20 February 2024 Matthew 6:7-15
What are we doing when we pray?
It has been well said that when we pray we are turning as much of ourselves as we have toward as much of God as we understand. For that reason, prayer is perhaps the most important thing we do every day, and so it is of critical importance to do it well. That is why Jesus gave us very specific direction in what has come to be called The Lord’s Prayer.
A literal library can be filled with reflection just on these five verses. Libraries have been filled already. These observations are the merest beginning:
1. The Lord’s Prayer is very light on asking for things. Of its 57 words in Greek, almost half (24) deal with acknowledging the holiness of God, how the holiness of God and the divine will is more important than any other thing. The Lord’s Prayer begins by drawing attention away from us and toward God. When it does get around to what we want, it is very circumspect. It is our daily bread it asks for, nothing more – not our worries, our hopes for the future, our anxieties about our jobs, our children, our neighbors. “Give us this day our daily bread so that we have sufficient strength to keep our attention on you, O God.” Our attentiveness to God is the important thing, not our attentiveness to self.
2. The only part of the Lord’s Prayer that includes any commentary is the bit about forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses” – we are meant to ask daily for divine mercy, but there is a qualification: “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are barred from seeking more mercy than we are willing to give, a teaching that is repeated twice (6:14-15). Our petitions for divine mercy turn us away from self, and toward the other, especially the other who is hardest to pray for. God’s mercy extends to that one, too. Our prayers must include the ones who have treated us the worst, because God’s means to forgive them also.
3. The Lord’s Prayer, as prayed by Catholics, ends before the same prayer prayed by Protestants. Many Protestant churches add, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.” The earliest Greek manuscripts do not include this line, but all the later ones do, so it cannot be lightly dismissed. Historians have found that the earliest occurrence of the concluding doxology was in a teaching document called the Didache, which was written around A.D. 80-90. It appears to be a way of including the Lord’s Prayer in a worship service, connecting it to other elements in the service, which is why Catholics include the doxological ending in the Mass, but not in daily prayer. What that means, then, is that by the end of the first century, barely 50 years after the Resurrection of Jesus, the earliest Church was already adopting authoritative liturgical forms, and had at hand authoritative texts to use in the context of worship. The Didache was old, but not as old as other texts that the Church had, hence the doxology was not included at first. This would seem to confirm that when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are praying some of the oldest words in Christianity. It is the Church’s belief that we are praying the words of Jesus Himself.
God’s name. God’s will. God’s mercy. God’s words.
When we pray we are turning as much of ourselves as we have toward as much of God as we understand. That was the pattern of Jesus’ life. Even from the cross, Jesus prayed for God’s mercy to cover the people who were killing Him, and His last words entrusted His life to God: “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit” (Luke 23:46).
In the end, only God matters.
Even while we are bearing our crosses, less us. More God.
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