Christ Church

This is the fourth and final address in this series. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”

Our Lenten study of the Lord’s Prayer brings us to the last three petitions, to the triad of forgiveness, temptation, and evil. They draw us into the deeper meaning of Christ’s Passion. To pray for forgiveness for ourselves and towards one another, to pray not to be led into temptation, and to pray to be delivered from evil is to pray the Passion of Christ.

We pray to our Father in all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray “Our Father” achieves, Thomas Aquinas tells us, “five things.” First, the words “Our Father” serve to “instruct us in our faith”; second, they “raise our hopes”; third, “they serve to stimulate charity”; fourth, they lead us “to imitate God”; and fifth, they call us “to humility”.  In other words, the phrase “Our Father”, which is present throughout the Lord’s Prayer, gives us confidence in God. As Aquinas says, “Our Lord, in teaching us how to pray, sets out before us those things which engender confidence in us, such as the loving kindness of a father, implied in the words, Our Father.” Once again, we see how the Lord’s Prayer is an essential of the Christian Faith.

Augustine breaks off his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in the sixth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel to speak about the Creed. He is speaking during Holy Week in the context of preparing catechumens for baptism. Both the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are to be learned by heart. “When you have learned [the Creed], that you may never forget it, say it every day when you rise; when you are preparing for sleep, rehearse your Creed, to the Lord rehearse it, remind yourselves of it, and be not weary of repeating it. … Call your faith to mind, look into yourself, let your Creed be as it were a mirror to you. Therein see yourself, whether you do believe all which you profess to believe, and so rejoice day by day in your faith. Let it be your wealth, let it be in a sort the daily clothing of your soul. Do you not always dress yourself when you rise? So by the daily repetition of your Creed dress your soul.” It is a powerful passage complemented by his teaching about the creedal nature of the Lord’s Prayer as being an essential form of our participation in the life of God in Christ.

From these remarks about the Creed, he turns to the “Our Father,” and highlights its essential and radical nature. In saying “Our Father,” he says, “you have begun to belong to a great family. Under this Father the lord and the slave are brethren; under this Father the general and the common soldier are brethren; under this Father the rich man and the poor are brethren. All Christian believers have various fathers in earth, some noble, some obscure; but they all call upon one Father which is in heaven.” Like the Creed, it is to be prayed every day.

In our Anglican tradition, this sensibility about the essentials of the Faith appears in the form of Church architecture developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before the Gothic romanticism of the mid-nineteenth century. Churches were designed to be places where the Word could be heard, essentially auditory Chapels. Even St. Paul’s in London, designed by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666, was meant to be the largest possible space that could be built and still allow for the human voice to be heard by all. But that emphasis on the auditory aspect of the Faith, on the importance of hearing since “faith cometh by hearing,” did not ignore the visual expressions of the Faith. Thus Churches would have the “Our Father”, “the Creed,” and “the Ten Commandments” posted on boards placed on either side of the holy table, the altar. The three together were known as “The Faith” or “The Belief” showing the interconnection between them as embodying the essentials of the Faith and the ways in which we participate in them through prayer, through the public confession of the Christian Faith, and through the ethical demands of the Commandments as well as presenting them in the sacramental aspects of the liturgy itself.

Augustine observes that having “heard of Whom we are to ask,” namely “Our Father” then it follows that we need to learn “what to ask for.” As we noted last time, the first three petitions are, as Augustine puts it, “for eternity.” “But the four following relate to this life,” the fourth petition providing a kind of bridge between the first three and second four.

There is an instructive contrast, it seems to me, between the fourth and the fifth petition. In the fourth we ask “Our Father” to give us our daily bread, for all the provisions for our lives. In the fifth we ask “Our Father” to forgive us. God gives us all that we need and more. But that we should then ask for forgiveness necessarily recognizes that we have misused the things that God has given us. We seek forgiveness in the recognition of our sins. The language of ‘debts’ or ‘trespasses’ refers to sins. We are reminded that we are sinners. The Scriptural text common to the Fathers and to the Medievals and beyond is from John’s Gospel. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 Jn. 1.8).  The fifth petition presupposes the awareness not only of our needs but of ourselves as sinners.

Aquinas follows a number of the Fathers, such as John Chrysostom, in calling attention to the power of the prayers of sinners. This is a strong reminder that prayer is not made on the basis of our own sense of worthiness. We beseech God in the prayer of thanksgiving after communion in the Prayer Book liturgy “to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits” which are negligible, “but pardoning our offenses,” which are considerable (BCP, p.86). As Aquinas points out, we pray for what “we do not merit. For God hears even sinners when they ask for pardon for their sins,” citing the publican who in humility prayed “God be merciful to me, a sinner” (Lk. 18.13). A phrase from one of Chrysostom’s homilies is highlighted in the Catena Aurea. “Humility,” Chrysostom says, “can lift up even a guilty man from the depths … [It] saved the Publican before the Pharisee, and led the Thief into paradise before the Apostles.” It is in humility that we know ourselves as sinners; it is in hope that we pray for mercy.

But the fifth petition is conditional and in ways that remind us of the central Christian insight about redemption or atonement. It has entirely to do with the God/man Jesus Christ, in the relation between the divine and the human natures united in his person. Our prayer for God’s forgiveness of our sins requires our willingness and desire to forgive one another. This is to transcend the divisions and enmities which are caused by sin. If we seek divine compassion for ourselves how can we not want the same for one another? There is in this petition a wonderful reciprocity, equality, and mutuality that belongs to our participation in the mysteries of God. We can only want for ourselves what we equally want for others.

