Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test.” (Luke 11.1-4)
What has become known as “the Lord’s Prayer” is found in two gospels, Matthew and Luke, and in an early Church document known as “the Didache,” (from the Greek word for teaching) written in the second century. The latter follows Matthew’s version, with the exception of an added doxology at the end, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever,” a tradition that is carried to the present day in many Protestant churches.
The two gospel versions have differences, as we might expect, beginning with their location in the respective texts. Matthew has the Lord’s Prayer as part of the Sermon on the Mount, often thought of as a compilation of the main teachings of Jesus. Luke inserts the dominical prayer while Rabbi Jesus was “praying in a certain place” during his journey to Jerusalem.
Matthew’s version is longer, while Luke’s text is tighter, the same as we will see in their respective versions of the Beatitudes. Generally, Matthew’s text is considered to have seven components, compared to Luke’s five parts. Matthew also uses more wording, his compatriot preferring to keep things simple.
The texts begin in the same way, although Matthew uses the phrase “Our Father,” a slight difference from Luke’s use simply of “Father,” although some early manuscripts do not show the distinction, the use of “our” connoting the prayer as one said by the community or inferring the communal aspect of our position as children of the same God.
Perhaps most importantly is Rabbi Jesus’ use of the name Father at the start of the prayer, somewhat of a departure from the Jewish practice of holding the proper name of God in such high esteem that it was not spoken aloud, seeing God as the complete other from ourselves, the One who is holy, unlike us, unworthy to even let his name cross our lips.
Here, Rabbi Jesus uses a familiar and familial term for God, one that he has already used earlier in the Lucan gospel when he prays aloud, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for what you have hidden from the learned and clever you have revealed to the little children.” Clearly, the Galilean teacher departs from the customary awe and wonder in the face of God’s grandeur and prefers a term that indicates closeness and familiarity.
Actually, that point cannot be overstated because, in the end, the way we pray depends on how we see God, the One whom we address in our prayer. So, when the disciples ask Rabbi Jesus to teach them how to pray, the most important thing he teaches them is how to address God, in this way determining how they are to see God, whom he sees as a father.
In using the term “father,” Rabbi Jesus instructs his followers to view the Most High God, not as far away and aloof, but as within reach and caring. This corresponds to what Father Gregory Boyle calls “the fundamental architecture of Jesus’s heart,” a heart anchored in love, a way of living that is now made available to us as well. As he writes, “We come to see that to follow Jesus is to change our understanding of God.”
And so, continuing that line of thought, we can say it is our understanding of God that predicates our way of praying to God, our mode of praying corresponding to our concept of God. Rabbi Jesus, in using the phrase “Father,” wants to shape our concept of God, finding in God a loving and involved deity, not an unaffected and distant power, far removed, unbothered by us.
When Rabbi Jesus envisions for his followers a God who is father, he proposes a God who wants a relationship with us, as a father holds dear his children. He posits a God who welcomes our prayers, as a father rejoices in the sound of his children’s voices. He places before us a God who is moved by our pleas, as a father is touched by the cries of his child in distress.
Many years ago, the British writer, J.B. Phillips, an Anglican clergyman, offered a similar thought in his popular book, Your God is Too Small, in which he argued that conventional understandings of God were inadequate to many people’s experience, and urged his readers to find a concept of God expansive enough to weather the continual challenges posed by human existence.
His point was a good one, apparent by the popularity of the book, but it was a point also made by Rabbi Jesus who broke the mold and offered to his followers a way to envision God that would bring to them a sense of connection, concern, and comfort in the mayhem, misery and misfortune that seem so much a part of each person’s life on earth.
Hearing again Luke tell us how Rabbi Jesus taught his followers to pray, we have the opportunity to revisit and to revise our own understanding of God, particularly if we have allowed our concept to show a marked departure from that of the Galilean Teacher who, by word and by deed, showed the closeness and the compassion of the God whom he chose to call his father.
Stepping back for a moment, we can ask ourselves if we pray to God as if he is a father who knows the needs of his children, or have we substituted a different image of God, one who, as Rabbi Jesus says, “would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg.” When we pray, which is it that we pray to?
The image of God that we carry with us greatly decides our mode of praying. If we see God as a policeman, one who reprimands us for our wrongdoing and punishes us for our offenses, then we will pray as a supplicant, bent low and breathing heavily from fear. If we see God as a street vendor whose goods we want, then we will cajole and bribe and badger, our prayer a bargaining tool to an end.
The possibilities are many. When we envision God as a feudal lord of a manor, then we believe the church sign that reads, “God answers knee-mails.” And when we approach God as a high-positioned CEO who has the power to approve or disapprove our project, then we present our best sales pitch, emphasizing how giving us the funds would be a good and wise investment.
Others, like Cool Hand Luke in the movie by the same name, may see God as “a tough one,” a warden unresponsive to our needs, unwilling to bend the rules, always going by the book, turning to him when we’ve run out of options, but expecting little or nothing from him, since, after all, we’re not one of the good guys.
It is easy to bring one or several of these images of God with us to our prayer, trained as we are by others to see God in one way or another, or inclined by personal experience to box in God in a particular way. But, for the follower of Rabbi Jesus, there is but one way to see God–and that is as our father. It is the way Jesus saw him and it is the way he taught his disciples to see him, telling them, “When you pray, say, “Father.”
Father Boyle, beginning his book The Whole Language, tells us, “Nothing is more consequential in our lives than the notion of God we hold. Not God. The notion of God. This is what steers the ship. Our idea of God will always call the shots.” He writes, “Meister Eckhart, the mystic and theologian who died in 1328, said, ‘It is a lie, any talk of God that doesn’t comfort you.’ This was his notion.”
Then he explains, “Granted, our conceptions may change and evolve, but when we “hold” them, they direct our course. What matters, in the end, is what kind of God we believe in.” His book then becomes a proposal to see God as Rabbi Jesus saw God, perfectly summed up in Father Boyle’s statement, “God is monosyllabic. Love.” As he says, “ I’m afraid that’s it. It is, as the Hindu poet Meera writes, a ‘love so strong a force it broke the cage.’”
Imagine, for a moment, if we could actually hold onto that concept of God, not occasionally, but continually, finally and fully understanding what it means when Scripture says “God is love.” Our prayer would be a very different experience, one without bartering this for that, one without servile begging for a loaf of bread, one without badgering and bargaining like a used car salesman.
It would be, instead, much more like Rabbi Jesus offered to his followers, a simple prayer that begins with the knowledge that God is our father, and as a father to us, he loves us and he wants our well-being. We go to him as a child with a bruised knee, crawling into his lap, and as a tear or two drops from our face, he holds us in his arms, and says, “I’m so sorry that happened. Let me make it better.” And he wipes clean the dirt and sings softly a tune as we fall asleep in his arms, at peace, at rest.
One of my favorite stories–its source long forgotten–was about an old man who each day stopped by a church and sat in the back pew for a while. He sat quietly and seemed content to sit. After a while, someone asked what he said when he prayed there in the pew. The old man smiled and replied, “Oh, I say nothing. I just like to look at God and he likes to look at me.”
That old man, wise and weathered by the years, understood well the words of philosopher and writer Mirabai Starr, who proposed, “Once you know the God of Love, you fire all the other gods.” Or, as Father Boyle offered, “In the face of this tender glance, we find a God quite speechless–too in love with us to chitchat.”
So, if this is so–and we have Rabbi Jesus’ word it is so–then if we go to God with only one word on our lips–Father–it is more than enough. Nothing else really needs to be said.
–Jeremy Myers
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