The Prayer of Jesus

A Reading of the Lord’s Prayer

Kent Gramm

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781625646729
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877743
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This unique phrase-by-phrase exposition reads the Lord's Prayer as Jesus' description of God. Our heavenly Father is the perfect parent beyond our dreams who loves, provides, forgives, and ultimately protects. Finding our parent, we discover who we really are and enter a kingdom without boundaries. The Prayer of Jesus is not a somber duty; it is the essence of the gospel's happy news. "If laughter is forbidden in heaven," said Martin Luther, "I don't want to go there."

1

Our Father

The first word of the Lord’s Prayer is subversive: it undermines all power on earth, especially religious power. “Our” means everyone. The word is all-inclusive, because there is no word or phrase in the prayer to limit it. We can claim that “our” means only Christians; we can claim that it means only Protestants; we can claim that it means only The Church of the True Bible Word; we can be blockheads. But to limit the word is to contradict the actual prayer and to claim an authority and power that Jesus does not give us.

“My” denotes possession, which is the basis of power. It relies upon impassable boundaries, or exclusion. I keep you out of what is mine. What is mine makes me. But it is a goal of the major religions to transcend that superficial me rooted in possession and exclusion and power in order to reach the true Self, which is rooted in commonality rather than exclusion, our rather than my. Paradoxically, this means not losing our selfhood but gaining it. Our Self is larger than we thought.

Think of this prayer as being handed to you somewhere else in the world. You are living in a forest by the side of a mountain, and you know nothing of civilization, or of human history outside of your valley. You know nothing of what scholars think they know of first-century Palestinian religion, or sects, or rabbis. All you have is this text, beginning with the world “our.”

All of us are in this position. We look at the text, we know that “our” means us, and we pray. It is the same everywhere, for everyone.

A biblical text in the hands of scholars is like a ball of yarn in a litter of kittens: someone or other has disputed the authenticity of every word of the prayer except “Father” (the most problematic word). Fortunately, the whole prayer is contained in this word.

The beginning of the prayer addresses our deepest terror: Am I alone? With two words Jesus answers the question of our vast, deep, star-filled nights: “Our Father” means we are not alone. It can be a startling experience to realize that someone is with us. Possibly we have believed in a false isolation that permits us to violate ourselves and others. This belief or despair gives rise to a sense of separation that drives us to be selfish and therefore self-destructive; it creates the possessiveness, insecurity, jealousy, and rage that can make life miserable. Down through history we have projected such personality traits onto God as well; therefore Jesus is going to jolt us out of some Old Testament preconceptions of God by a word substitution—“our” for “my”—that should boggle our minds. Many of Jesus’ contemporaries would have considered this word criminally offensive if the circle of “our” were drawn too large. The very first word of the prayer gets us into difficulty if we want to make restrictions, draw boundary lines, and decide who is in and who is out.

We should be quick to rule out a wrong understanding of this phrase, namely, that God is ours—as if we could keep the deity in a magic lamp to bring out whenever we want something, or whenever we wish to persuade people of our piety. Americans are individualists, and we believe in possessions. Therefore, whether we realize it or not, we sometimes think of God as our particular and personal possession. “My god is an awesome god. Your god watches Lawrence Welk.”

If we picture our next-door neighbor as also having a magic lamp, we can more easily understand why the possession idea is wrong. Does God love that neighbor as much as God loves us? Is God personal to him or her? Would God forgive our neighbor’s sins? Is our relationship to God of higher quality? We could replace that next-door neighbor with any political candidate of a party opposed to ours, and ask the same questions.

If our answers to any of the above suggest inequality between ourselves and somebody else, we might have an eentsy little problem. The Lord’s Prayer helps to cure that problem.

*

“Our” is the doorway to the Lord’s Prayer. It is

• an assurance of the grace of God

• an assertion of God’s love

• a reminder that God is sovereign, and that God’s way lasts

• an assurance that we are not alone

• a friendly recommendation that we love our neighbor

Taking these in order, we first have an assurance of God’s grace. “Our Father” relates us to God. The term “father” has the effect of pinning that relationship into our minds. It is like a family relationship; it cannot be broken.

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.”30

So is the Kingdom of Heaven, because we are part of God’s family. Jesus told us to pray this way, so it is not a presumption on our part. Jesus could have used the words “King,” “Master,” or even “Friend”; but this is a relationship that cannot be broken—certainly not by us. We cannot arouse God’s anger to the point of our being made no longer God’s children. This is reassuring to those of us who are imperfect, and it has deep and startling implications. One of them is to put people who draw religious boundaries out of business. That is one reason why authorities considered Jesus an enemy.

So even if we sin, God is our Father, a parent—even if we commit infractions against the rules, and if we fail to love. God remains our parent; we can still go home.

