The Lord and His Prayer

N. T. Wright

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780802871770
• eBook ISBN: 9781467411561
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Prayer

In this book of pastoral reflections N.T. Wright explores how the Lord's Prayer sums up what Jesus was all about in his first-century setting. Wright locates the Lord's Prayer, clause by clause, within the historical life and work of Jesus and allows the prayer's devotional application to grow out of its historical context. The result is a fresh understanding of Christian spirituality and the life of prayer. This deeply devotional book will refresh and stimulate the heart and mind of any reader.

Chapter 1

Our Father in Heaven

If we are serious at all about our Christian commitment, we will want to learn and grow in prayer. When we kneel down, or settle in the quiet chair that serves as our personal place of prayer; when we’re walking along, or riding in the train to work; whenever we pray, this is what we are coming to do: to pursue the mystery, to listen and respond to the voice we thought we just heard, to follow the light which beckons round the next corner, to lay hold of the love of God which has somehow already laid hold of us.

We want all this, at our best, not because we selfishly want, as it were, to maximize our own spiritual potential. To think that way would be to import into our Christianity a very modern, materialist, self-­centred ideology. No. We want it because we know, in our heart of hearts, that we want the living God. We want to know him; we want to love him. We want to be able truly to call him Father.

In a sense, therefore, the first words of the Lord’s Prayer, which we examine in this first chapter, represent the goal towards which we are working, rather than the starting point from which we set out. It is no doubt true, here as elsewhere, that the end of all our striving will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. But that means, I think, that, although we are given the Lord’s Prayer in our baptism to be our own prayer, a special personal gift for each one of us, this prayer is not just the spiritual version of the baby’s mug and spoon set, though it is surely that as well. It is the suit of clothes designed for us to wear in our full maturity. And most of us, putting the suit on week by week, have to acknowledge that it’s still a bit big for us, that we still have some growing to do before it’ll fit. It is true, then, that as soon as someone becomes a Christian, he or she can and must say ‘Our Father’; that is one of the marks of grace, one of the first signs of faith. But it will take full Christian maturity to understand, and resonate with, what those words really mean.

In many ancient liturgies, and some modern ones, when the Lord’s Prayer is said at the Eucharist, it is introduced with solemn words which recognise that to say this prayer properly, and to mean it from the heart, would imply that we had become fully, one hundred per cent, converted, Christian; that the Holy Spirit had completed the good work that God had begun in us. And, since we know that’s not true, the priest says words such as these: ‘As our Saviour Christ has commanded and taught us, we are bold to say . . .’. In other words, we don’t yet have the right to say this prayer, but it’s part of the holy boldness, the almost cheeky celebration of the sheer grace and goodness of the living God, that we can actually say these words as though we really meant them through and through. It’s a bit like a child dressing up in his grown-­up brother’s suit, and having the cheek to impersonate him for a whole morning, and just about getting away with it; and learning to his surprise, as he does so, what it must be like to be that older brother.

And that, of course, is exactly what the Lord’s Prayer invites us to do. The Lord’s Prayer grows directly out of the life and work of the Lord himself, whom both St Paul and the author of the letter to the Hebrews describe precisely as our elder brother. We call Jesus ‘the Son of God’, in our hymns and creeds and prayers, and we are right to do so; but we don’t often stop to think what that meant for Jesus himself. What was going on in Jesus’ life when he called God ‘Father’, and taught his followers to do so too?

People used to say that nobody before Jesus had called God ‘Father’. They also used to say that the word Abba, which Jesus used in the Garden of Gethsemane and quite possibly on other occasions, was the little child’s word, ‘Daddy’, in the Hebrew or Aramaic of his day. People therefore used to say that Jesus thus introduced, and offered to the world, a new level of personal intimacy with God. This conclusion may, in some sense, be true; but the two pillars on which it stood are shaky. Plenty of people called God ‘Father’, in Judaism and elsewhere. And Abba is in fact a word with much wider use than simply on the lips of little children. So what did it mean for Jesus himself that he called God ‘Father’?

The most important thing, which is really the starting-­point for grasping who Jesus was and is, is that this word drew into one point the vocation of Israel, and particularly the salvation of Israel. The first occurrence in the Hebrew Bible of the idea of God as the Father comes when Moses marches in boldly to stand before Pharaoh, and says: Thus says yhwh: Israel is my son, my firstborn; let my people go, that they may serve me (Exodus 4.22-3). For Israel to call God ‘Father’, then, was to hold on to the hope of liberty. The slaves were called to be sons.

When Jesus tells his disciples to call God ‘Father’, then, those with ears to hear will understand. He wants us to get ready for the new Exodus. We are going to be free at last. This is the Advent hope, the hope of the coming of the Kingdom of God. The tyrant’s grip is going to be broken, and we shall be free:

I see my light come shining,

From the west down to the east.

Any day now — any day now —

I shall be released.

