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WHAT IS THE LORD’S PRAYER?

Philip Zoutendam

Jesus Christ in prayer. Traditional iconography. Public domain.

How should we pray? The question is as old as Christianity itself, and anyone who is not quite sure of the answer is in very good company. Jesus’s own disciples had to ask — actually, they had to demand: “Lord, teach us to pray,” they tell Jesus, having watched him in prayer himself (Luke 11:1). And Jesus’s response is to give them a remarkably simple yet astoundingly rich prayer of just a few lines that has come to be known to Christians around the world, and across time, as The Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come;
thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.
Amen.

This form is actually a translation of the slightly longer version attributed to Jesus in Matthew (6:9-13), and it is the form most familiar to Anglicans and many other English-speaking Christians because of its place in the Book of Common Prayer. With the possible exception of Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd…”), it is without doubt the most memorized passage of scripture in Christian history, and it is also surely the most reliable guide for each new generation of Christians pondering for themselves what, how, and why we can pray to God.

It is easy to look at the Lord’s Prayer and think, “That’s it? Surely there’s more to prayer than that!” But the earliest Christians did indeed claim that this single prayer was the one thing needed for one’s personal prayer life. The oldest Christian text after the Bible itself is The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, often known as the Didache (“Teaching” in Greek). As the title indicates, this document — which we might call the original Christianity 101 handbook — purportedly contains the instruction of Jesus’s first followers, the very disciples taught by Jesus to pray the Lord’s Prayer. And when it is their turn to teach, they simply echo what they received: 

Do not pray like the hypocrites, but rather as the Lord commanded in His Gospel, like this:
‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name … [etc.] (1)

Pray this three times each day.

That’s it. Pray the Lord’s Prayer, they say. Pray it three times a day. That’s all you need.

The next few generations of pastors and teachers say much the same thing — though thankfully, they have more to say about why the Lord’s Prayer might be all you need. One common theme in the early centuries of the Church was comprehensiveness of the Lord’s Prayer. That is, the Prayer somehow summed up the good news that Christians received from God and shared with the world: it was, as one third-century author put it, “a summary of the whole Gospel.” (2) Again, it might be hard at first to see something so big in such a small prayer, but the purpose of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and the mission that the Church takes on after his ascension, is just this: to reconcile those who are estranged from God — to bring us into the family of God. And so this prayer, even from its very first words, “Our Father,” does indeed proclaim that good news. This prayer, given as gift from Jesus to his disciples, invites all who follow him into something we would have otherwise thought impossible, improper, unbelievable: it invites us to share the very relationship that Jesus himself has with God, the intimate bond between parent and child.

That relationship between Jesus and God is hard to articulate, because Christians affirm that Jesus is God, an equal Person of the Trinity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s Prayer certainly doesn’t explain the mysteries of this Three-in-One divinity to us. What it does do is even more powerful: it places us inside this dynamic relationship between the Persons of the Trinity. Most obviously, as noted above, the Lord’s Prayer puts the disciple in Jesus’s shoes looking up to God the Father: “we stand where Jesus stands and we can say what Jesus says,” as Rowan Williams puts it. (3) But the Prayer implies an intimate connection with Holy Spirit as well. The Spirit is not mentioned here, but later in the New Testament she is named as the One who stirs up and voices our prayers — in the very language that Jesus uses here. “Because you are children,” Paul says in Galatians, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:6). And “when we cry, “Abba! Father!” Paul adds in Romans, “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15-16). So, as much as we ourselves are in God when we pray this prayer, addressing God just like Jesus did, as “our Father” too, we also find God inside us, placing this prayer in our hearts, bringing this prayer to our lips. We are with and in the whole Trinity, embraced and immersed in God. This is expressed in exquisite simplicity by Mike Higton (in a sermon constructed only from one-syllable words). The Spirit, he says

… is the breath of God in our minds,
the fire of God in our hearts,
the stream of God’s life in our veins.

