PRAYER:
THE OUR FATHER
The theme I’d like to reflect on once more is prayer—or more
specifically on “The Our Father.”
Today’s gospel - Matthew 6: 7-15 - calls us to reflect on prayer—to reflect on
Jesus’ simple words and simple teachings on prayer as found in The Our Father.
And I would like to use for all my comments a sermon by Gerd
Theissen entitled “The Our Father” in The
Open Door, Variations on Biblical Themes. It’s on pages 62 - 66.
LUKE
Today’s gospel gives Luke’s Our Father. Today’s gospel gives some good teachings on prayer—both in
simple teachings of Jesus about prayer
as an introduction to the Our Father and the Our Father itself.
Luke has the disciples coming up to Jesus and asking him on
how to pray.
Suggestion: bring this section of Luke—Chapter 11 -- to
prayer over and over again. I have been using it for prayer for a good 36 years now.
Go up to Jesus and ask him to teach you how to pray.
I like Luke’s introduction to the Our Father and these
simple teachings of Jesus on prayer. Luke has the disciples coming up to Jesus
and asking him on how to pray.
GERD THEISSEN
Gerd Theissen in a sermon entitled “The Our Father” in The Open Door, Variations on Biblical Themes begins his homily with the theory that the
motivation of the disciples was not how to pray, but to distinguish themselves
from others.
Here in Luke it was to have a prayer that will distinguish
them from the Baptist’s followers. In Matthew’s version it was to distinguish
themselves from the Gentiles. In the Didache,
it’s was to distinguish themselves from the Jews with the help of the Our Father.
Theissen then states that the joke is on everyone who tries
that because “the Our Father is the least suited prayer conceivable for
distinguishing us from others. Any Jew and any Moslem can recite it, and
probably it would not be difficult for many Hindus to say it with us. It is a
quite basic prayer which concentrates on the important things between cradle
and grave.” (p. 62)
A CHRISTIAN
PRAYER—A TREASURE
Theissen goes on to say that it has become a Christian
prayer—a special treasure entrusted to Christians.
It is a treasure because it contains the essentials.
It provides a treasure we can bring to every dialogue with
all religions—to Jews, Gentiles, believers and atheists.
But we better first have introduced this prayer into our own
life first—giving us convictions we would live and die with and for.
FATHER
Theissen says that the word “Father” is significant. When he
was born, his dad was away at war and was a prisoner of war.
He says that he only knew his dad by stories. He didn’t get
to know him till he was 6 and a half.
His analogy is to bring out various points. In his book it’s
one long paragraph. Let me present his actual words but with a paragraph space after
each sentence.
“God may be like that to some people.
God is absent.
Many people know God
only from stories.
And they hope that God
will enter their lives later so that they can feel that something in these
stories will ring true.
It rings true that we
do not owe our existence to chance, but to a power who wanted us with love, who
gave us the task of living, who affirms us and supports us in good times and in
bad.
Some people may say
that with our parents, father and mother, we remain within our sphere of
existence.
But with that father
we go beyond it.
What can we already
know of him?
How can we trust him?
Let me recall
something very simple here.
Even in the case of
earthly parents, one thing radically escapes our experience: the story of the
love between our mother and our father, that story in which our own existence
has its common ground.
We can only hear of
it.
Indeed we even have to
take the identity of our father and mother on trust—on the basis of stories of
others.
But it is reasonable
here to believe and trust that it was love—or at least the longing for
love—which helped us to exist.
If we trust that, then
in later life with our parents we shall find much to confirm and justify this
faith, and we shall also not allow ourselves to be led astray by the inevitable
conflicts with parents, or even by long alienation.
But if we are full of
mistrust, if we suspect that we owe our existence not to a love story but to
something else—calculation or chance or thoughtlessness—then we shall also find much to justify our mistrust.
That is how I imagine
our dealings with God: we relate to him as we do our father and mother.
If we trust the
accounts which tell us that we owe our existence anew each day to a love story,
then every day we shall have new experiences in which the trust is confirmed.
And it is quite
reasonable to have this trust—even through deep crises and catastrophes.”
(pp. 63 - 64)
HALLOWED BE YOUR
NAME
God is present everywhere. But where is God praised? Where
is God recognized?
Well here we are recognizing him, praising him, giving him a
name, not allowing him to remain anonymous.
Theissen uses the analogy of self—we often spend our days
unaware of ourselves—wrapped up in our routines. Then a moment happens that
wakes us up—that tears us apart from the regular routine. I am irreplaceable. I
am one person between birth and death—who has to make decisions which no one
else can make—and encounter joys and sorrows that on one else can have.
So too God in our lives. God is always present in our life.
“But only in a few
situations does he emerge from his anonymity, does he disclose himself, so that
we ourselves become the answer to his call, with body and nerves, ideas and
actions—and at the same time terrified that we owed him this response.
