Luke 11:1-13
A couple of months ago, I discussed one line in the received version of the Lord’s Prayer, the version from the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew. In particular, I took issue, still take issue, with the line that says “Give us, this day, our daily bread.”
It makes us passive, and while I am okay with humans receiving unearned grace from a loving Creator, I am not okay with sitting around and waiting for God to fix things we can fix ourselves, or for God to drop manna from the sky in some modern day version of the Exodus story. If we want bread, we need to plant some wheat, knead some dough, and chop some wood. And while we are at it, we should bake some extra bread for the neighbor who has been under the weather lately or lost their job or whatever. Though I’m not really sure how I’m going to feel if my neighbor knocks on the door at midnight asking to borrow three loaves…
There is another, more technical problem with that line in the prayer. The Koine word “epiousios,” translated as “daily” for centuries, is totally made-up, occurring nowhere else in Greek literature. The prefix and root word mean roughly “over substance,” which means nothing. Centuries of priests, translators, and scholars has simply fallen in line with the consensus translation, though some have suggested that instead of meaning “give us this day our bread for today,” it might mean “give us this day our bread for tomorrow,” pointing to the fact that day laborers during the time of Jesus, the working poor, used today’s earning to buy bread for their family tomorrow. If there were too many days when they could not work, the family went hungry.
I’m not sure it means either of those things, daily or for tomorrow. It may be that the author of the original text layer, the lost text we call “Q,” was trying to capture a word in Aramaic, the language of the streets in 1st century Palestine, and we simply don’t know that word.
This morning, we’re going to move past that one particular problem, a problem of translation and theology, and do a deep dive into the Lord’s Prayer itself, for our gospel reading lifts up Luke’s version. Like the physician’s version of the Beatitudes, Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is shorter, and in many ways more concrete. We’ll work from Matthew’s more familiar version.
First, let me offer a couple of general notes. The Lord’s Prayer is thoroughly Jewish. There is nothing in it that would not have fit into mainstream Jewish belief at the time of Jesus, or for that matter, in this time. Rabbis have noted that it is a prayer both Jews and Christians could pray.
The fact that later authors never “christianized” it leads me to believe in the historicity of the story.
Second, it is a liturgical prayer. His followers ask Jesus to teach them how to pray just as John the Baptizer taught his followers how to pray. It is meant to be a formula, probably for use during the appointed times for personal prayer, for like Islam and the Christian monastic tradition, there was a sense of prayer as a personal practice throughout the day. The Didache, a 1st Century text rediscovered in 1873, was a manual of sorts for early Christians, and called for prayer three times a day, in the early morning, midafternoon, and at sunset, matching the Jewish custom
There is a place in our spiritual lives for spontaneous prayer, the sort we see Jesus practice in the Garden of Gethsemane. And there is certainly a place for contemplative prayer or the analogous practices from other traditions like meditation or sitting Zen. The Lord’s Prayer simply provides the first step in our prayer practices, a foundation that is always both starting point and safety zone.
Though the prayer is intended for individual use, it is not an individualistic prayer. “Our” Father. Forgive “us.” Christianity is always and only collective. Depeche Mode can sing about a “personal” Jesus, but salvation is communal.
Referring to God as “Father” is not unheard of in the Jewish tradition of that age, though Jesus makes use in other teachings of the word “Abba,” which implies less formality and greater intimacy, God as a loving parent. Notably, Jesus generally uses both “Father” and “Abba” in an inclusive way. God is not necessarily uniquely the “father” of Jesus in much of the text, but is, as the prayer begins, “our” father, all of us children of God. Our adoption by God dovetails with adoptionist Christology, the officially rejected belief that Jesus was born fully human, and adopted by God at some later event, possibly baptism, just as the Caesars adopted sons.
“Hallowed be thy name” is a messy translation, in an ambiguous subjunctive mood for the grammar nerds out there. It is better translated as an imperative, “Let your name be sanctified.” There was still a sense that there was magic and power in knowing someone’s true name, something we see later in fairytales. Sanctified means to set aside as sacred. The line, then, might best be rendered in today’s English as “Let us treat your name as sacred.” This is still a cultural practice in Rabbinic Judaism, where Yahweh is rarely used, and even the word “God” is rendered in abbreviation.
The next portion, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” is debated by scholars and theologians, who try to read it through the lens of later Christian theology, through debates over whether Jesus was announcing that the just kingdom of God was already breaking into Creation, was always co-existent with our daily lives, was announcing that an apocalyptic and violent re-ordering and restoration of Creation was at hand, or was announcing an other-worldly faith focused on heaven. This last is particularly problematic, though there is no key that will give us the correct and final answer.