So, when we pray
we do not pray on our own.
Yes, we have God the Son, God by our side
who joins our words to his,

But, more than that, we have God in us,
God in our hearts, God in our guts. (4)

This radically good news of new life with and in God is one reason for those ancient references to the Lord’s Prayer as a “summary.” But there is a second reason too, which will lead us into the petitions of the Prayer itself. The early Christians were convinced that the Prayer not only contained the whole sweep of true theology, but also that it expressed the whole spectrum of true prayer. Christians might sometimes use other words in their address to God, but the proper sentiments and requests — and even the proper order — of a fitting Christian prayer are all already found in the one prayer that Christ taught us. “[W]e say nothing else but what is contained in that prayer of the Lord if we pray correctly and properly,” wrote St. Augustine in the fifth century. “If you run through all the words of holy petitions, you will not find, in my opinion, anything that this prayer of our Lord does not contain and include.” (5)

And so, in the Lord’s Prayer, we have a paradigm, a template, for all prayers of our own. We might branch out in our language — though the early writers like to insist that we never need to — but whatever we say should be rooted here. In the memorable image of Tertullian, a second century theologian from Carthage, the Lord’s Prayer is the “foundation” on which we “construct a secondary top-story of pleas.” (6) We might also (sticking with the domicilic metaphor), think of the Lord’s Prayer as the whole house, and its various movements as different rooms. Our own particular petitions inhabit these rooms, whose shape and boundaries in turn determine what fits and what does not. When we quite naturally pray for our own necessities, for instance — food, a home, a decent job with sufficient wages — we are asking God to “give us our daily bread.” But the limits of our Lord’s language here, the simplicity (“daily bread”) and finitude (“daily bread”) that he teaches, mean that asking for an excess of any of these things — a pantry stocked with caviar, a seven-figure (or maybe even a six-figure) salary — clearly doesn’t fit.

No doubt there are countless other examples already springing to mind, and we’ll consider several more below as we reflect on each specific petition in the Prayer, but it is worth pausing here to note what the traditional reverence for the Lord’s Prayer reveals about prayer itself. Prayer certainly involves asking God for certain things, both material and spiritual. In prayer we express our need for God to do certain things, as promised, for our good. But our prayers — at least when guided by Jesus — shape our own activity too. When we pray as the Lord taught us, we are already experiencing the work of God. God is already active in us, forming and reforming our desires, our hopes, our plans.

* * *

And now, to the prayer itself:

“Our Father, who art in heaven”

Much has already been said about this first line, and there is much more to say that we will not have room for here. That God is our Father — yes, even our Father — is the root and cause and power of all our prayer. Our prayer begins in pure grace, in the unmerited gift of parental love and personal attention from the one who is Lord of the universe.

Of course, calling God “Father” may hardly seem like a gift to those whose experience of human fathers has been anything but gracious. Perhaps the best we can do here is allow Jesus himself to interpret this line for us. The heavenly Father Jesus describes is one who is resolutely generous (Matthew 7:7-11) and unfailingly compassionate (Luke 15:11-32).

“Hallowed be thy name.”

Hallowed things are holy, and thus “hallowing” God’s name means recognizing that everything about God, from God’s name on down, is holy and deserves our reverence. It may seem strange to pray for something that is already a reality — God’s name and self are holy, whether we ask for them to be hallowed or not — but this strangeness serves to reveal once more the reflexive action of prayer. In praying this petition, we are essentially asking that what is eternally, transcendently true becomes true in us. The Lord’s Prayer calls us to hallow God’s name.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done …”

Again we find ourselves praying for things that hardly seem contingent on our asking. Isn’t God’s kingdom already coming? Isn’t God’s will always done? Yes and yes. These things are done in us and by us. Then why are we even asking?

For one thing, we all find ourselves in situations that seem out of control — outside our control, and sometimes even outside God’s control. These petitions, then, become a source of comfort and a reminder to trust. When a friend is in the hospital, when the wrong person has been elected, when things are going wrong instead of right, still we remember, imagine, and invite the action of a God who is perfectly just and perfectly merciful.

But even as we’re praying for God’s will and rule “out there,” in the world, we also find that we’re praying for them to come about in us, and by us. We are inviting Jesus inside, inviting him to take up residence on the throne of our hearts, allowing him to determine what we love, what we want, and therefore what we do. Here is a king whose kingdom brings good news to the poor, release for the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed (Luke 4:18). Letting this “kingdom come” in our own lives will lead to join Christ (and the angels in heaven) in doing God’s will here on earth.