Where God emerges from
his anonymous, nameless present, we experience one thing above all: that we
must change profoundly, that we must `hallow’ ourselves (as one can say in
biblical language) in order to correspond to him and to hallow his name, so
that he is not driven out, not forgotten, not despised.” (p. 64)
THY KINGDOM COME
Theissen goes on to comment on the phrase, “Thy Kingdom
Come”.
“That’s not all.
We go on to pray,
`Your kingdom come.’
That means that to
correspond to God not only must we change ourselves, but the whole world must
become different, so that it emerges from its anonymous present and can be
lived in.
That was one of the
great discoveries in the Bible and in Judaism: the world which corresponds to
God, in which his name is acknowledged and hallowed, cannot be the same as the
world which now exists, which seems to be so final—and which is nevertheless
only a transition in the great process of reality.
This new world, which
will fully reflect God’s presence, is not something incomprehensibly remote.
It already begins in
hiddenness here and now. It already began in Jesus.
And also in Francis,
in Gandhi and in Albert Schweitzer.
In all these figures
something is present of that kingdom of God in which God’s will is done not
only in heaven but on earth.” (pp. 64 - 65)
GIVE US OUR DAILY
BREAD
Theissen goes on to comment on the phrase, “Give us this day
our daily bread.”
He states that we live in a
“problematic world
which is different from that world in which God’s will prevails.
In this world we must
pray, `Give us each day our daily bread’—or, as we should probably understand
the phrase, `Give us each day tomorrow’s bread’, so that we are freed from
tormenting cares about life.
For precisely that is
the great temptation to which we are exposed in the world.
Bread is scarce.
Material goods are
limited.
We are born into a
hard struggle over the distribution of resources, a struggle at the heart of
which is deep distrust that there may not be enough for everyone.
If we trusted that
there was enough for everyone, it would not be so hard for us to give something
away.
But as it is we fight
over the scarce goods of life—between classes, between nations, between
generations, between developed and underdeveloped countries.
No one escapes this
oppressive context: we all live at the
expense of other people.
Indeed, we now
discover to our horror that as a human species we live at the expense of all
other kinds of living beings.
We have spread over
this earth so successfully that countless species are already extinct and many
more die out each year.
That is what I call
the inexorable struggle over distribution. In it we have a right to life, to
the bread we need to live.
We also have right to
tomorrow’s bread.
But what we are doing
is more: we are consuming the bread for the day after tomorrow.
We are plundering the
planet so that those who live after us will not find much left, and we are
letting the hungry beside us go away empty.” (P. 65)
FORGIVE US OUR
TRESPASSES
Theissen goes on to comment on the phrase, “Forgive us our
sins.”
“So it is necessary to
pray, `Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.’
We are guilty in this
struggle over the distribution of food and opportunities, for even if we are
personally innocent, we are caught up and entangled in a system of unfair
distribution.
We darkly suspect that
there is a close connection between the catastrophes of famine on this earth
and our luxury.
We also suspect that
our ordered (and perhaps indeed successful) life and study are connected with
the failed and ruined lives in our society: where there are winners there are
also losers.
The rules of the game
are often unfair.
But those who take part in the game confirm
them—even involuntarily.” (p. 65)
LEAD US NOT INTO
TEMPTATION
Theissen goes on to comment on the phrase, “Lead us not into
temptation.”
“Precisely this
insight is a great temptation to cynicism.
And we pray: `Lead us
into into temptation.’
The tempter approached
Jesus in the wilderness loaded with biblical quotations.
It’s the same with us:
incontrovertible truths become our temptation.
It is an incontrovertible
truth that life is a struggle over distribution, that we have great difficulty
in escaping this struggle, that all civilization limits it only up to a point,
that it would be too much for the conscience if we felt personally responsible
for all that goes on.
And then along comes
the tempter and whispers all these truths in our ear—and suggests that cynicism
which says, `If you personally share in this struggle over distribution (your
share of food, education, possessions and status) -- why bother about the fate
of others?, and he goes on to whisper, `It’s really time that you rid yourself
of your post-pubertal dreams and faced reality.’
We are mostly tempted
by truths, sometimes even by truths supported by science.
But the temptation is
that we forget the most basic things.
“We forget that we owe
life to the power of God. Before God and through God we all have the same right
to life.
“We forget that we are
constantly called to repentance, so that his name is hallowed through our
actions and thoughts.
“We forget that we are
caught up in that process which is aimed at changed of the world, so that
everyone can experience God’s goodness.” (p. 66)
CONCLUSION
Theissen ends his homily this way:
“`And lead us not into
temptation.’
Today, that means,
`Lead us not into temptation to deny the reality of God.’
For in that case
everything could basically remain as it was.
In that case we could
persist in our laziness, and the world in its remoteness from God. Amen.”
(p. 66)
So those are some ideas about the Our Father and
Prayer—almost all stolen for Theissen.
