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.”
Something about the prayer life of Jesus himself seems to have inspired his disciples to want to learn to pray. They must have sensed in him the vitality and life he drew from his relationship with the Father. And from what they knew about the disciples of John the Baptist they must have realized that there were greater depths of possibility for prayer, depths to which the right teacher could lead.
Perhaps our own life of prayer is more shallow than we'd like. We too can come to the Lord in order to learn a prayer that is vital, capable of filling our entire lives. In fact, we must.
But it would be wrong to think that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer that is unable to fill their whole life. (Novo Millennio Ineunte 34 - Saint John Paul the Great)
But what if we make this request for deeper prayer and we are answered by Jesus giving us the words of the Our Father? Will this disappoint us? The Our Father can seem like a formula given to children, especially to those who have been saying it repetitiously since childhood. When we ask for deeper prayer we are probably hoping for something, deep, serious and impressive. But the entire fullness of the mysticism of prayer can be found in the Our Father. What has been lacking in it is not the prayer itself but our attentiveness to it.
Father, hallowed be your name,
The Father is the one "who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see" (see First Timothy 6:16). This is true whether or not we believe it, whether or not his name is hallowed in our own hearts. But if it is not true for us our lives will be based on something other than the fundamental truth about all of reality. If we miss a point that big it is only natural for secondary things to go awry. Yet the truth is so great that we cannot simply hallow his name by trying to do so. We must ask that he himself hallow his name in us. When this happens our hearts will be well directed in regard to all else.
your Kingdom come.
When God is first in our hearts we will be able to seek first his Kingdom, knowing that it is that Kingdom which fulfills the purpose of creation, and each human heart individually. We will be able to trust in him for our daily physical and spiritual needs. We will be open to the mercy that makes life in that Kingdom possible, open to the grace poured out on us from the cross, and open to the transformation that is meant to bring in our own lives as we become a people of mercy.
Those who live in the Kingdom are covered by the protection of the King. The final test is a real threat to us if we try to walk our own way in our own strength and power. But in Jesus and his Kingdom that test was definitively overcome. We ask that we continue to walk in union with Jesus and his victory so that we do not have to face that test alone.
Jesus is the one who makes known the Father. We can't really enter into the Our Father until Jesus reveals the Father to us.
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father (see John 14:9).
The revelation of Jesus and the new kind of knowledge of the Father brought by that revelation is what made Paul bold in his concern for the poor and in his missionary zeal.
And when Cephas came to Antioch,
I opposed him to his face because he clearly was wrong.
The world needs us to have a life of prayer deep enough to make us similarly bold. Let us join with the Mother of God and the disciples in the upper room today and invite the Holy Spirit to come and remind us of all Jesus taught.
Lord, teach us to pray
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