“Give us this day our daily bread”

Only now, halfway through the Prayer, do we ask for something explicitly for ourselves! And, as we already noted, what we ask for is remarkably modest: not a feast, or even a full kitchen (though sometimes these are indeed the good gifts that God provides for us), but just enough to get by for the day. Both the parameters and the placement of this request (after the petitions about God’s name, kingdom, and will) anticipate what Jesus says later in Matthew 6, teaching his disciples not to worry about necessities like food and clothing: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).

“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

All the things we just prayed for? All the commitments we just made? We will inevitably, repeatedly turn away from them. We will seek our own will. We will reach for more than what we need for just today, and we will take it at the cost of someone else’s daily bread. We will “trespass” beyond the bounds of God’s kingdom.

Part of the beauty of the Lord’s Prayer is that it recognizes these failures that impair and undermine our prayer and includes within itself the remedy. It reveals that the God whom we address as Father already knows our failures, but is willing to hear us anyway, because this God is always willing to forgive us. What’s more, it turns these failures into one more way to become like our Father, in forgiving those who trespass against us.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Most interpreters of the Prayer suggest that the language here does not imply that, unless we ask otherwise, God might well “lead us into temptation.” God permits trials, sometimes even severe ones (as in the Old Testament story of Job), but does not actively cause them. What we have here, then, is an acknowledgement of our own frailty and vulnerability, to which we respond with a plea for God’s help. We rely on God to protect us when we are inevitably tempted, not to let us fall all the way “into testing, becoming entangled in its nets,” as Origen of Alexandria, one of the earliest theologians of prayer and contemplation, wrote in the third century. (7) We recall God’s promise not to let us be tested beyond our strength, and to always make way for escape (1 Corinthians 10:13). And even here, we are still praying with Jesus, who was himself tested and tempted, and was himself always delivered by his Father, even from the grave.

* * *

Conclusion

Knowing the Lord’s Prayer does not, of course, fully answer the age-old question that we started with — that is, knowing what to pray doesn’t automatically mean we know how or when to pray it. 

But the good news here is that there is hardly a wrong way to pray the Lord’s Prayer, and there is certainly no wrong time to pray it. The key thing is … just praying it. The ancient rule of saying the Lord’s Prayer three times a day, morning, noon, and evening, is still a good one — but there will be other moments too when you find that you want, or need, to let Jesus’s prayer pray in you. You might pray it slowly, meditating on each line. You might pray it quickly, in a pinch or in a hurry, when other words can’t be summoned. You might pray it for yourself. You might pray it with others in mind. Whenever and wherever and whyever, keep praying it. You will find that the Lord who taught these words, which in turn continue to teach us who now pray them, is faithful to hear and respond. And, best of all, you will find, as Origen says, that your whole life gradually becomes a prayer that says, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” (8)

For Further Study:

Ancient Christian texts:

Modern Resources:

  1. Roberts-Donalson English Translation: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/didache-roberts.html

  2. Tertullian, On Prayer 1, in Tertullian, Origen & Cyprian on the Lord’s Prayer, translated by Alistair Stewart-Sykes (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 42. The famous bishop and martyr Cyprian, writing soon after Tertullian, echoed this claim, calling the Prayer a “summary of heavenly doctrine” (See Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer 9, p. 70 in the same volume.)

  3. Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Bible, Baptism, Eucharist, Prayer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 62.

  4. Mike Higton, Brancepath Sermon: Trinity Sunday, 27 May 2018, p. 11: http://www.stbrandon.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-05-Trinity-Sermon.pdf.

  5. Augustine, Letter 130, Letters 100-155 in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, translated by Roland Teske, edited by Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2003), 22.

  6. Tertullian, On Prayer 10, p. 49.

  7. Origen of Alexandria, On Prayer 29.9, in Tertullian, Origen & Cyprian on the Lord’s Prayer, translated by Alistair Stewart-Sykes (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 196, italics mine.

  8. Origen, On Prayer 22.5, p. 162.

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