Our prayer for forgiveness acknowledges that we are the enemies of God who seek reconciliation and forgiveness. That implies that who we are is something more and greater than our enmities and even our sin and evil. We seek forgiveness from the Father precisely out of the awareness that our humanity has been made uniquely in the image and likeness of God. In other words, what we seek is to be returned to the Father as children and sons, turned back to our Creator and his will for his creation. But that equally demands that we seek the overcoming of our enmities between one another. How is this possible or even thinkable? Because prayer is essentially ecclesial and corporate. We can only pray in the body of Christ for what Christ in his body has desired and accomplished for us. The first word of the Crucified Christ is the word of the Son to the Father. That word is forgiveness. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk. 23.34). That prayer, like the fifth petition, reveals the divine will to be reconciled with his sinful creation and makes our desire to be reconciled with one another a condition of forgiveness. We cannot want from God what we refuse to give to one another.

The fifth petition gives way to the sixth about asking “Our Father” not to lead us into temptation. This petition confounds and confuses many. How can God lead us into temptation? Isn’t that the devil’s task as, for instance, in the temptations of Christ and the three classic temptations of “the world, the flesh and the devil”? To be sure. This is why we need to avail ourselves of the wisdom of the past which makes a crucial distinction between temptation and being led into temptation.

Temptation is about being put to the test whereby what is Good is brought to light. Jesus puts the Canaanite woman to the test in order to draw out from her what belongs to the truth of human desire (BCP, p. 144). It is found in Christ. She is, we may say,  put to the test but that is not the same thing as being led into temptation. This is the crux of the matter. Faith as an active principle or power at work in us has constantly to be tested. This is the positive. The negative which this petition addresses is about our being tested beyond what we can withstand. The petition is an open acknowledgement that we depend upon God utterly and completely in terms of the things which tempt us which are partial or incomplete goods, on the one hand, but can define us in terms of our inordinate love for them , on the other hand. The whole idea of temptation goes to the relationship between God and man. Do we love things in the right way?

We are tempted to be sure, but like the temptations of Christ what is revealed are precisely the things which belong to the truth of our being. This petition is really our prayer about our willing what God wills for us, knowing full well the push and pull of human evil, the push and pull of the Devil. There are temptations, to be sure, but in this petition, we pray that we not succumb to them for such is the work of the devil but rather adhere to God and his will for us.

The seventh petition helps us to understand the deeper dynamic of sin and evil which belongs to the teaching of the Lord’s Prayer. It is grounded, we might say, in the redemptive love of God for us that is an essential feature of God in Himself. As such, the God who does not lead us or bring us into temptation yet proves us, tests us, and, more importantly, delivers us from all evil.

In a way, this is the whole point, namely, Christ’s overcoming of what belongs to human evil and wickedness. It happens in and through what belongs to the truth of our humanity as gathered back into God. In God all is good and there is no place for evil. It is nothing; God is everything, and God seeks to draw us back to himself.

Dante, in the Purgatorio of his Divine Comedy, brings out the ecclesial and corporate nature of prayer. In his magisterial work, those who are in Purgatory, itself an image of our life in peregrinatio, our life in the journey of the soul to God, are being prepared for heaven. How then can they who are already set on heaven, pray to be delivered from evil? Because they pray for others in the body of Christ. All prayer is ecclesial or corporate. “This last prayer is not made for us – we know,/Dear Lord, that it is needless – but for those/Who still remain behind us we pray so” (Purg. Canto XI, 22-24). Prayer arises “for their and our good speed.” Our lives are bound together in love and care.

There is at least one further consideration, namely, the ways in which the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer connect to the Beatitudes which are also part of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The “Our Father” belongs to human excellence and character. Once again, it turns on the concept of our willing what God wills for us in the context of human sin and evil.

Aquinas, drawing on Augustine, allows for the various ways in which the petitions of the “Our Father” can be linked to the Beatitudes. To hallow God’s name in the first petition relates to “the fear of God,” meaning to hold God in awe and wonder which is the necessary humility that makes the  “poor in spirit” blessed. In asking “thy kingdom come” matches up with the second Beatitude about the meek, the gentle ones who inherit the earth. Praying that the Father’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is the wisdom of those who mourn for in praying for the doing of God’s will they mourn no more; they are comforted. “If it is fortitude which makes the hungry blessed,” a kind of strength of character in pursuing righteousness, then this matches up with the petition to be given “our daily bread” which alone satisfies us and makes us blessed. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy” complements the reciprocity of seeking the “forgiveness of our trespasses, even as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” The petition that we not be led into temptation corresponds to not being divided in our hearts; in other words, the pure in heart seek God rather than being drawn to temporal things that cause us to be tempted. To be delivered from evil finds its complement in the wisdom which makes the peacemakers blessed. For that is to look beyond all evil and division to our good in God. That makes us the children of God.

Is there not an eighth Beatitude? “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This Beatitude, too, is about the triumph of the good over and against all and every evil but in and through all of the other petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. It is about our being gathered into the love of God even in the face of suffering and abuse. Such is the Passion of Christ. And such is our participation in Christ. It is about “letting Jesus pray in us” for “our whole life says Our Father.” In humility and in hope, we participate in the Father’s love.

We pray the “Our Father” in our liturgies both as the form of prayer that shapes all prayer but also with the addition of the doxology as a form of praise. It is worth noting that in the classical Books of Common Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer with the additional words “for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever” is used after we have received the grace of the sacrament of absolution or of communion.

Prayer and praise go together and belong to what Aquinas calls “the affectionate intimacy” of the “Our Father”. Praying the Lord’s Prayer “makes us intimate with him, inasmuch as our soul is raised up to God, converses with him in spiritual affection, and adores him in spirit and truth.”

May the “Our Father” carry us through Holy Week.

Fr. David Curry
April 2nd, 2020
Lenten Programme IV, 2020
Posted but unpreached owing to the closure of the Churches because of Covid-19.