Jesus taught the people to start from where they were in their life situation. Jesus then invited them into the mystery of the kingdom. There was special emphasis on the parables as the method of his teaching. In the parables, he taught that prayer should be urgent, insistent, forgiving and always steeped in humility that recognizes one’s sinfulness.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offered a great deal of his message on prayer. First, there must be a conversion that shows itself in concrete action: reconciliation before offering gifts at the altar, love of enemy, prayer in secret with simple language and even silence, purity of heart and choosing God’s kingdom above all.
The Our Father
This all leads to the greatest lesson in prayer, the Our Father. (Mt 6:9-13) Jesus starts out by telling us not to pray as the pagans pray. Their prayer is described as an effort to wear down God with volume, repetition and perseverance searching for just the right phrase to gain the desired response from a somewhat indifferent deity.
Jesus‘ invitation to pray is totally opposite. God, he says, already knows what we need. God’s generosity is a given. According to Jesus, what is needed is a human heart disposed to the big-heartedness of the Father.
The structure of the Lord’s Prayer is clear. The first part draws us into the domain of the Lord who is “Our Father” both holy and loving. There is a divine plan. The petitions of the first part of the prayer place all the attention on God: the loving Father, the holy name, God’s kingdom and God’s will. We are pulled away from our small world of self-interest. In the second part, we come back to our needs and our dependence on God.
The initial address of “Our Father” is an expression in the original language (likely Aramaic) of parental tenderness and endearment. Today it would be “Daddy” or “Pop” or some similar utterance of an adult child. Likewise, by using “Our”, Jesus is revealing that we, as a community of disciples have been welcomed into a new family, a Godly family. All members are invited into a divine relationship of intimacy and confidence.
The next three petitions, in truth, are one: the coming of the kingdom is the central message of Jesus. The holiness of God’s name and God’s will are biblical statements that are part of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom.
The kingdom is God’s response to the consequences of sin flowing from the tragedy in the Garden. The first eleven chapters of Genesis describe this destructive evolution of evil that permeates our world. From the call of Abraham to Jesus’ declaration of the kingdom we have the counter-evolution of love in God’s plan. The Hebrew Scriptures are replete with expressions of the bondage to sin and death and, most of all, alienation from God. They also have a message of faithfulness and hope. In Jesus, there is a new saving presence which continues in his new family of faith, the Church. The kingdom is, indeed, the seed that will become the great tree to shelter all the birds. (Mt13:31-32) We participate in the coming of the kingdom when we walk with Jesus in a life of love and service to his reign.
When we pray for God’s kingdom, we are praying for deliverance from the consequences of sin. The magnitude of this seemingly simple petition is easy to miss. This prayer includes our pleas for practically anything that is good from the healing our child’s headache to elimination of sexual slavery, from success in the driver’s test to the conversion of the gangs, from peace with the in-laws to peace between Russia and Ukraine.
In the Good Friday liturgy, the Our Father is echoed as we pray that “God may cleanse the world of all errors, banish disease, drive out hunger, unlock prisons, loosen fetters, granting to travelers safety, to pilgrims return, health to the sick, and salvation to the dying”. God’s kingdom will overcome all hatred and every prejudice, any expressions of inhumanity, every dimension of poverty, and divisions of all kinds. The list goes on and on. All evil, and most especially death, is vanquished by the coming of God’s kingdom. The hidden Alleluia of Christ’s victory is always the wheat overcoming the weeds in our midst. (Mt 13:24-30)
When we pray “Thy kingdom come”, we are praying for all that we need (and, perhaps, even some of what we want). All our varied petitions in the prayer of the faithful, in our rosary, in our novena intentions, and in each hidden desire in our heart are most likely included in God’s kingdom. Yet, it is still good to pray for our individual concerns because it helps us become mindful of our dependent relationship with God.
The second set of petitions in the Lord’s Prayer reflects a pilgrim people like the Israelites wandering the dessert for whom manna is the bread for their human material needs. But the bread is also a symbol of the Eucharist. It is in this context that we are reminded that God forgives always. However, we can block that flow of mercy if we do not forgive. In the final petitions we pray that the forces of evil not prevail in our personal, communal and historical reality.
The Lord’s Prayer, then, is the prayer of the family of God on the journey to the unity and freedom of the kingdom. This is the New Creation, the eventual return to the original innocence inviting us to enter into a consciousness of our total reliance on God. It helps us experience the sense of divine intimacy. It fills us with hope.
