The Lord's Prayer

The Lord's Prayer
Stephen Curkpatrick

The Lord’s Prayer addresses God in intimacy and responsibility that are intrinsic to the experience of grace and truth in Christian faith. It does so in the brevity of less than sixty words in Greek (Matthew).

The Lord’s Prayer invokes at least the following themes. God in grace is distinctive from creation as intimate with human life. The will of God is otherwise in sovereignty, yet tangible in God’s grace for creation. In contrast to creaturely anxiety in the face of mortality, humans can receive gifts that invoke trust in the goodness of life. Within the gift of freedom for responsibility, faith and love, humans in their fallibility are also vulnerable to evil.

God in grace is distinctive from creation as intimate with human life. Intimacy and otherness are essential to the truly personal, for even in intimacy, another is also other in uniqueness. Only as other, a person is “you” to whom we relate as unique. Without such otherness, humans are easily assimilated into impersonal regimes of ideology or material categories that are expedient. As other, the mystery of human uniqueness is sustained beyond such assimilation. As the source of all relationships, God holds intimacy and otherness together as our Father in heaven.

Only as distinct from all phenomena of creation is God the ultimate personal and relational “You” with a name that is otherwise than the names of anything in creation—I will be who I will be. God is distinguished from the phenomena of creation, yet God is also nearer than anything in creation as the source and end of all life. God is distinctive or holy in character, yet named as personal and intimate in Jesus Christ (the prayer’s context).

For the Psalmist, God in heaven is sovereign in freedom, while idols are merely the work of human hands (115:3-4). To be in heaven is precisely an aspect of God’s character—to be otherwise than the various things created by humans and sovereign in the freedom to be otherwise. Human artefacts have no freedom and as such, are potential idols. Humans become like their idols—without freedom and relationships—for unlike God, idols neither hear nor speak. Idols have no volition. God is otherwise than phenomena and encounters people in a call to relationship; the response is volitional and therefore responsible among others as also relational.

God as other calls forth response and trust within a communion of love that honours creaturely freedom with life and joy in the veracity of this trust. Human products cannot establish trust or communion; they can be manipulated along with natural phenomena. To honour God as distinctive or holy, in heaven or otherwise than human perspective, affirms the possibility of intimacy in the freedom of responsible love that is a gift in grace, otherwise than our initiative.

The will of God is otherwise in sovereignty, yet tangible in God’s grace for creation. The reign of God will come, yet it is not forced upon humans in their freedom. The Greek passive imperative—let come—articulates our willingness to receive this reign in grace. It is not an ideology to be repeated as a mantra. God’s kingdom will come through God’s will being done as grace and truth in Jesus Christ amid human life, not as humans might construe it but as it is already willed by God for creation.

To receive the reign of God tangibly in our midst is to seek the will of God, otherwise than by vociferous partisan rhetoric for a deputed social good; certainly not in violent martyrdom anticipating rewards in heaven. God’s reign will come in self-giving love. Gethsemane represents exemplary obedience to the will of God; as it is in heaven is disclosed in Jesus Christ.

By contrast to creaturely anxiety in the face of mortality, humans can receive gifts that invoke trust in the goodness of life. The business of daily bread generates anxiety, calculations and conflict in the struggle for a place under the sun. Without daily gratitude for gifts of life, the quest for bread precipitates greed, envy and a cycle of violence. Forgiveness is also the bread of humans as the word without which humans cannot live—the word of reconciliation amid our creaturely anxiety.

Whether individual or tribal, the quest for survival within mortal anxiety is a perennial source of human compromise. Humans live in a tension between suspicion and community. Human tribes ignite competing partisan perspectives of the good; this invariably scuttles the possibility of genuine communion. Forgiveness, from God and of others, is essential to true humanity and our capacity to experience the goodness of life in grace and communion.

If bread is today’s gift, the future belongs to God. The reign of God comes where grace is known in gratitude for daily bread and the transforming bread of forgiveness—through the community of faith that both shares bread and lives beyond bread alone.

Within the gift of freedom for responsibility, faith and love, humans in their fallibility are also vulnerable to evil. In the name of God or an ultimate good, subtle sins can be committed through a compound of altruistic freedom and self-preserving anxiety.

Humans do not know the scope of their existence or the limits of their freedom—self-deception percolates through their actions and aspirations. Humans do not comprehend the subtlety of evil. Even when our best intentions are assumedly opposed to evil in the quest to eliminate evil, unwittingly, we can also connive at evil.

Humans cannot distinguish the good so clearly that they also know the scope and depth of evil, for the subtlety of evil exceeds human discernment even as it arises within human decisions. To be delivered from evil is also to be delivered from ourselves as a volitional source of evil. This is a perennial necessity, for humans, in a mixture of good intentions and anxious survival, invoke cunning and unwitting ways of diminishing one another.

While trials of life can strengthen character, the plethora of human experiences within the goodness of creation can also become a snare as ideals and pleasures become ultimate but self-diminishing goals. Before the temptations to self-justifying diminution that characterise every generation, the source of true human character ultimately, is only known through faith in God’s saving grace.

Human entanglement in sin is too subtle to extricate ourselves from, without further compromise, fault or affect on others. Within the singular trial of life—which is lived only once and without an encore—we are always in need of grace as inexorably, without the reality of God, our fallible decisions define our destiny.

The Lord’s Prayer is uttered in personal address to God, even as a prayer of Christian community. God is not an impersonal force or an ineffable mystery but the source of vocative encounter, volitional responsibility and above all, intimacy. Without such personal encounter, we may be speaking either to an image that masks the unknown or to ourselves in a form of personal but agnostic self-motivation.

The Lord’s Prayer is not an independent fragment of an ideal religious sentiment that was adopted by early Christian tradition. The Lord’s Prayer is inseparable from New Testament testimony to the reality of God as intimate in encounter and vocative in summoning our response to Jesus Christ. This response is expressed in crucial decisions and responsibilities that are only possible through the Holy Spirit’s enabling presence.

Another reality otherwise than our own permeates this prayer as it gives focus to God who is known intimately in grace and truth through Jesus Christ. The Lord’s Prayer invokes a reality that is intrinsically Christian in its disclosure, expression and declaration.