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.
Saint Luke’s version of the Our Father is shorter than the one given to us by Saint Matthew and shorter still than the one we pray every day.
And the opening line to the prayer tells us something very profound about the very idea of praying. When asked to teach us how to pray, Jesus shows us how he prays, and begins by saying “Father.” Just like he did when he overheard him praying in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he died for us. “Father, take this chalice away from me.” Or as he would upon the cross: “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing,” or when he breathed his last: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
When we, then pray the “Our Father” we do so with the words and the heart of Jesus. His father is our Father, who art in heaven, for he is our first born of many brothers, our Savior and Lord.
And if you think about, the words of this prayer are the first words from the Bible which we learn to speak as a little child and will most likely be the last ones we will ever pray with our final breath, the same words which during every day in between mould us in the image and likeness of Christ Jesus. Indeed, these words mark all the moments in which we grow into becoming the children of God, by “increasingly…growing more and more deeply in communion with Jesus” (Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth [English translation], Doubleday, 2007, p. 138)
This is why the first two petitions of the prayer ask only that God’s will be done. The first is a repetition of the Schema Israel, which Jesus would have prayed every morning and evening:
Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.
Listen to it again:
Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever…
Now compare it to the Lord’s Prayer:
Father, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.
It does not take a scriptural exegete to notice the similarities.
But then the prayer asks for two more things, each of which seem to be born out of our self interest:
We ask God to "Give us each day our daily bread” because we are hungry and we ask him to “forgive us our sins" because we want to go to heaven. But look a bit more closely at that last petition, for we don’t just ask God to forgive us, but to forgive us in the same way and to the same extent as we forgive others!
In other words, we ask for these things not just so we can have full bellies and get away with murder, but so that we can become more like Jesus, whose mercy, even as his blood dripped down the wood of the cross, was a complete self-emptying and an expression of perfect mercy.
That’s why the Church gives us the story from Genesis today in which Abraham begs God to forgive the a righteous men from the destruction of the city of Sodom. (cf. Genesis 18: 21-32.) Would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it? No, the Lord replies.
How about forty-five people? Would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the forty-five innocent people within it? No, the Lord replies.
How about forty people? Would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the forty innocent people within it? No, the Lord replies.
And then he makes a big jump: How about twenty people? Would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the twenty innocent people within it? No, the Lord replies.
And what about ten? Would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the ten innocent people within it? No, the Lord replies, even if there be ten innocent people I will spare the whole city.
And Abraham’s semitic number game is not just a good story for our amusement. It is an illustration of the exhorbitant mercy of God, which we are called to imitate.
Just as the father waits for the prodigal to come home so he can forgive him, just as the shepherd searches for the one lost sheep, just as the woman scours the house for the lost coin, so we are to seek, forgive and embrace all who have hurt us.
And the more we seek mercy for others, the more we begin to sound like Jesus, who with his voice and his body gave everything for the salvation of the world. Every time we say the Our Father our voices mingle with the voice of the Church, for those who pray are never alone.
And, finally, we come to the last petition of the Our Father. We usually pray it with the somewhat confusing translation “lead us not into temptation.” Would God really lead us into temptation? As the rather recent discussions arounf the Italian and French translations of this prayer have made clear, God would never lead us in temptation, but that is not the point of what Jesus’ is teaching us to pray. Luke’s somewhat more blunt version of the petition is a little more to the point: “do not subject us to the final test.”
Here the Lord is speaking of the Last Judgement, when he returns in glory at the end of time. It is a petition for strength to face God’s final Judgement, the time of trial. It is asking, like the whole prayer, that God’s Kingdom might come and that we might have so conformed ourselves to Christ that we might have a home in it.
For, as our patron reminds us, “God is faithful and will not let you be tried beyond your strength” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
