewer to God as Mother. They are metaphors for our relation to God as distinct from the revealed reality of God. In the Christian understanding, God is Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Those terms are almost completely given by Jesus Christ and become the terms upon which the divine attributes such as “the infinite power, wisdom and goodness” of God are predicated (Art. 1, Thirty-nine Articles, BCP, p. 699). The simple point is that Jesus teaches us the most about God as the Father, about himself as the Son, and about the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost who is the bond of their love, the love-knot, as Lancelot Andrewes puts it.

This is all significant in relation to the Lord’s Prayer because prayer is grounded in the life of God himself. God as Father has nothing to do with earthly fathership or sonship. God as Father is Christ’s Father and our heavenly Father in part because of the Lord’s Prayer. The Trinitarian imagery of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the revealed ways in which the spiritual life of God in himself is opened to us. That is the divine life in which we participate through prayer, especially and essentially, the Lord’s Prayer. Matthew and Luke provide the scriptural ground for our participation in the life of God. As Origen indicates, “the whole of our life says Our Father.” In praying the Lord’s Prayer, we are learning how “to let Jesus pray in us.”

Fr. David Curry
Lenten Programme on the Lord’s Prayer I
March 5th, 2020