God’s will being done on earth seems like a good idea, though of course, the question is then which god, our God who is seen in the constant forgiveness and grace and healing of the prophets and Jesus, or the hateful homophobic misogynist white nationalist God that is all about damnation, the false god who tells the oppressed that their suffering will earn them a heavenly reward.
Hogwash!
Suffering now is suffering now. It earns you nothing. Don’t confuse sinful human systems with a divine plan.
God’s will being done means love of neighbor, means justice, kindness, and humility, means doing God’s will on earth, because that is exactly what it says. Like bread from the sky, we can wait for God’s will to be done, with about the same result. Or we can get out there and do God’s will.
Having addressed the mysterious bread, let us move on to the one passage where English language traditions divide. Are we forgiving and asking to have forgiven trespasses, debts, or sins?
The truth is, there is no single word that captures the Greek word used to express a Jewish concept in Matthew’s version. What each translation is trying to capture is the sense that a relationship is out of balance, that there has been a breach, that the wronged party is called to offer grace. Remember that Jesus explicitly states that God’s forgiveness is contingent upon our forgiveness. If we do not forgive, neither will God. That doesn’t mean allowing yourself to be a victim. It does mean that poisonous little grudge you’ve been clinging to has got to go.
It is worth noting that while Matthew uses the same word for what we forgive and what is forgiven, the gospel of Luke uses two different words. In Luke, we ask God to forgive our sins, as we forgive the debts of others. The former is moral, the latter financial. And in my reading, Luke, who is always on the side of those at the margins, is leaning into the economic justice we considered last week, for financial debt was and is often the result of injustice, and the Torah and the prophetic tradition both set explicit boundaries around debt and debt slavery. I can imagine no greater evil than medical bankruptcy.
We have no consensus on what Jesus meant by “lead us not into temptation.” Even traditional Christians struggle with the concept of God tempting people to sin, except for the whole “tree in the garden” myth. Even the Vatican has wrestled with this, especially our English translation, and you know how much they hate change. The late Pope Francis approving the English wording “Do not let us fall into temptation.” The German Conference of Catholic Bishops ultimately rejected changes to their translation. The versions in the Romance languages seem to come closest to the only interpretation that makes sense: “Grant us the strength to resist temptation.” If that is what we mean, maybe that is what we should say!
The next line, the seventh and final petition in the prayer, is closely connected with the idea of temptation, though not surprisingly, “deliver us from evil” is not quite right either. The Koine Greek in Matthew says “rescue us from the evil one,” and the phrase is not in Luke’s version at all. Some modern thinkers have suggested “save us from the time of trial,” though this depends on an apocalyptic god, one who has plans for violence and suffering not as part of the natural order, but as part of a divine plan, and as I have shared in the past, that is not a god I could worship. Since I don’t happen to believe in a personified evil named “Satan,” I am okay with being saved from a generic evil, though I’m not inclined to see death and disease as evil, for nature is not evil. That said, there are real evils in this world, the greed that takes food away from the hungry, the war crimes of the Israeli Defense Force, the race war that shutters HIV prevention programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. And while we might pray for guidance and courage, just as with all thing Christian, I am inclined to believe we are supposed to act, not so much “deliver us from evil,” but “be with us in our resistance to evil, the evil that is done to the oppressed, and the evil we sometimes do ourselves.” See above reference to forgiveness.
Finally, the spot were Protestants keep praying and the Catholics look around confused. “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory”… yadda, yadda. The Vatican points out that this portion, called a doxology, is not in the earliest manuscripts we have of Matthew’s gospel. But it is in the Didache, the 1st Century instruction manual I mentioned earlier. Probably the greatest argument in favor of using it is that it derives from Jewish practice, specifically the use of short portions of the Kaddish as separators between sections of the worship service. This is even more appropriate, as the major theme of the Kaddish is the magnification and sanctification of God’s name, the exact starting point of the Lord’s Prayer.
It is for you to figure out what the Lord’s Prayer means to you. In a few minutes, we’ll step out of our comfort zones and say it together in an alternative translation, hopefully allowing you to see it with new eyes, to hear it with new ears. In whatever language or translation, it represents one continuing thread in the story of Christianity that stretches back two thousand years, is shared by all major Christian movement, and should, in better times, provide a starting point for our life together, with our neighbors in Rabbinic Judaism, and across the doctrinal lines that divide members of our christian tradition.
Forgiving and forgiven, may we pray, as Paul advised, without ceasing.
Amen.