Nobody can get in the way of that parent-child relationship. We do not need to worry about whether we think the right thoughts about God: our doctrine can be impure, we can be in error, we can be uninformed, or we might simply disagree with the beliefs of whatever branch of the Church we have wandered into. Troubling as this point of view has always been to some religious professionals, it is an immense comfort to ordinary people. It should even prove to be of comfort to religious authorities, because most if not all of them are wrong. They have to be, because they all disagree. In fact, you could define “religious authority” as “one who disagrees with other religious authorities on points of theology.” “Religious authorities” is a comfortable oxymoron. Such people are often in error, but seldom in doubt. Doubt is an embarrassment to the self-righteous “saved.” But no matter how much we doubt, and no matter what we doubt, we can still pray the Lord’s Prayer, and therefore say “Our Father.” Do we make our children think the right ideas in order to stay our children?

God’s grace saves us, and God’s love does not depend upon conditions. I suppose that relying on this steadfast love leaves us less to do. Lots of religious theory is generated in order to relieve boredom. The most intense doctrine, the most burning true believers, can be found in the world’s most boring places. But Christianity has a better cure for boredom: love thy neighbor. We can invest our time in thinking right, or we can invest it in doing good: I do not suppose we are flush enough to do both.31

The heart of the Christian faith is God’s love. It is the heart of the Christian understanding of God. So the prayer Jesus taught us is an expression of that love, an exercise of the child’s relationship on our part, and also the keynote of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God. “Our Father” is the leading statement of the prayer’s description of God. It puts all other religious thought and action into perspective. Everything else should be tested against this primary statement.

Here we arrive at the necessity to consider that phrase, “concept of God.” Our knowledge of God cannot be primarily conceptual. It is imaginative and sometimes relational. God is larger than a thought and cannot be a mere object of thought. The Master of the Universe is larger than any idea of God. We base our imaginations of God, along with whatever concepts we conceive, upon our parents. To have grown up with bad parents affects how we conceive of and imagine God, whether we know better or not. An angry, tyrannical parent tends to put us off from God, whom we can only with great difficulty resist thinking of as a tyrant. If parents are bad, then we tend to want nothing to do with God, whom Jesus in this prayer refers to as “Father.”

The Lord’s Prayer allows us to imagine Jesus’ picture of the Father, and not our own. Jesus’ picture is positive; it is what every child dreams of and no child fully gets. This picture delineated by the prayer is of a father who nourishes us, forgives us, and protects us. The Father of Jesus is both the ideal father and the ideal mother. While Jesus uses the word “father,” what we see of Jesus’ Father comes through this prayer and through comparisons made in parables and figures of speech: God is portrayed as a woman finding a lost coin, a shepherd searching for and even sacrificing himself for a lamb, as bread, as water, and even as a mother hen. In fact the pictures Jesus shares of God show anything but a harsh, tyrannical, jealous Nobadaddy.32 The murderous Old Testament figure that Mark Twain so vividly excoriated is not represented in Jesus’ words, or in Jesus himself: that figure is represented by the religious and imperial authorities, of whom Jesus was an innocent victim. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus does not succumb to the will of a tyrannical father, but makes his Father’s will his own, which in his case means assuming the role of God himself—and that is a role of acceptance, suffering, and renunciation of power and authority.

That Jesus substituted “father” for “God” or the unpronounced Hebrew name “YHWH” is one of the most significant elements of his prayer. Jesus opted away from some Old Testament images of God, which (alternating with loving images such as we see in Psalms and Hosea) sometimes invoked associations with the worst human fathers imaginable: punitive, violent, unpredictable, demanding, and heartless. What does this new designation mean? What did “father” mean to Jesus, and what was the picture Jesus meant to pass along to us?

Human femininity and masculinity can be misleading when applied to God as pictured by the Jesus of the gospels. The portrait we have of Jesus of Nazareth contains elements of what have been stereotypical masculine characteristics, and stereotypical feminine characteristics. While masculine in gender, he was not the stereotypical unfeeling or domineering male any more than God is the typical earthly father.33 The gospels’ portrait of God in Jesus includes and transcends both genders, so “father” could imply “parent.”

The parental figure of speech suggests the idea of family, but it replaces our experience of family with our deepest wishes for family. It restores our childhood view of mother and father, the view we cherished before we awoke to the humanity of our parents. The familiar term Abba or “Papa” does this. Our earthly siblings and parents ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Our Father
• Chapter 2: Who art in Heaven
• Chapter 3: Hallowed be Thy Name
• Chapter 4: Thy Kingdom Come
• Chapter 5: Thy Will be Done on Earth as It is in Heaven.
• Chapter 6: Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
• Chapter 7: Forgive Us Our Trespasses [Debts/Sins] as We Forgive Those Who Trespass [Sin] against Us [Our Debtors]
• Chapter 8: Lead Us Not into Temptation
• Chapter 9: But Deliver Us from Evil
• Chapter 10: [For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, Forever.]
• Chapter 11: Amen.
• A Note of Appreciation
• Works Cited