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Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished,
one of his disciples said to him,
"Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples."
There was something about the prayer life of Jesus that was deeply compelling. It was not mere dry recitation of memorized formulae. It was not, as so often with the Gentiles, a heaping up of empty words. The disciples could tell even from a distance that their was something powerful happening in the prayer life of Jesus. John the Baptist was the greatest to be born of women prior to the Kingdom and he had taught his disciples to pray. But with the advent of the Kingdom in Jesus it seemed a new form of prayer would be necessary, and the disciples therefore had reason to hope that he would teach it to them.
He said to them, "When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name,
What made the prayer of Jesus so fundamentally unique was the unique way in which he was related to the Father. He had come forth from the Father and was the perfect faithful child to whom the Kingdom belonged. In the Old Testament there was a vague sense of the fatherhood of God over Israel corporately and of kings particularly to some degree. But there was nothing like the intimacy of the relationship which Jesus claimed for himself with the Father, so close that he would even use the Aramaic word "abba", or "daddy", to address him. To give some sense of the scope of the difference God was referred to as our Father 13 times in the Old Testament whereas Jesus himself called God his Father more than 150 times in the Gospels. In teaching his disciples to pray he was inviting them into the relationship which he himself had with the Father, to which only he himself, through his Spirit could give access.
And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” (see Galatians 4:6).
Even at the beginning of the Our Father, in this terrain that seems so mundane and familiar, we are invited into a participation in a supernatural and spiritual reality. We are invited to transcend our limited understanding of the reality of the Father and allow the Holy Spirit to wash over us and hallow that name in our hearts. When this happens our prayer will be anything but routine for it will be in the presence of one who is truly listening, who loved us into being, and who is absolutely worthy of our trust. Our prayer life will have an utterly different character when God is hallowed as Father in our hearts rather than, as often happens, when we address ourselves to a deity we perceive as distant and disinterested.
your kingdom come.
Experiencing the Fatherhood of God allows us to pray for a Kingdom which is not first an earthly Kingdom, for we are then able to acknowledge and to trust that the one who made us knows what will fulfill us. It allows us to pray for the ever increasing manifestation of the Kingdom which is found in the pearl of great price, Jesus himself, and then in and among his disciples. It is therefore a petition which asks for the spiritual fulfillment of humankind and of the deepest desires of the human heart. We realize that our hearts are restless and unfilled anywhere except in the fullness of the Kingdom and so we pray for that Kingdom in its fullness. It is not just a prayer for individuals to find some subjective fulfillment, but rather a prayer for the history to reach the culmination which it can find in Christ alone.
Give us each day our daily bread
In the petition for our daily bread is contained the entire hierarchy of goods which we ought to desire. At one level, it acknowledges that it is appropriate to depend on God for our basic material needs. Beginning on this basic level we learn how to trust God for the necessities of the day while leaving the future in his hands, since "Sufficient for the day is its own trouble" (see Matthew 6:34). But this petition for bread also orders our material desires to the higher goods of the Kingdom, since man cannot live by bread alone (see Matthew 4:4). And so we ask also for the bread of the wisdom (see Proverbs 9:5), which was the hidden food that Jesus possessed (see John 4:32), and also the daily bread of the Eucharist, fulfilling, as it did, the daily manna in the desert.
We go on to pray that God would help us order our relationships in this world according to his priorities, chiefly according to his desire for mercy, which is why we ask to forgive and be forgiven. We end the prayer remembering our dependence on God, on the necessity of him preserving us in temptation, lest we be left only to our own strength and therefore succumb by necessity. Testing will come, but when we place ourselves continually under the watchful gaze of our Father as faithful children it need not overtake us.
From the Old Testament reading about Abraham and from the parable Jesus told about the neighbor coming at midnight we learn the importance of persistence in prayer. We learn not merely to ask, to knock, and to seek, but to ask and keep asking, to knock and keep knocking, to seek and to keep seeking. We are able to do this appropriately and without anxiety when we remember that the one we are petitioning is both our Father and also also are friend. Indeed it is the case that this persistence itself is his gift, drawing from us something good, itself contributing to the hallowing of his name and the coming of his Kingdom.
If you then, who are wicked,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will the Father in heaven
give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?
With the world on our day looking increasingly similar to Sodom and Gomorrah it is essential for us to learn this way of prayer Jesus taught so that we can plead for the mercy which God himself first taught us to desire, both for ourselves, and for the world.
Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me.
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