The very first word of the Lord’s Prayer, therefore (in Greek or Aramaic, ‘Father’ would come first), contains within it not just intimacy, but revolution. Not just familiarity; hope.

The other strong echo of ‘Father’ within Jesus’ world reinforces and fills out this revolutionary, kingdom-­bearing meaning. God promised to King David that from his family there would come a child who would rule over God’s people and whose kingdom would never be shaken. Of this coming King, God said to David, ‘I will his Father, and he shall be my Son’ (2 Samuel 7.14). The Messiah, the King that would come, would focus in himself God’s promise to the whole people. And in Isaiah this promise, though still affirmed, is thrown open to all God’s people. ‘If anyone is thirsty, let them come and drink . . . and I will make with them an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David’ (Isaiah 55.1, 3). The two pictures go together. Freedom for Israel in bondage will come about through the liberating work of the Messiah. And Jesus, picking up all these resonances, is saying to his followers: this is your prayer. You are the liberty-­people. You are the Messianic people.

You see, the Jews had clung on to that Exodus-­hope, down through the years in which they still lived with slavery, with exile, with the awful sense that the promises were taking a mighty long time to be fully fulfilled. ‘Surely you are our Father’, says one of the later prophecies, ‘though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not acknowledge us’ (Isaiah 63.16). In other words, the national hope seems to have slipped away; the things we thought were so secure have turned to dust and ashes; yet we cling to the fact that you are our Father, and that fact gives us hope where humanly there is no hope. Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt, Syria, and now Rome; when would the tyranny of evil end? When would Israel be free? Most Jews knew in their bones, because they celebrated it at Passover and sang about it in the Psalms, that freedom would come when God gave them the new, final Exodus. Many believed that this would happen when the Messiah came. The very first word of the Lord’s Prayer says: Let it be now; and let it be us. Father . . . Our Father . . .

Jesus’ own life and work and teaching, then, was not simply about a timeless new vision of God. Jesus didn’t come simply to offer a new pattern, or even a new depth, of spirituality. Spiritual depth and renewal come, as and when they come, as part of the larger package. But that package itself is about being delivered from evil; about return from exile; about having enough bread; about God’s kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. It’s the Advent-­package. Jesus was taking the enormous risk of saying that this package was coming about through his own work. All of that is contained in the word ‘Father’, used in this way, within this prayer.

For Jesus, it was a great wager of faith and vocation. It meant leaving the security of home, family and job because his Father was calling him to a new job. He called the fishermen to become fishers of men. He himself, the carpenter, was called to take wood and nails to accomplish the real Exodus, the real defeat of evil. Calling God ‘Father’ was not simply comfortable or reassuring. It contained the ultimate personal challenge.

That is why, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he called God ‘Father’ once more. In John’s gospel Jesus uses the image of father and son to explain what he was himself doing. In that culture, the son is apprenticed to the father. He learns his trade by watching what the father is doing. When he runs into a problem, he checks back to see how his father tackles it. That’s what Jesus is doing in Gethsemane, when everything suddenly goes dark on him. Father, is this the way? Is this really the right path? Do I really have to drink this cup? The letter to the Hebrews says, with considerable daring, that the Son ‘learned obedience by what he suffered’ (Hebrews 5.7-9; compare 2.10-18). What we see in Gethsemane is the apprentice son, checking back one more time to see how the Father is doing it. And what is the project that Father and Son together are engaged upon? Nothing less than the new Exodus, rescuing Israel and the whole world from evil, injustice, fear and sin. The daring thing about that passage in Hebrews is this: Jesus too, like us, went on learning what it actually meant to call God ‘Father’. And the learning process was only complete when he said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’

The word ‘Father’, then, concentrates our attention on the doubly revolutionary message and mission of Jesus. It is the Exodus-­message, the message that tyrants and oppressors rightly fear. But it isn’t a message of simple human revolution. Most revolutions breed new tyrannies; not this one. This is the Father’s revolution. It comes through the suffering and death of the Son. That’s why, at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, we pray to be delivered from the great tribulation; which is, not surprisingly, what Jesus told his disciples to pray for in the garden. This revolution comes about through the Messiah, and his people, sharing and bearing the pain of the world, that the world may be healed. This is the kingdom-­message, the Advent-­message.

But if we in turn are to be the messengers, we need to learn to pray this prayer. We, too, need to learn what it means to call God ‘Father’, and we mustn’t be surprised when we find ourselves startled by what it means. The one thing you can be sure of with God is that you can’t predict what he’s going to do next. That’s why calling God ‘Father’ is the great act of faith, of holy boldness, of risk. Saying ‘ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Prologue
• 1. Our Father in Heaven
• 2. Thy Kingdom Come
• 3. Give Us This Day
• 4. Forgive Us Our Trespasses
• 5. Deliver Us from Evil
• 6. The Power and the Glory